Task 1: Academic Writing

Teaching profession has become more challenging from time to time in our rapiddeveloping era. Teaching is a significant profession and plays an important role in
equipping the future generation with adequate knowledge and skills. The urge of
modernization force the students to push their effort to the limit. The teachers role in
teaching the pupils increased by the new education policies enacted to fulfill the
students needs. The increasing workload and tasks for teachers are unavoidable and it
is seriously affecting the teacher both physically and mentally. Teachers faces new
challenges and opportunities from the increasingly diverse and needy students
population. They need to develop new knowledge and skills to perform the curriculum
needs. As a result, teachers undergo hectic and stressful environment in making things
work in school. The survey by Teachers Assurance reveals that 76% of teachers believe
that workplace stress is making them ill, with 56% believing they would do a better job if
they were less stressed. In addition, 40% feel they argue more with their partners and
friends as a result of the pressures they face and 83% said they feel constantly
exhausted because of work (Bousted, 2013). It concludes that stress and burnout
among teachers are happening and it damages the education system and the teacher
itself.

a) Signs of People Under Stress

As a leader in school, it is vital to create stress-free environment to boost the
efficiency of the schooling system. It is undeniable that stress is inseparable with huge
workload and constraints of times. But it can be controlled and minimised with the
effective leadership and systematic organisation in school. There are many signs of
stress. According researches, exhaustion, headache, irritable, and bringing problem
back home are a few examples of symptoms that we could visibly see on a person.
Stress could also affect the teachers health. Obesity, depression, and heart disease are
examples of stress-related illness. Actually, being stress is not a negative reaction. It is
part of the way the body try to react in stressful environment. The heart beat faster to
pump the blood tho the parts of the body so that the muscle can work and react faster to
a physical stress. But for teachers, the stress are more onto psychological stress.
According to research, when the body are having stress, it needs to be channeled out to
shut it off. The greater the stress, the greater the reaction of the body. But when it is not
handled properly, it will bring serious physical problems to the body which leads to
serious illnesses.

When a teacher is having stress, there are several obvious signs which noticeable
by the people around them. Common symptoms of stress are loss of appetite, sleeping
problem (insomnia), and difficult in concentrating. It causes headache, muscle tension,
and dizziness.In terms of emotion, stress people will frequently feel anxious, having low
self-esteem, and lose temper more easily. According to The American Institute of Stress,
there are around 50 common signs and symptoms of stress. In school, we could detect
teacher who are under stress by looking at the changes in their appearance, their
behaviour, and their social life. If a teacher is under stress, they will look dull and
uninteresting. They will not take care of their appearance and seem not to care about
the peoples thought about them. When we are close enough with them, we could see
that they will be frequently blushing and sweating, they will stutter and stammer in
speaking, and their hands will tremble when working something. Stress people tend to
put themselves in isolation and escape from the social crowd. They will be having mood
swings easily and sometime overreact to petty annoyances. Stress people will
sometimes facing increased and decreased appetite, thus resulted in weight gain and
weight loss. We could see their physical changes drastically.
Stress can affect the way a person think, behave and the way the body works. It
affect both physically and mentally. Different people will not react the same way when
they are stress. Some could experience physical problems such as frequent colds, using
drugs or alcohol to relax, while others have emotional ones such as being over sensitive
and crying without any obvious reason. Stress can even change the way teacher thinks
or create memory problems.There are various way stress could affect a persons life.
The effect of stress could be reduced when it is handle properly, but if it is prolonged, it
might cause a long-term effect with serious illness such as high blood pressure, heart
attack, and sexual irregularities. Worst case scenario, stress can cause burnout and
even suicidal.

b) Effect of Burnout
When stress is not dealt properly, the final result will lead to burnout; a stage where
it is considered as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and cynicism that occurs
frequently among individuals who do people work of some kind (Maslach & Jackson,
1981). Burnout is generally viewed as a syndrome consisting of three dimensions;
emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment. In
this stage, burnout is not a regular stress where it is only related to negative outcomes
for the individual including depression, a sense of failure, fatigue and loss of motivation
but burnout also give negative impact for the organisation, including absenteeism,
turnover rates and lowered productivity (Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998). In teaching
2

profession, burnout teachers will affect the effectiveness of teaching and learning and it
will hinders the school from achieving excellence.
Burnout should not be labelled as same as stress. According to Schaufeli and
Enzmann (1998), burnout tends to be job-related and situation specific rather than
pervasive. In contrast, depression generalises across situations and other spheres of
life. Occupational burnout is typically and particularly found within human service
professions. Professions with high levels of burnout include social workers, nurses,
teachers, lawyers, engineers, medical practitioners, customer service representatives,
and police officers. One reason why burnout is so prevalent within the human services
field is due in part to the high-stress work environment and emotional demands of the
job. When a teacher is on the stage of burnout, they are lack of commitment in
accomplishing their duty in school. They will not be able to provide adequate services
especially when the task requires them to make decision and needs them to interact
with clients. When they no longer have the passion in working in teaching profession,
they are also too depleted to show sign of creativity and wisdom in tackling their job. It
will decrease the school organisations achievement.
As mentioned earlier, stress teacher will be easily get fatigue, and they will
constantly feel tired. Burnout teacher will also be the same. In school, they will not be
productive and they will not actively contribute to the organisation. Nowadays, teachers
roles and tasks has multiplied. Teachers role is not solely in classroom anymore.
Teacher have to carry all the tasks of providing the students with co-curricular activities,
train for sports, organise extra class, and many more. Beside of that, teachers also
burdened with all the clerical works where they need to provide folders for their subjects
and students, they need to key-in students attendance and marks for assessment. In
this type of situation, teachers need to be proactive and be wise in managing time. If the
teacher is not committed in playing his role as a teacher, they will not be able to cope
with the needs of the 21st era students.
Burnout teacher prone to absent from school, decline in classroom performance,
and poor interpersonal relationship with colleagues and students. According to Matthew
Lynch (2016), Burnout teachers are usually less sympathetic toward the problems of
students, and are less committed to their jobs. They develop lower tolerance for
classroom disruptions, less prepared for class, and generally less productive. As a
result, burnout teachers can have a negative influence on the morale of new teachers.
This will affect the academic performance of the students. Another problem of burnout
teacher is they will keep on blaming on others for failures and their low achievement.
Thus, resulting on a negative environment yet no solid solution will be achieved.

