Teaching While Stressed: Hiding Our Emotions Helps Students, Hinders Healing, Try This

Many of us routinely park our emotions at the classroom door by compartmentalizing our stress and anxiety. It turns out that putting on a chronic happy face is harmful. The impact of this practice is well-known among mental health professionals. We invited a panel to explore productive, proven alternatives.

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Dr. James L. Floman is an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He received his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, where he studied the effects of mindfulness and compassion meditation on teacher emotion regulation and prosocial behavior with Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl. Dr. Floman has three core research streams: 1) The assessment of dynamic social-affective processes (i.e., developing and validating EI and well-being measurement tools); 2) EI, mindfulness, and well-being training (i.e., developing, optimizing, and scaling EI and well-being-enhancement interventions for real-world applications); and 3) Affective neuroscience (studying mental training-induced changes in ‘emotional brain’ function and structure).
Sara Silber is an award-winning elementary school teacher and a lead mentor with 30 years of classroom experience. Sara has written two blogposts, for BehaviorFlip’s Blog — “Social Emotional Growth Maps” and “A Teacher’s Journey Through Hacking School Discipline.” More recently, she authored a chapter in the inspiring book Thank You, Teacher. Sara enjoys working with her students and helping them grow and become independent learners. When she is not teaching or planning she is finding ways to support her colleagues. She loves to share her expertise, funny stories and other things that happen in the life of a teacher.
Mandy Froehlich is the former Director of Innovation and Technology in Ripon, WI. She also consults, presents and keynotes nationally on teacher engagement, edtech, leadership, and climate & culture. She is the author of several books, Reignite the Flames, The Educator’s Matchbook,The Fire Within and Divergent EDU.