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2005, Number 5

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Salud Mental 2005; 28 (5)

Strategies for intervention and prevention of burnout in teaching.

Guerrero E, Rubio JJC

Language: Spanish
References: 45
Page: 27-33
PDF size: 72.84 Kb.


ABSTRACT

In the European Union 50 per cent leave their jobs due to stress. Burnout is an English term literally meaning “to be burnt out by work”, that is, to be emotionally exhausted. Later on, this term was extended and consolidated by Maschlach and Jackson who considered burnout as a three-dimensional syndrome derived from emotional chronic stress characterized by physical and/or psychological tiredness, a feeling of being unable to work more (emotional exhaustion), a cold and impersonal attitude towards other people, and a feeling that the current job position and the fulfilled tasks are inadequate.
From a psychosocial point of view, burnout must not be identified as psychological stress, yet it has to be understood as a response to chronic stress sources developed from relationships between assistance services users and the workers who take care of them.
From the psychiatric scope, Olza pointed out that psychological problems that are job related have not been given enough attention. Burnout is one of the major problems that has strong financial, social and personal effects.
Our review is centered in the burnout syndrome prevalence among education professionals. In the past years many authors analysed and defended the need of a deep research regarding this subject. These authors also established burnout as a non questionable feature in the case of teaching, taking into account that somatic and psychological problems are common and affect teachers’ performance as well as their relationship with students and their teaching quality.
Prevention and intervention strategies
Burnout research has been centered in describing the syndrome, facilitating variables, and describing syndrome consequences. It has been taken also as a statistical analysis of measure instruments.
Alvarez and Fernandez classify the researches reviewed in their work in two categories considering burnout prevention and treatment. The first one is related to primary prevention and the second covers secondary prevention; it includes researches that examine and compare diverse intervention techniques.
Individual strategies
This part refers to a preventive and treatment focused approach meant to promote self-adaptation improvement strategies, and stress confronting regarding many personal factors.
Physiological techniques
Techniques oriented towards physiological arousal and emotional or physical unrest caused by labour stress sources, such as physical relaxation, breath control and biofeedback are considered among others.
Behavioural techniques
Those techniques are aimed to self-acquired skills and competences to facilitate labour conflict solving. Assertive training, social skills training, problem solving techniques and self-control are considered among others.
Cognitive techniques
Cognitive approach focuses on the perception, interpretation, and evaluation of labour conflicts and self resources that are at work in the subject. Taking into account that burnout is mediated by irrational thinking derived from stressing events, it is important to confront it according to cognitive techniques in order to change automate thinking.
The following are among cognitive techniques: Systematic desensibilization, mind detention, stress inoculation, cognitive restructuration, irrational thinking control, dysfunctional attitude suppression and rational-emotive therapy.
Social intervention strategies Social intervention strategies are considered to break isolation and improve socialization processes, strengthening social support trough cooperative work policies. It seems clear that social support crushes the nocive effects produced by stress sources and increases self-capacity to confront them.
Sandin points out that social support affects health directly; therefore, to have a support net facilitates individual experiences regarding self-esteem, positive affection and control, protecting the worker from multiple diseases and improving the immunologic system.
Final remarks
Different researches reviewed, clearly show that, for burnout to be explained in all its complexity, it is necessary a wider approach. This takes us to lay out a more efficient way to handle prevention and treatment as a holistic intervention that includes single, social and organizational contexts.
Other researches propose a psychopedagogical intervention program from a behavioural-cognitive approach, aimed to provide confronting strategies that will allow to improve health, labor quality and personal confort.
Information society has changed its pattern and needs professionals being capable of adapting to continuous technological, social and cultural changes. Static job positions have disappeared and initial formation does not have the level needed to confront the educational challenging that our educational reality has become.
It is now needed a fresh and continued formation where other values rather than technical ones are taken into account. We are undoubtedly referring to personal, emotional and professional competence development programs, that will allow ourselves to communicate efficiently, work in groups, and control our emotions as well as our creative and innovative capabilities.
Currently there are no measures to soften burnout in teachers; burnout teachers performance gets worse and their presence has negative effects on their teaching quality. These reasons moved us to propose the design and implementation of a prevention and intervention program dealing with teacher’s stress, trough a research project.
We believe that in the future, setting, development, and -most important- evaluation of this kind of programs will be strictly held; meanwhile, we hope to contribute with this article to promote dysfunction prevention and health improvement, as well as the involvement and monitoring of challenging programs designed to improve single, social and labour competences.


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