A recent study by University of Virginia researchers Patricia Jennings and Helen Min (2023) yielded three findings relevant to school leaders. First, although teachers play a critical role in preparing students for the future, they often aren’t prepared to provide trauma-sensitive support to students. Second, developing social and emotional competencies, such as compassion, can help teachers respond effectively to students’ needs while protecting the teacher’s own well-being. Their third finding is more likely to be new to school leaders: There are nuances of empathy, and though empathy is essential for success with students, it’s potentially harmful to educators when overdone. Educators should be trained to practice safe and productive levels of empathy.
People in K–12 education have discussed the dangers of teacher burnout and compassion fatigue for years, and leaders are trying to ease teacher burnout. Self-care mantras adorn weekly school newsletters, and principals often put well-intentioned encouraging notes in teachers’ mailboxes. But as Dr. Seuss says, “Sometimes the questions are complicated, but the answers are simple.” I believe the answer to reducing teacher burnout lies in strengthening a basic human building block: compassion.
Teaching Students Who’ve Known Trauma Is Hard
Most teachers have an opportunity every day to use trauma-sensitive practices. From the slightest middle school drama to a significant death in a student’s family, caring educators have helped our hurting youth in more ways than they know. Trauma-sensitive practices can include everything from giving just-in-time praise to listening to a distressed student to adopting equitable grading policies. But being trauma-sensitive doesn’t mean schools should put teachers through some very hard emotional stuff and not give them the skills and competencies to manage it effectively.
Educators practicing compassionate responding provide care to alleviate a person’s suffering while maintaining their own emotional well-being.
For instance, imagine a middle school teacher, Sarah, who is passionate about her job and cares deeply for her students’ well-being. Sarah’s school serves a diverse population; many students come from challenging backgrounds, some of whom have experienced trauma. Over time, she’s noticed that her students’ behavior and emotional struggles in the classroom are often linked to their past trauma. Sarah empathizes so deeply with her students’ traumatic experiences and emotional struggles that it begins to take a toll on her own well-being. She feels overwhelmed, anxious, and sometimes even helpless as she carries the emotional burden of her students’ pain. These emotions lead her to sometimes lash out at students or even appear frantic. Sarah is experiencing what can be called empathy-based stress.
Cultivating compassion, however (which isn’t quite the same as empathy), can counteract the adverse effects of empathy-based stress (Jennings et al., 2023). Empathy is primarily about sharing another person’s emotional experience—and can be overwhelming. In contrast, educators practicing compassionate responding provide care to alleviate a person’s suffering while maintaining their own emotional well-being. Figure 1 contrasts key elements of these two approaches.
To manage the demands of classrooms that include traumatized students and create supportive learning environments, teachers need social and emotional competencies—specifically, compassionate responding. Professional learning about thinking patterns and behaviors, mainly through one-on-one instructional coaching, can support teachers in developing this key mindset and skill. Schools must teach and practice compassion at every level. The well-being of our teachers is at stake.
Empathy-Based Stress vs. Compassionate Responding
Schools aspire to hire teachers like Sarah who care deeply for their students and will go the extra mile for them. But to support the well-being of such teachers, leaders need to spot signs of empathy-based stress and actively teach compassionate responses. Such training can lessen the toll too much empathy takes and reduce teacher burnout.
Compassionate responders react to the suffering or challenges faced by others with understanding, care, and concern. Such responding does involve empathizing with the person’s situation and often feeling motivated to alleviate their suffering (Keltner, 2004). It also involves mindfully acknowledging your reactions and connecting with your own emotions, offering emotional support and validating the other person’s feelings, focusing on the other person and listening attentively to their concerns, trying to understand the other person’s perspective, and only providing solutions or advice if asked.
Compassionate responding is essential for building connections with others and fostering a supportive environment. It helps people feel heard, understood, and cared for, contributing to their overall well-being and emotional resilience (McCrary, 2022). Teachers’ everyday interactions with students often reveal the need to support a student through compassionate response while maintaining both the student’s and the teacher’s well-being. Figure 2 shows what either compassionate responding or an empathy-based response might sound like in various situations.
How Leaders Can Protect and Support Teachers
School leaders can watch and listen for signs of empathy-based stress from teachers, such as forgetfulness, overly emotional responses to situations, or even changes in eating patterns. They may notice behavioral changes like detaching, acting hopeless, or overcompensating. Signs like these are red flags. A leader’s intervention can be as small as a personal, “How are you, really?” check-in or as large as providing one-on-one coaching to help a struggling teacher switch to more compassionate responding as she works with students. A principal might help a teacher reframe their thinking and get past empathy-based stress by helping that teacher reflect on their emotional responses as they work with a student facing trauma and consider how they interact with the student. This training can take many forms. A leader might offer practice-based exercises teachers can use to help shift their language in student interactions. Or a struggling teacher may need to have one-on-one conversations with an instructional coach to unpack their feelings in a challenging situation.
Compassion training is not a curriculum you can buy. Instead, it involves reflecting on and (through practice) reshaping our interactions with students at any given point in the day.
Teachers like Sarah are everywhere in our schools. Individuals join the profession to “make a difference,” but sometimes lack the applied emotional intelligence skills to perform and stay in this complex, rewarding, but stressful profession. Compassion training may be a critical component of professional learning to build the social and emotional competencies teachers need to support students while protecting themselves against the harsh effects of empathy-based stress. Compassion training is not a curriculum you can buy. Instead, it involves reflecting on and (through practice) reshaping our interactions with students at any given point in the day. Compassion must be lived and owned by all of us.
