Work Life Balance - We Don't Know What That Is!
Working in education, it is commonly assumed that educators never "turn off" when they leave their place of work. The amount of work that educators are expected to complete within an eight-hour workday while also providing a high-level education to their students is an expectation that is set significantly too high. Leaders within education should have compassion when it comes to their teachers. Remember, these are the individuals that are communicating with parents, students and the community. You can hold your teachers to a high standard while also acknowledging that they are people with lives outside of the cinder block walls of a classroom.
I will never forget a conversation I had with a local teacher about work quantity and the feeling that they MUST complete the job at home due to needing to meet the deadlines set by their administrators. The teacher said to me, "I am stuck. I do not know what I should do. They keep taking my planning time for meetings, I am on dismissal duty every single day, and they just keep piling on the work." The immediate thought was to have a conversation with the admin, to set healthy boundaries about the work that is being requested, and the unrealistic deadlines being given but I knew that they had went this route before and were unsuccessful. They even told me that they went to the union that the teachers had, and the administrators still were requesting to take up multiple planning periods in the week and piled more and more work on. All I could think about was the way that this teacher was living in a constant state of anxiety and fear that they were failing their students because they were not submitting paperwork on time.
I made sure this teacher knew that the reason the paperwork was not getting done was because they were focusing on the important task at hand, teaching and being present for their students. This is a common scenario that many educators are being faced with on the daily, and a large contributor to why people are leaving the profession. If you work in administration at any level in education, please do us all a favor, treat us like human beings and be realistic.
The teacher in the scenario above left the field of education due to struggling mental health, emotional fatigue and the simple fact that they felt like they were NEVER, truthfully listened to.
Work life balance is something that every working individual deserves. You should be able to spend time with your loved ones without worrying about the papers on your desk or having a panic attack about the upcoming planning periods that are being taken away from you. Those of you that work in school leadership, what can you do to be better?
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