Transcriber: Helen Chang Reviewer: S Sung
I want to take you back to why I became an educator in the first place.
I was in college.
I discovered what I thought was my dream job,
and I did everything I could to prepare for the interview.
I learned about the organizations.
I thought about what kinds of questions would be asked.
I memorized the scripts for what I wanted to say
just to make sure I got things right.
And for reasons that you can now already figured out.
I didn't get the job
and I was devastated.
I started to rethink my career aspiration.
I started thinking back to middle school, when I was eleven years old.
I remembered a teacher who really inspired me,
who sparked some curiosity,
particularly about psychology that I never knew existed before.
I decided that I wanted to educate
and try to pay that impact forward.
I never actually gave her that feedback.
To this day, she doesn't know
that she is the reason I became an educator.
I recently discovered that she actually retired early,
in her early fifties, because she had burned out.
I couldn't help but wonder, what would have happened
if I had actually gone back and given her that feedback,
and shown how she had made a difference in my life,
and really shaped the trajectory of my entire career.
And what if other students had done this too?
I know that we've all had teachers who've had this kind of impacts on us.
If you think about how much you might enjoy
going to visit that one teacher or professor who really inspired you,
that's a pretty meaningful experience for both sides.
So that really got me wondering -
what do we actually know about teacher burnout?
This was my job interview, by the way.
(Laughter)
So, I got to thinking about, okay,
I'm going to get into this teaching profession,
and I need to know something about what it's like to be a teacher.
I was really disturbed by what I've discovered.
(Laughter)
If you look at the research evidence on teacher burnout,
this is amazingly common.
Christina Maslach and her colleagues at Berkeley,
have actually shown that teaching is the profession
that burnout rates on average are the highest,
higher than any other profession that you can imagine,
whether you look at firefighting,
nuclear power plant operators,
doctors and nurses.
Teachers have worse burnout than all those groups on average.
We know that this kind of burnout is really costly and consequential.
Burned out teachers show lower job performance.
Their students actually demonstrate less academic achievement.
They are more likely to quit.
And there is even 30 years of research
linking burnout to health problems,
including cardiovascular disease,
and various other types of illness.
So, this led me to a really important question
when I arrived in graduate school.
What can we do about teacher burnout?
I got some inspiration from a teacher that some of you would recognize.
Her name is Deborah Meier.
She is a highly innovative urban educator in Harlem, who said,
"It's making a difference in the world that prevents me from ever giving up."
I got to wandering - is that true?
Do teachers who feel they actually make a difference become less burned out?
Are they more able to sustain their motivation and their energy?
Dr. Campbell and I, a few years ago, conducted a study of teachers
where we tracked their perceptions of job stress.
We looked at their perceptions
of how much they actually made a difference,
and then we also measured their burnout rates.
We found that those who experienced a lot of job stressors
were much more burned out,
unless they felt that their job really made a difference.
And for those teachers who really felt that their day-to-day actions
had a meaningful, lasting impact on students' lives,
job stressors didn't really matter.
They weren't any more burned out.
They were able to justify
and cope with those job stressors by knowing
really that the ends justify the means.
That because my work makes a difference,
it's okay to put up with all the terrible things
that happen on the job.
So this was really exciting.
But I was a little bit dissatisfied
by just looking at teachers' reports of burnout.
So, they say they are less burned out.
But, are they actually more willing and able to invest more energy on the job?
Do they work harder?
Do they work more effectively?
I had a chance to try to answer those questions
in a slightly different domain.
I want to take you into a world
that I think is actually more difficult than teaching
by the data I've collected.
This is actually part of the higher education world
that no one likes to talk about,
which is university fund raising.
Think about the people who call you, at night, usually during dinner,
and ask you to donate your hard earned money
to your alma mater,
as if the tuition that you and your parents gave,
weren't already enough.
This is a notoriously difficult job to do.
Annual turnover rates exceed 400%.
Entire staff quits every 2 to 3 months.
You get rejected all the time.
Rejection rates at most universities exceed 99%.
And most of the people you call
treat you like a telemarketer and yell at you.
So it is no surprise
that when I arrived at one of these call centers -
I can't reveal the identity of the university,
but suffice it to say that the mascot rhymes with the "Molverines" -
(Laughter)
I found this sign on a caller's desk.
I found it really disheartening, but also highly amusing.
I thought I'd share it with you today.
(Laughter)
This is a very sad state of the world if this is your experience on your job.
(Laughter)
So, I started wondering how does this job make a difference.
When these fund raisers bring in money for the university,
where does it go?
Who benefits from it?
The data that I got suggested that over 60% of all the donation funds
actually went to provide students scholarships -
underprivileged students,
out-of-state students,
and merit scholarships.
These callers actually are helping students get an education.
But none of the callers had any idea where the money went,
and how really the work they did
had effected the lives of scholarship students.
So I designed a very simple intervention,
where I brought in one scholarship student to talk for just five minutes,
about how the scholarship that he got,
that was funded by the work these callers did,
had made a difference in his life.
I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to do a lot of good,
because the job itself
is still really unpleasant and really stressful.
But I had an inkling of hope that by seeing this scholarship student,
the callers would come face-to-face with someone who really appreciated
and valued the work they were doing.
It would show them
how their work was making a difference,
and give them a little bit of extra energy
to motivate them to work harder, smarter, longer,
and ultimately bring in more money.
The results that I got shocked me.
They shocked me so much
that I had to replicate this study six different times before I believe it.
Now the good thing about a 400% annual turnover rate
is that you have a lots of subjects to participate in studies
every semester.
