Students' perceptions of the incidence of burn-out among their teachers

Research in Education, May 2003 by Evers, Will J G, Tomic, Welko

The aim was to explore students' perceptions of teacher burn-out in relation to the incidence of disruptive student classroom behaviour and teachers' competence to cope with it. A random sample of students from a Regional Training Centre participated. First, it was shown that the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Coping with Disruptive Behaviour Scale and the Perceived Disruptive Behaviour Scale could be adapted for students to report symptoms of burn-out perceived among their teachers, the occurrence of perceived disruptive student behaviour and the students' perception of their teachers' ability to cope with such behaviour. Second, students' perceptions do not differ according to their age. Third, a significant difference was found between the perceptions of male and female students in respect of emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, but not in respect of personal achievement. Finally, a considerable percentage of variance on each of the three burn-out dimensions is explained by teachers' ability to cope with student disruptive behaviour and perceived disruptive student behaviour. Students' perceptions of their teachers appear to contribute valid information on the mental health of the latter. It is advisable for future research into teacher burn-out to be based both on the teachers' self-reports and on the students' reports.

Key words Students' perceptions, Teacher burn-out, Vocational education

Research reveals that burned-out human service professionals, including teachers, have had and perhaps are still having a hard time. Although the fit between them and their job has been disrupted (Galloway et al., 1981; Smith and Bourke, 1992), they continue their work, and, by doing so, harm their own health and the well-being of their clients.

Students need mentally and physically fit grown-ups who can guide them as they find their way in our world. Burned-out teachers suffer from irritability (Huberman, 1993), and they are found to be responsible for student apathy (Jenkins and Calhoun, 1991). Teachers are known to continue working in spite of burn-out symptoms (Dworkin, 1985; Hock, 1988) or reduced classroom management skills (Blase, 1984; Smith and Bourke, 1992).

As burned-out teachers negatively affect themselves, their students, and the educational system (Hughes, 2001), it is necessary to develop and promote the use of instruments to try and more accurately predict teacher burn-out. As a complement to teachers' reports on their own health, their students could give valid information about them, thus helping to discover burn-out among teachers at an earlier stage and making timely preventive or restorative intervention strategies possible. Teachers play such a valuable role in helping our children grow up that any opportunity to promote their physical and mental health should be seized.

Teacher burn-out

According to the well-known definition of burn-out (Maslach, 1976; Maslach and Jackson, 1981), burned-out people suffer from emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion refers to feelings of being emotionally overextended and having depleted one's emotional resources. Depersonalisation refers to a negative, callous, and detached attitude towards the people one works with, i.e. patients, clients, or students. Reduced personal accomplishment refers to someone's negative self-evaluation in relation to his job performance (Schaufeli et al., 1993).

Many studies of burn-out stress a behavioural aspect of the syndrome while many others stress a mental aspect. Oranje (2001) divides studies on burn-out into three categories. First, burn-out is considered to be a coping problem (the interaction model), i.e. burn-out stems from the negative outcome of an individual's judgement of his own abilities in relation to real or imagined stressors in the individual's environment (Byrne, 1991; Cherniss, 1980; Eskridge and Coker, 1985).

Second, some studies view burn-out as a state of both physical and mental exhaustion that strikes the individuals involved for a long time in situations that exact a heavy emotional toll (Kremer-Hayon and Kurtz, 1985). This view is categorised as the response or physiological model.

Third, the basic principle of some studies is the view that it is the environment that produces stressors responsible for the onset of burn-out. Examples of such environmental stressors are the social relationships of the teachers with students, colleagues and principals (Brouwers and Tomic, 1999; Feitler and Tokar, 1980) and the organisational working circumstances (Brenner et al., 1985; Burke and Richardsen, 1996; Van Dierendonck et al., 1998).

Although burn-out symptoms also occur among blue-collar workers, it is the category of human service workers who appear to run the greatest risk of falling victim to the burn-out syndrome (Freudenberger, 1975). Teachers in particular experience many stressful events in their careers (Burke et al., 1996).

It is, however, a serious problem that, so far, teacher burn-out studies have lacked a firm theoretical basis and that proof of causal relationships between environmental stressors and individual health consequences is almost entirely lacking. Guglielmi and Tatrow (1998) posit that burn-out research lacks a theoretical framework that unifies and guides empirical research on burn-out. To meet one of their most essential objections, we started from the self-efficacy theory when composing the questionnaire on teacher competence in order to measure domain-specific teacher classroom behaviour. In some studies the self-efficacy theory appeared to be a promising conceptual framework for studying teacher burn-out (Brouwers, 2000; Evers et al., 2002).