Faculty Highlight: Russell Carson Studies Teacher Burnout
Jerry Willis, PhD, Associate Dean for Research
Just what does a kinesiology faculty member do? Most of us have come in contact with the general stereotypes of professors, eggheads, absent minded, elitist, isolated in the Ivory Tower. There are also stereotypes of colleges of education and of kinesiology. Many of our stereotypes are so deeply engrained in our culture that they now live a life virtually independent of their origins. Take the phrase ivory tower. Some British pundits say the phrase comes from the Song of Solomon. In praise to his beloved, Solomon (7, 4) says: “Thy neck is like a tower of ivory, thine eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon” and so on. (It seems to lose something in translation, but regardless, that is not where we get the term.) It is actually American. In 1913, when a wealthy family named Proctor donated some of the money to build the graduate college tower building at Princeton, it became known as the “Ivory Tower” because the Procter’s company (now Proctor and Gamble) made Ivory soap. In the 1920s the Princeton faculty song even had a verse about the building, “…a lifetime’s hope, constructed out of ivory soap.” What is so detrimental about disembodied stereotypes is that they frequently shape people’s views and options about a group or organization more than reality. What the public, and even other academics, think about universities, colleges of education, and kinesiology, is often surprisingly stereotypical and uninformed.
However, when Russell Carson, then a doctoral student at Purdue University, received an offer from the Department of Kinesiology, he didn’t base his decision on stereotypes. He already knew of the department because he had studied and learned from the ground breaking research and scholarship done by LSU kinesiology faculty. He happily accepted the position and headed south.
Russell teaches some of the methods courses for physical education majors who plan to be teachers as well as research courses, and a methods course for all pre-service elementary education majors. Also, his research interests are anchored in core issues in kinesiology pedagogy but they are also relevant to work in many other areas of the college. He is concerned with teacher burnout, a serious problem that contributes to the need in America to prepare three teachers for every one that will be in the classroom five years after graduation.
His dissertation, funded by the Spencer Foundation and guided by his major professor, Thomas Templin, is an interesting combination of applied research, theory, and technology. He was interested in “teachers’ daily emotional experiences” and how they relate to teacher burnout. He studied middle school teachers in 14 different subject areas. Using a survey, he identified teachers who had high, moderate, and low levels of “emotional exhaustion” which is a core component of burnout. Then he asked them to rate their emotional status four times a day.
How did he get busy teachers to stop and rate how they were feeling four times a day? He used Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs. During the workday teachers carried a small palmtop computer called a Palm Pilot with them. When the Palm Pilot beeped, it was a signal to record more data.
The handheld computers were running software developed in the Military Family Research Institute in Purdue’s Department of Psychology. Psychologist Howard Weiss developed the software, the Purdue Momentary Assessment Tool or PMAT, to study military families, and Russell adapted it for his study. The program asked about a person’s emotions, if they were experiencing frustration, anger, happiness, or caring. It also asked if the teacher had done any of 16 work events since the last measurement (such as planning, lecturing, giving praise, grading, clerical work, interaction with an administrator), and about which activities were most positive and most negative for the teacher. The software also asked the teacher to rate how well they had performed their work related tasks and about their level of emotional exhaustion.
The teacher’s in Russell’s study also wrote a journal elaborating on their workday and how they felt. And, he conducted semi-structured interviews with five people from each group, labeled high, medium, and low burnout.
What were the outcomes of the research? Russell is still analyzing some of his data but thus far there have been a number of interesting findings. Some were expected. Teachers with higher levels of anger, frustration, and nervousness, for example, had higher levels of burnout, while those who reported high levels of caring and happiness had lower levels. Further, the more incidents of student discipline reported the higher the burnout score but higher levels of interacting with colleagues tended to be associated with lower levels of burnout.
Other findings were not so predictable or obvious. One finding dealt with whether teachers must “put on a happy face” regardless of how they really felt. This is called “surface acting” in the literature, and high levels of surface acting were much more likely to have high levels of burnout. On the other hand, teachers who took frequent vacations, even short ones, had lower burnout scores. This even surfaced in data describing how a teacher took some time during the day for non-work related activities such as phoning family. This type of activity was associated with lower burnout levels. Finally, a teacher’s rating of job performance was related to burnout. The poorer the teachers felt they were performing the higher their levels of burnout.
Even this brief summary of Russell Carson’s research raises lots of questions for all of us involved in teacher education. For example, in many schools the new teacher gets the more difficult classes to teach (more student discipline incidents, higher levels of frustration and anger), and new teachers often feel isolated and alone because they haven’t yet made friends with other teachers (lower levels of interaction with colleagues).
Further, novice teachers often feel overwhelmed by teaching and have to struggle to do everything they have to do (less opportunity to take a break or vacation). Sounds like a very good recipe for burnout doesn’t it?
If you would like to contact Russell about his research his email is rlcarson@lsu.eduAngela Owings Broussard | College of Education
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