c) Suggestion on Effective Ways to Deal Stress

To overcome burnout problem among teachers, school leaders are responsible to
provide support and help for the stress and burnout teachers. As a leader, to improve
and sustain the achievement of the school must be including all members of the school.
Teachers are one of it, as teacher is the main power in generating excellence in school.
To help the teacher, school administrator should identify the cause of stress among the
teachers in order to work on the area. Since stress among teachers are caused by the
excessive workloads and inter-relationship among the school members such as the
colleague, administration, students, and students parents, ways to relieve their stress
are through focusing in this. In terms of workloads, the school administration should
need put excessive pressure towards the teacher to finish their tasks. Instead, they
should implement motivating approach which will encourage the teacher to perform in
their duties. For example, the school could give awards to the best-performing teacher
every month. This will motivate them to excel in their teaching and at the same time, as
a symbol of appreciation for the teachers effort in teaching their students.
Beside that, school administration should alert on the teachers behaviour. There
are peak times during the schooling session where the tasks for teachers are too much
and burdening, especially during the end of term, the start of the year, and during major
tests. One of the way to provide a platform for the teachers to release their stress is by
having fun activity and give them time to enjoy themselves. The leaders in school could
organise fun programs such as family day and sports day so that they can have time to
do something out of their dull and tiring routine in school, One thing to make sure is that
these programs are meant to let them to have fun, not to put more burden on their
shoulder while they already have too many things to do. So, all the preparation could be
done by third parties, such as the Teacher and Parents Society, where parents could be
the organiser. This fun-filled activities will surely help the teachers to release their stress
and avoid burnout among teachers.
Other than that, school administrations could appoint a specific person to consult
the teachers who are having tough times. This person must be someone in the school
who have experience and are good in giving advice and understanding. It could be the
principal, senior teachers, or the school counselor. Any teacher could come and meet
this person to ask for assistance in solving their problems, or just simply to express their
feelings. Sometimes, teacher under stress will feel better when we could express it out
instead of keeping it in ourselves. This person could provide help by giving tips and
motivate the teachers to keep up with their positive attitude and diminish unnecessary
tasks to make them clear on the goals and their priority.

In many cases, teachers stress are caused by the parents. Sometimes things
happened in the classroom and brings dissatisfaction from the client. It causes tense
relationship between teacher and parents. There are cases where parents come to
school in unacceptable manner just because they are not satisfied with certain teacher
in school. This thing is one major factor that causes stress among teachers, when they
are depressed by the parents act. It is better for the school administration to create a
system where parents and teacher could meet up personally and discuss about the
matter that they are not satisfied with. In this modern time, communication made easier
with the invention of internet which leads to the creation of convenient application in
their smartphone such as Whatsapp, Telegram and many others. These application
provide a platform which makes communication become easier and faster. Sometime,
teachers are not satisfied with their students, so they could directly consult the parents
to solve this issue. When issues are directly solved, it will help to decrease the teachers
burden in teaching.
In a nutshell, teaching profession and stress are inseparable. Every occupation
which involves social interaction are commonly related to stress. Teaching is stressful
and stress should be avoided before it becomes worse and leads to another negative
effect. The best ways to do this are to establish a helpful network of colleagues to share
concerns with, avoid areas out of ones control, exercise daily, eat right, and look on the
brighter side. School administration must be wise in dealing and helping the teachers to
work in stress-free environment even in hectic situation.

Reference
1. Bousted, M. (2013, July 16). Workplace stress among teachers must be taken
seriously.

The

Guardian.

Retrieved

from

https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-

network/teacher-blog/2013/jun/26/tackle-workplace-stress-organisational-level
2. Haskvitz, A. (2008, September ). Alan Haskvitz: Teaching and stress: Symptoms and
cures - teachers.Net Gazette. Retrieved September 8, 2016, from Teachers.net,
http://www.teachers.net/gazette/SEP08/haskvitz/
3. a. (1979). Stress effects. Retrieved September 8, 2016, from The American Institute
of Stress, http://www.stress.org/stress-effects/
4. Struggling with stress? (2016, August 22). Retrieved September 8, 2016, from NHS,
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/pages/understandingstress.aspx
5. Maslach, C. & Jackson, S.E. (1981). Maslach Burnout Inventory. Research edition.
Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
6. Schaufeli, W.B. & Enzmann, D. (1998). The burnout companion to study and practice:
A critical analysis. London: Taylor & Francis.
7. Lynch, M. (2016, June 9). Ask an expert: The effects of teacher burnout - the
Edvocate.

Retrieved

September

8,

2016,

from

Ask

http://www.theedadvocate.org/ask-dr-lynch-the-effects-of-teacher-burnout/

An

Expert,