Skip to main content

Teaching and Burnout

Well, friends, it's been quite a while since I've written in this venue.  Full disclosure: the fall semester was a tough one--my library was down two teaching librarians and the load was heavy as responsibilities in this and other areas increased.  While I still enjoyed being in the classroom with my students, I didn't have as much time as I'd like to think deeply about cognitive science and educational theory, and I often started feeling badly about myself for not making more time for it, for not pushing forward in my understanding of how we can best help students learn.

The truth is that a career is a marathon, not a sprint. This is something that I spout off to others quite frequently, but is something I too often fail to keep in mind for myself.  I often feel like a hypocrite as I speak to my students frequently about the importance of self-care, when I so infrequently practice self-care myself.  Teaching, done well, uses up a huge amount of emotional and cognitive energy (as does much of law librarianship), so this is my (very public) reminder to myself that taking care of myself is a key part of being able to do my job to my best ability.

So how can we help recover from or decrease the effects of burnout?

First, I think it's helpful to understand the factors that lead to burnout.  A helpful Harvard Business Review article articulates three symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. Let's take each in turn.  Exhaustion--physical, emotional, cognitive--undermines our ability to work as effectively as we might like; teaching, especially a heavy load, leads to all three types of exhaustion.  Feelings of inefficacy--when one feels incompetent and unproductive--often happens in tandem with exhaustion.  When people are exhausted and not feeling like they're working at their best level, we can start to feel we're failing at our job; this can be especially difficult if your career performance is something in which you've previously take immense pride.  Finally, cynicism is a lack of engagement that occurs when you are trying to mentally distance yourself from your work; it can occur from conflict or lack of voice in the workplace. Tired and frustrated that we feel that our work is subpar, we begin to view our work through a different, darker lens. Burnout can manifest in different combinations of the above factors. For me, exhaustion has been a regular companion since I started my first law librarian job, but the feelings of inefficacy and cynicism I've felt at point this year have scared me much more, as I never want to feel disengaged about this profession of which I'm privileged to be a member.

Here are a few ways that we can work to recuperate from these symptoms:
  1. Replenish your energy.  This can differ for different people. Sleep, obviously, is important. Make sure you're getting the right amount.  For me, this means not too little and not too much.  If I sleep too much, it actually results in me feeling groggier than if I got the appropriate amount.  Exercise--preferably in the fresh air--is also another big factor.  A walk outside, even a short one, makes me feel better almost instantaneously. If I start feeling tired or am having a hard day, I'll leave my desk and go outside for a quick jaunt.  I don't feel great if I just veg out watching TV, but reading a fiction book can actually be a helpful mental break. Scrolling through social media does not qualify as a mental break for me.
  2. Do things that have a positive effect on your emotions. Spend time with company you enjoy and participate in activities that make you happy; it may take some reflection to figure out which people and hobbies are re-energizing for you.  For me, this is spending time with dear friends (and NOT talking about work) and my dog; hiking; cooking; and taking photos.  I've started going home at the lunch hour to eat with my pup and to take an actual break, instead of just eating lunch at my desk.  I've also tried to start limiting the amount of work I'll do on weekends and replacing that by taking my camera out for long walk.  I can do better work during the week if I take some time to engage in other passions on the weekends and in the evenings.  Fingers crossed I can keep this going as the new semester begins.
  3. Log your accomplishments and what you're grateful for.  This is especially important for those of us whose burnout can manifest with those feelings of inefficacy and cynicism. It's easy to fixate on the negatives, but taking a few minutes each day to acknowledge the positives can do wonders in helping to keep a more uplifted mindset.  Even if you find yourself overloaded and have to put some projects aside, you are accomplishing plenty; taking a moment to recognize that can help you to remember you are making progress.
  4. Cultivate positive and meaningful relationships inside and outside of your workplace.  These people will help make you feel appreciated and valued beyond your ability to be performing your job at a certain level.  The challenging part for me has been finding the willingness to open up about my exhaustion to others, including family members and close friends; I am guilty of being an exhaustion denier. Some of my law librarian colleagues have been so helpful this year in this regard; phone calls with faraway friend/colleagues has been a re-energizing reminder that people care and that we all feel this way at times.  Being open about our challenges helps us all, and it's okay to take a break from boosting others up and let them bolster you.  It has also helped to participate in a diversity and inclusion colloquium across campus; spending time every other week with like-minded individuals has helped to me to re-engage.
To be the best teacher I can be, I need to avoid burnout.  I've commented before on how I must love teaching because, even when I'm beyond exhausted, I "miraculously" find the energy when I enter a classroom.  But the reality is, we all only have so much energy--there is a limit.  I don't want to reach mine when I'm trying to help students learn and I want to keep learning and writing about how we can best facilitate student learning, so developing some strategies to start coping is necessary.  It may be a work in progress, but it's helping.

Recommended resource for more on self-care: Legal Ease: Self-Care for Library Staff.  It's a wonderful resource written by our own community.



Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the new
Read more

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter. There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation , on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2] Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn , &qu
Read more

Helping with Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 2: Prioritizing Transparency

One factor leading to decreased focus and motivation in online classes is the uncertainty many students feel in the virtual environment.  This uncertainty can arise from students never having taken an online class before, from having distractions at home that they don't have in their in-person classes, or from using technology with which they're not familiar.  This uncertainty can lead to students disengaging with the class, as they feel disconnected from the content, their instructor, and their classmates. To support students undergoing this uncertainty and help them stay engaged, provide as much clarity as possible.  Being clear about expectations will help students gain some balance in an uncomfortable situation.  There are a number of ways we can help students minimize their discomfort--from making sure online class modules are standardized in their format within the learning management system to designing a syllabus with well-structured, clear course requirements.  One m
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki
Read more

Cognitive (Over)Load in First Year Legal Research Instruction

The research and analysis that we teach our students are processes, but when our students’ grades are based primarily on the documents they produce, students can have a difficult time internalizing those processes. This is partially due to what cognitive psychologists refer to as cognitive load.   Cognitive psychologists define cognitive load as “the mental burden that managing working memory imposes on a person.” [1]   According to a 2015 law review article on cognitive load and legal writing: "Cognitive load theorists opine that the process of learning complex new information can exhaust a student’s finite working memory, perhaps capable of holding as few as two or three elements at a time. The complexity of the ‘element interactivity’—the interaction between various elements of the material to be learned—alters cognitive load. Thus, the complicated process of analyzing legal problems, researching their possible solutions, and communicating that analysis in writing can o
Read more