At 7:15 on a windy Tuesday morning, our school secretary informs me that two of our school’s five paraprofessionals are absent without substitutes. My jaw slackens. I thank her and stride down the hall toward two other special education teachers who have commenced the near-daily process of shifting instructional schedules to compensate for staff absences. One colleague will assign independent work to her reading groups so that she can support a fifth grader with feeding and toileting throughout the day. I will cancel my social-skills groups and skip my lunch break to provide behavior-regulation support for my second-grade students. My other colleague previously planned to forego her morning interventions as her third graders are taking the state reading exam, but she will merge her kindergarten and first-grade math groups this afternoon.
Classrooms, administrative support, and materials—those largely predictable or “static” elements that shape the work of teaching—often come to mind when we think of teachers’ working conditions. However, unpredictable events can add up over time and influence educators’ work. These “dynamic” conditions include staff absences, as in the above example, but also extend to scheduling shifts and student absences. They force practitioners to prioritize certain aspects of their work above others (at times, to the detriment of students), and the accompanying tenor of uncertainty can contribute to teacher burnout. I examine how these conditions impact special education teachers in my article, “Dynamic and Static Working Conditions: Examining the Work of Special Education Teachers,” in the current issue of The Educational Forum.
Dynamic working conditions are not, however, limited to the experiences of special education teachers. General education teachers and people who work outside of the education system entirely can experience these paradoxically frequent yet unpredictable fluctuations in their work life. Student absences from the general education classroom, for example, may not happen every day, yet require ad hoc teacher responses when they do. As teachers spend time responding to student absences—by emailing a student’s family, modifying instruction, or spending their preparatory period helping a student make up work, among other possibilities—they may sacrifice collaborating with colleagues, lesson planning, or attending to other work responsibilities. Though these tradeoffs may seem small on an individual basis, their impact compounds upon frequent recurrence.
As the teaching profession becomes increasingly fraught, we must mobilize the tools at our disposal to stave off teacher burnout. This means identifying dynamic working conditions that hold important consequences for teachers in practice. Ideally, we must examine the broader policy contexts that contribute to these conditions and develop sustainable solutions. At the very least, we must account for these oft-overlooked aspects of teachers’ work and the additional labor they create for teachers.
By Helen “Rosie” Miesner
Rosie Miesner is a dissertator in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former elementary general and special education teacher, Rosie’s research examines how socio-political contexts shape the practical enactment of special education policy and how policy confluence informs the everyday practices of pre-K–12 teachers.
Her article in KDP’s Educational Forum, “Dynamic and Static Working Conditions: Examining the Work of Special Education Teachers,” is available free for the month of June.