May Newsletter

Ann Renn - BHS

Stacey Endicott - BHS

Joe Bavlnka - BHS

Christina Olson - JYMS

Laurie Kowalke - JYMS

John Davies - East and West

Rylee McCarthy - GLW and NF

Brianna Capesius - ABE

As we have discovered in the previous sections of this toolkit, the goal of compassion resilience can be reached with the application of personal skills and perspectives combined with organizational policies and practices. In this section we will focus on the systemic factors that can negatively impact our compassion resilience and explore our response and potential role in making positive change.

We all work in imperfect systems. When we look outside of our own system to those that we rely on to provide for the health and well-being of our students and their families, we find more imperfection. The first step in lessening the negative impact of the systems in which we live and work is naming what it is about the systems that contributes to our compassion fatigue. The second step is to discover which items on that list we can change, which ones leadership can and will address, and which ones we would best be served by letting go.

Sense of Competence: Feeling successful with students and having more control of the classroom decisions.

Educator Support Systems: Educators identify other educators as their primary source of support, yet none felt comfortable admitting stress or difficulties to administration. Social support is among the strongest mitigating factors against secondary trauma. The simple act of having time to discuss work-related stress with colleagues is most effective in reducing symptoms. Social support has been shown to buffer a myriad of stress outcomes and is among the first line of intervention recommendations.

Supervision: Putting emphasis on supporting educators and helping them meet their needs with specific recommendations is most the effective supervision (especially related to new educators). Set aside some supervision time to build an individual self-care plan that can be monitored for progress over a length of time. Effective supervision that goes beyond focusing on administrative tasks, can contribute to positive outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and educator retention. Educators with high levels of STS benefit from a more intense tier of mentorship or perhaps individualized treatment provided by an outside agency resource.

Creating a Climate of Support: Creating a climate of support for stress and STS mitigation that is flexible and responsive to staff cultural diversity prevents hierarchical mechanisms that ultimately contribute to STS levels. It is recommended that institutional mechanisms for peer-to-peer discussion and consultation on work-related stress would support prevention and mitigation of stress and STS in the educational setting.

Grounding connects people to the Earth's natural healing energy. Grounding practices reduce inflammation, pain, and stress; improves blood flow, sleep, and vitality. Grounding is a simple, profound lifestyle addition, requiring no effort or dieting. Grounding is a GROSSLY overlooked factor in health and healing. Click on the link below to experience this for yourself!

Reflect on what are you doing when you feel most alive – most like yourself? The majority of people when asked this question do not immediately go to a situation at work, but rather a place outside of work where they feel most alive. If that’s the case for you, when is a time at work when you feel most alive?

When you go home from your workday, do you have a tendency to share what happened in your day that left you feeling most alive or what was most draining? Our bodies experience the stress we relive in our conversation to some degree as if we were experiencing it again. Sharing the hard parts of our day may be needed to be understood and validated. We can become aware of when it moves from helpful to hurtful. We have a choice about how much time and on what we focus when talking about our work. One practice to play with is to include what made you feel most alive in your day as you talk with friends and family.