Building Educator Compassion Resilience During Crisis

By Liz Krubsack, Education Consultant, Student Services, Prevention and Wellness Team

As schools plan students’ return amidst unprecedented challenges, there is a growing emphasis on educator well-being as a central component of these efforts. This emphasis stems from the understanding that supporting students in healing and re-engaging in education requires educators themselves to feel safe, supported, and valued. Given the cumulative toll of the pandemic and work for racial justice, many educators may be experiencing compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is an umbrella term that includes secondary trauma and burnout, and refers to feelings of depression, sadness, exhaustion, anxiety and irritation experienced by people in their work or personal life. Compassion resilience, on the other hand, refers to the ability to maintain physical, emotional and mental well-being while responding compassionately to people who are suffering. Think of this resilience as a reservoir of well-being that educators can draw upon on difficult days and in difficult situations. While every person has responded differently to the current crisis, it is reasonable to expect that educators will need additional opportunities to develop their resilience skills moving forward. Administrators are well-positioned to support staff in meeting this difficult moment by implementing approaches and supports that bolster the resilience of all staff.

While this can feel like a daunting task, CASEL’s Reunite, Renew, and Thrive: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Roadmap for Reopening School document identifies several helpful questions to consider when designing opportunities where adults can connect, heal, and build their capacity to support students, including:

How can we maximize supportive connections between all adults in the school community in ways that may look different from previous years?
How can we use this moment to help tap into educators’ sense of purpose to fuel their practice and support their well-being?
How are we creating spaces for adults to focus on self-care in ways that model what we want to happen for our students?
How can we put staff well-being at the center of school culture?
How can we best leverage community partners to support the range of needs and experiences of your staff?
How can we model and normalize asking for support?

These considerations can inform the components of staff wellness plans, guiding adjustments to existing plans to ensure they address the unique challenges that educators are currently facing.

Another important resource for building staff resilience is the Compassion Resilience Toolkit. This toolkit, a collaboration between DPI and Rogers InHealth, offers information, activities, and resources for school leadership and staff to understand, recognize, and minimize the experience of compassion fatigue. These resources aim to increase compassion resilience perspectives and skills from both a system and individual perspective. The content of the Compassion Resilience Toolkit has been strongly informed by research and best practices related to resilience, positive psychology, compassion fatigue, organizational psychology, and mindfulness. The toolkit offers a tier one approach to improving staff culture that utilizes staff circle discussions to build resilience skills in staff, teams, and organizations.

For more information about implementing the Compassion Resilience Toolkit in your district, contact Emily Jonesberg at [email protected], Molly Herrmann [email protected], or Liz Krubsack [email protected].