This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The OECD reports schools worldwide are under growing strain from teacher shortages. "It is getting harder to recruit, retain and deploy qualified teachers where they are most needed," it has found.
Australia faces a similar picture. At least one-third of Australian teachers say they intend to leave the profession before retirement. A 2023 survey found 7 in 10 teachers considered their workload unmanageable.
The usual policy response to these findings focuses on retention: better pay, lighter workloads, clearer career paths. Those steps are worth taking for teachers' own sake. Our new research, published in Educational Psychology Review, points to a second reason to pay attention to how teachers are doing: their well-being also appears to matter for how students learn.
In other words, if teachers are happy, students learn more. Researchers have suspected for some time that a teacher's own well-being, or the lack of it, such as burnout, exhaustion or stress, is linked to the classroom and how students do. But the evidence was scattered across many smaller, disconnected studies, with no single estimate of how large, or how reliable, these links actually are.
We wanted to change that. So colleagues and I searched for all available studies measuring the relationship between teachers' well-being or lack of well-being and student motivation or academic achievement. We ended up analyzing 186 studies and data from more than 350,000 teachers worldwide—the largest synthesis of this evidence gathered to date.
The search covered elementary, secondary and combined schools across 33 countries. The studies were published between 1977 and 2023. We defined teacher well-being broadly to include factors such as self-efficacy (the belief in one's capacity to do a job), job satisfaction and commitment, work motivation and general psychological functioning such as positive mood and the ability to cope with demands.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
