As our world endures multiple crises, educators have turned their eye to what does and does not work effectively to assist students in the school environment, regardless of changing landscapes, such as lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-critical race theory legislation, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, personal crises students face, as well…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a useful statistical approach for understanding heterogeneity in a population. This article provides a pedagogical introduction to LCA modeling and provides an example of its use to understand youths' daily coping strategies. The analytic procedures are outlined for choosing the number of classes and integration of…

Support to improve teacher wellbeing is scarce in almost all contexts, but especially so in low- and middle-income settings in which teachers face both professional and personal challenges (Kirk and Winthrop 2007; Mendenhall, Gomez, and Varni 2018). In this field note, we discuss War Child's development of Coaching-Observing-Reflecting-Engaging…

National Teacher of the Year Sydney Chaffee discusses her struggle with anxiety and how it opened her eyes to the stigma of teacher mental health.

My journey in the field of stress and coping began in the mid 1980s when I was researching the rather new field of childhood depression. It was a relatively under-explored field, and as a clinical and educational psychologist it was becoming increasingly apparent that there were concerns of young people, with some of these reflected in their…

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), one in five adults living in the United States has a mental illness (2022). Despite the varying complexities and diagnoses associated with students who are navigating mental health issues, there are numerous approaches educators and professionals supporting adult learners can take to…

Compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress can be exhausting for education leaders. The good news, says district administrator Mona Johnson, is that they can also be prevented.

Teacher stress and burnout are associated with many adverse outcomes for teachers, students, and the educational system. This paper describes the Coping-Competence-Context (3C) Theory of Teacher Stress. The theory is based on empirical research on teacher stress and coping highlighted within this special issue and attempts to more explicitly…

Research and practice emphasize the importance of family involvement in early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, in order to address the unique and diverse challenges of families, support and resources may need to be prescribed on a case-by-case basis. This article suggests ways early intervention programs can…

Principals are critical to improving schools, but job-related stress and burnout are factors that can limit principal effectiveness and lead to untimely turnover. Extant literature, leadership preparation programs, and district policies have largely ignored principal burnout despite the increased complexity of the principalship and increasing…

Family resilience is a concept that has wide and deep roots, ranging from the development of the concept of individual resilience to the postulates of general systems theory, including family systems theory and related therapeutic models as well as studies on family stress and coping. Integration of these roots into a comprehensive theory remains…

It's time to make your mental bandwidth work for you. Being an educator is more stressful than ever, and teachers and administrators must constantly shift gears. You can do a quick self-check and begin fueling your brain energy: take the Educator Bandwidth Survey. "Educator Bandwidth: How to Reclaim Your Energy, Passion, and Time"…

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the pertinence and utility of using a trauma-informed lens in educational development. A trauma-informed approach is a framework grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma. After I describe the primary source of traumatic stress many faculty members are experiencing, I…

This article describes how two Southeastern social work programs delivered integrated behavioral healthcare training to MSW students and social work practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 posed challenges across five domains, including: (a) adaptations to course curricula; (b) adaptations to field education curricula; (c) experiences…

Today's teachers experience high levels of stress and fatigue that can negatively affect their well-being. Teacher burnout is not a new educational phenomenon, but it has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we discuss the prevalence of teacher stress and its impact on teacher well-being and student achievement. We call for…