Preventing Teacher Stress and Burnout in an Urban Arts Secondary School Context

KAra Noble

Abstract

Stress and burnout pervade among public school teachers and are heightened in urban schools, where job demands are often high and resources low. Teacher stress and burnout, leading to turnover, is known to be especially high for early career teachers. Many studies have been done that isolate possible contributing factors such as: supervisory support, the classroom emotional climate, student behavior, pupil teacher ratio, access to resources, teacher temporal intelligence, district budgets, job demands and effective classroom practices. Oftentimes, there are multiple contributing factors over periods of time leading to teachers experiencing burnout and consequently leaving the field. In this study, teachers who have worked at an urban arts school were interviewed regarding their experiences in order to learn how to prevent stress and burnout by looking at contributing factors and strategies to combat them. These interviews were analyzed for themes related to prevention of stress and burnout in the urban arts secondary school context.