Patricia A. Jennings: Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom. W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 2015, 288 pp

Excerpt

Teachers in today’s classrooms face many obstacles and difficult situations, such as inadequate pay, large classrooms, students with high rates of problem behavior, academically unprepared students, and pressure to meet the increasing demands of standardized testing. Given the inherently stressful situation of being a school teacher, it is not surprising that teacher’s have some of the highest rates of work-related stress among all occupations, with stress levels comparable to those faced by ambulance personnel, prison guards, and call-center customer service agents (Johnson et al. 2005). The intense and unrelenting stress that many teachers experience often leads to job burnout, and subsequently, teachers also have one of the highest rates of occupational attrition, with 4 % of teachers leaving the profession entirely every year (Planty et al. 2008). This combination of teacher attrition and stress ultimately affects the quality of education students receive, as there are fewer experienced teachers in the classroom and those that do remain often have a diminished sense of their own sense of efficacy which in turn impacts student achievement (Goddard et al. 2000). Taken as a whole, while it is clear that the profession of teaching is stressful and that the results of this stress are alarming, what is less clear is how this seemingly untenable situation can be addressed given the current supports and resources readily available to teachers. …