Teachers' Stress and Social-Emotional Competence: Identifying Risk and Protective Factors in Relation to Classroom Efficacy and Burnout

Background. Teachers are responsible for delivering academic instruction, facilitating student learning and engagement, and managing classroom behavior. They often serve as implementers of school-based social-emotional prevention programs, as well. Because teachers’ ability to create a healthy classroom context and deliver academic and social-emotional curricula with high quality is critical to students’ positive outcomes (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009), it is important to understand the factors that promote or impede teachers’ skill in the classroom. For example, teachers’ stress may interfere with their performance and contribute to burnout (Tsouloupas et al., 2010), whereas their social-emotional competence (SEC) may counter the negative effects of stress and promote effectiveness in the classroom (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003).

     Current study. This poster examines the unique and interactive effects of stress and SEC on teachers’ concurrent efficacy and burnout in a sample of 64 middle school teachers and school staff (88% female). Measures of self-efficacy (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk, 2001) and burnout (Maslach et al., 1997) each were regressed on years of teaching experience, perceived stress (Cohen et al., 1983), SEC [i.e., emotion reappraisal (Gross & John, 2003), general mindfulness (Baer et al., 2004), and teaching-related mindfulness (Greenberg et al., 2010) as predictors in separate models], and the stress by SEC interaction term (dropped if non-significant).

     Results. Stress and SEC showed unique associations with teachers’ self-efficacy and burnout. Controlling for the other variables in each model, stress negatively predicted teachers’ sense of personal accomplishment and positively predicted emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. In contrast, SEC measures positively predicted personal accomplishment and negatively predicted emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

     There was evidence of stress by SEC interactive effects for some outcomes. General and teaching-related mindfulness moderated the effect of stress on emotional exhaustion such that mindfulness protected against elevated emotional exhaustion at high levels of stress. In addition, each measure of SEC moderated the effect of stress on self-efficacy in an unexpected way: Stress was negatively related to self-efficacy at high levels of SEC and, unexpectedly, positively related to self-efficacy at low levels of SEC. It is possible that this unexpected finding was due to greater awareness of reduced competence among teachers with greater SEC.

     Conclusion. These results add to a small but growing literature on teachers’ stress and SEC. Targeting these risk and protective factors in preventive interventions is a promising approach to improving well-being among both teachers and students.