ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the importance of awareness and self-advocacy in light of the distressing trends. It describes key research on two of these symptoms, high teacher turnover and low student achievement, which educational research has identified as indicators of unhealthy levels of teacher stress where they occur. There are few places where this contagion effect is more evident than in schools, where emotions — both positive and negative — can spread like brush fires. The educational researcher Andy Hargreaves refers to schools as emotional geographies, which he defines as “the patterns of spatial and experiential distances that help shape, configure, and color the feelings and emotions about ourselves, our world, and each other”. The implications of this truth are far reaching. There is a growing body of literature that emphasizes the negative consequences of large scale cognitive and emotional dissonance — a pattern that has contributed to an epidemic of teacher burnout and turnover, particularly in high poverty schools.
