Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
TISH JENNINGS: Being a teacher today can be a very challenging experience. There are a
lot of demands on teachers to fulfill curriculum requirements, testing requirements.
My own teaching experience, I saw how stress interfered with my own ability to be present,
and notice those moments, and teach in a way that allows minds to open and stay open. Because
when you get stressed out your mind closes, it's just what happens.
When you start to feel like you have to defend yourself or your being threatened in any way
you pull back, you pull in, you constrict. To teach in this way you have to keep yourself
calm and relaxed and open, and open hearted, and open minded.
To be a teacher requires and extremely high degree of social emotional confidence, way
more than the average person. Because you have to be able to regulate your emotions
in the context of a classroom setting where you're teaching--
MARIA LEROSE: [interposing] Where there are a lot of other little emotions.
TISH JENNINGS: [laughing] A lot of other little emotions.
TISH JENNINGS: So what I had hoped to do is create an intervention program that would
help teachers deal with the stress, and help retain that joy and love that teachers come
to teaching with.
TISH JENNINGS: You're in a classroom. You're in front of 25-30 kids and you're trying to
cope with an issue and you're not supposed to get angry, that's not socially acceptable.
So, it's almost like having your break and your accelerator going at the same time, and
it wears you out. It really exhausts you. So, I started thinking-- well how can I help
teachers with this? Where we came to was a combination of mindful awareness practices
and emotion skills training. CARE combines both of these in a sequential, didactic manner.
It progressively introduces different concepts that starts with, you need to care for yourself
and this is why you need to care for yourself, this is your emotional life and this is why
it can be challenging to be a teacher, and this is why these situations may cause stress
for you, and here are some techniques that we know can help you self regulate in that
context.
MARIA LEROSE: How do you introduce this to teachers?
TISH JENNINGS: We have two ways that it is presented right now. Every summer we do it
here at the Garrison Institute as a five day retreat.
It's very intensive and we usually have a large group. Here, last year, we had about
75 people. That's a really interesting dynamic setting to do it in.
We also do it, what we call out in-the-field, and that's in a school, or in a district,
with a group of teachers. In that setting we try to spread it out. We do a more extended
version of it.
TISH JENNINGS: We just finished a two-year project that was funded by the federal government,
to finish the development of it, pilot it several times, get some feedback, you know,
and to pilot it again. We just did a pilot randomized controlled trial.
What we've been finding is that the program really helps reduce a lot of different kinds
of stress. The kind of stress I was really interested to see it reducing was a sense
of time urgency, a sense of time pressure, because one of the biggest stressors teachers
expressed to us is that they feel like they have no time.
Teachers were reporting at the end of the program--compared to the control group--that
they felt less time pressure.
MARIA LEROSE: Well that's odd, because there are only so many hours in the day.
TISH JENNINGS: Right
MARIA LEROSE: So how would it be that--- what did it change?
TISH JENNINGS: Well, that's a really interesting question. The only way we could find that
out was through our focus groups, and we asked them about that.
They said to us that it was amazing to them, that they felt a sort of psychological space,
that they felt like they had more time. They felt like by slowing down, they had more time
and that they were accomplishing more.
I think what happens when you're getting all revved up with this kind of time pressure
rumination, is that you are spending so much time thinking about what you have to do, that
you are not doing what you have to do.
MARIA LEROSE: And are you at the stage now where if people are interested they should
contact you?
TISH JENNINGS: Definitely. We're at the point now where we'll be publishing our materials
very soon, publishing our research, the findings that we have from the second year of our project.
We are getting ready to go to scale. We're preparing the capacity to do that. We're very
excited about that.
MARIA LEROSE: I see, and in a nutshell, what are the findings?
TISH JENNINGS: That reduction in this time associated stress, or time related stress,
improvements or increases in mindfulness and interpersonal mindfulness, a measure that
Mark Greenberg and I developed. We've also noticed self efficacy improved with this program
and the other one that I thought was very important is that we reduced physical symptoms.
MARIA LEROSE:Well, I'm not a teacher, but where do I sign up? [laughing]
TISH JENNINGS: [laughing] You can come to our retreat this summer.
MARIA LEROSE: Thanks a lot Tish, Tish Jennings.
TISH JENNINGS: Thank you