Oakland Unified School District – UC Berkeley
Research-Practice Partnership
Research Brief
August 2020
Practice-Side: Sonny Kim & Aija Simmons
Research-Side: Chunyan Yang, Jennie Greenstein, Meg Stomski, Xueqin Lin
During the initial weeks of the distance learning phase in the spring of 2020, OUSD’s SEL team noticed educators confronting and rising to new challenges. They sought to take stock of educators’ experiences in the district and collaborated with Berkeley’s researchers to design and administer a survey. This brief summarizes the findings about teachers’ social and emotional well-being. (See the companion brief on teachers’ sense of teaching efficacy.) These findings should be interpreted along with the results from other staff surveys done at OUSD during spring and summer 2020.
The link for the survey was distributed to site-based educators through site administrators at the end of May 2020. The survey remained open until June 12. This brief summarizes the results from 321 fully completed responses from educators. In addition to percentage of responses, the analysis makes use of scale scores, which summarize where teachers fall along a spectrum of strongly disagree to strongly agree by aggregating their responses across multiple questions. The full list of survey questions are located here.
Educator Resilience:
Stressors, Compassion Fatigue and
SEL Competencies/Support
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Because the survey was anonymous and the respondents did not identify their school sites, the overall representativeness of the participants is difficult to characterize. The respondents self-identified their race/ethnicity, and the chart on the left compares that of the survey sample to that of OUSD educators at large. (District data are from the 2019-20 All Staff Dashboard Snapshot, with the position type limited to “Certificated.”)
White educators and educators of other or multiple races are over-represented among the survey participants, as are female educators. An overwhelming majority of the respondents were classroom teachers at an elementary school site, although the survey was made available to all staff members affiliated with a school site at all grade levels.
There are many sources of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked educators to rate on a scale of 1-10 how much each of the following items were causing them stress.
The biggest stressor for educators during the distance learning phase was what schooling would look like after the shelter in place order was lifted. Almost 70% of teachers rated this stressor 8 or higher. Educators are highly stressed about student engagement during distance learning, the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic crisis, as well as students’ mental wellbeing, health and safety.
“Compassion fatigue” measures how much stress, burnout, and secondary trauma teachers are experiencing. Lower compassion fatigue translates to better teacher well-being. We asked educators questions to assess how much they are suffering from compassion fatigue as a result of the distance learning.
58% of educators strongly or somewhat agreed feeling compassion fatigue while teaching remotely. (Note that disagreement is the favorable outcome, as shown by the colored bars below.) Female educators reported higher compassion fatigue than male educators. Black educators reported the lowest levels of compassion fatigue. Teachers with more years of experience reported lower levels of compassion fatigue.
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Educator Stressors
Compassion Fatigue
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On average, the extent of compassion fatigue teachers experienced was associated with their sense of teaching efficacy (see the companion brief on teaching efficacy) but not their SEL competencies. For teachers with low SEL competencies, the extent of compassion fatigue were similar regardless of their level of teaching efficacy (2.82 to 2.81). For teachers with high SEL competencies, higher sense of teaching efficacy was associated with lower compassion fatigue (2.4) and lower sense of teaching efficacy was associated with higher extent of compassion fatigue (3.0). In summary, teachers with lower teaching efficacy but high SEL competencies were more vulnerable to the risk of compassion fatigue and teachers with both higher teaching efficacy and higher SEL competencies had lower risk of compassion fatigue.
Effects of SEL Competencies and Teaching Efficacy on Compassion Fatigue
SEL Competencies and Support Needs
SEL competencies refer to skills that enable educators to recognize and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively. We asked OUSD educators how strongly they agreed with four core SEL competencies (e.g., self-awareness, social-awareness, social relationships, and self-management) and their experiences and expectations with SEL support from their school.
A vast majority (91%) of educators agree with the items assessing SEL competencies. Black and Hispanic educators reported slightly lower SEL than other racial/ethnic groups, and female educators reported higher SEL than male educators. Elementary school educators reported the highest SEL, while high school educators reported the lowest. A large majority of teachers indicated that they needed SEL support from the school during distance learning (88%), as well after they return to the physical school setting (93%). Additionally, 83% of educators believed that students will have difficulties returning to the physical school setting when in-person school resumes.
Updated: 2020-08-28
Implications for Action
Links/References