(Laughter)
I was able to replicate this many times.
If you look at the results,
what they actually show was pretty striking.
You take a group of callers
who gets to meet one scholarship student for five minutes.
After that, you follow them for a month.
You find that in that month-long period,
the average caller spends two-and-a-half times
as much time on phone per week as he or she has before.
Also nearly doubles in the number of calls made per hour
for a full-month after that one interaction
with the scholarship student.
They are not just working harder, they are working more effectively as well.
The average caller brings in five times as much money per week
after seeing that one scholarship student face-to-face,
and hearing his or her story, than before.
That's a typical caller going from $400 a week to over $2000 a week.
That's 23 callers raising 37,000 extra dollars for that university per week
than they had before.
So I think this is really powerful.
I think that for the callers what they begin to see is -
I've now come face-to-face with someone who is really touched by my work,
who really appreciates it.
Now I know that my job makes a difference,
so I'm going to work a lot harder as a result.
The scholarship students also really appreciate it.
We've done this many times.
It turns out the chance to express gratitude is really meaningful.
To be able to say "thank you".
There's a lot evidence.
Bob Emmons and his colleagues, for example,
have shown that just keeping a weekly gratitude journal
is enough to actually increase both psychological and physical health
over a nine month period.
So there's a real opportunity to show employees
how their work makes a difference,
but also enables those benefits from it to actually say thank you,
and express their appreciation and gratitude.
What does this mean for teaching?
Well, one of my experiences as an educator,
is having a very clear sense of my short-term impact on students
while they are in my classroom.
But not necessarily knowing what happens afterward.
When students graduate,
do they remember anything that I've taught?
Do they even remember me?
Have they gotten any value out of my class?
How do they actually benefit from what I've taught them?
So, I think there is a real disconnect
between the short-term impact we've experienced as educators
and ultimately in the long-term value
that our knowledge, our teaching, our classroom exercises actually delivers.
So, I think there's some really exciting things that we can do about this.
This is Monica Groves.
Monica was a Teach for America teacher,
who was inspired to become a teacher,
because of her own first grade experience.
And just loved the experience of learning to read, to write,
to understand new ideas and new concepts
and decided to pay that forward.
Monica, like me, had never gone back and told her first-grade teacher
how much of a difference she'd made in her life
in really changing her career path.
This is where television turns out to be a really good thing.
Because Dateline NBC finds out about this,
and decides we can make a great show by connecting Monica
with her first-grade teacher Mrs. Kamminga.
So they organized a whole show
that looks a lot like my fund raiser study,
where Mrs. Kamminga is actually told
that one of her students had credited her
with changing her life and inspiring her to pursue this career.
She gets to fly down and surprise Monica in her classroom
and see her in action
really try to influence the next generation of students.
Mrs. Kamminga says,
"Every single teacher's mission
is to make a lasting contribution to the lives of students.
This was a truly heartwarming moment that brought me to tears -
to see how the work I'd done in my own classroom
had not only changed Monica's life,
but then been passed forward to whole generations of students
was incredibly powerful in memory."
Monica was really thrilled to have the chance
to express her gratitude in return.
I think this is something we ought to think more about in education
than we do today.
If you look at Monica and Mrs. Kamminga together,
one of the things you see
is a teacher reconnected with her former student
in a way that we rarely, rarely are able to accomplish.
The benefit to teachers is pretty clear -
to know how your job makes a difference in the long run,
how it's valued,
how it's appreciated.
I think the benefits to students are also pretty clear.
The students, when they are able to see these former students
who have been affected in a meaningful way
by this very class they're taking,
this very teacher they're interacting,
really have a chance
in a way they probably couldn't otherwise see.
If they're very young,
to develop self-confidence and afficacy.
When they see each other just a bit older than them,
having mastered the skills and knowledge that they're trying to learn.
With older students, potentially having role models,
to see alumni who have gone out,
and actually use the knowledge and skills
they got in the classroom,
in a meaningful and valuable way.
So I want to think a little bit about a new vision
for the future of education in the K through12 sense.
The vision is really simple.
It's "no alumni left behind."
I'm only half kidding when I say that.
When we think about "no alumni left behind",
what I really want to do is ask the question -
how can we bring alumni back into the classroom?
A couple of ideas just to stimulate your thinking.
One possibility is to get students together
at the end of semester or at the end of school year,
and ask them to create some kind of lasting tribute
that really captures the most important insights
that they're going to take away.
It could be a Youtube video.
It could be a Facebook site.
There are lots of creative ways to use social media
to really distill and consolidate what they're getting out of the class,
and potentially share with future groups of students.
A second idea is to think about bringing in
one alumnus guest speaker every year.
To identify one student from that teacher's classroom
who's actually gone on to use the material in a significant way
in his or her life, career, future studies
and be able to talk about that in a really legitimate, personal way.
To be able to say,
"Look.
We know that the teacher is obviously committed to you learning this material.
Here is a real student who has benefited from it,
who can provide a serious testament to how useful this knowledge actually is."
Another idea for the notion of "no alumni left behind"
is really simple.
Let's think about asking our own alumni
who have taken our classes,
to become mentors to our current students.
This is something I've been doing in my classroom for seven years.
I'll tell you without a doubt
it's the most meaningful thing that happens in my class
to see my former students really bonding with my current students.
Having been in a similar stage of life,
been in their shoes at one point,
and having a small common bound,
me as their professor,
to really be able to share knowledge.
All I ask is that they pay it forward.
So, these are just a few examples of ways
that we might be able to bring alumni back into the classroom,
to reduce teacher burnout,
and enable students to see the value of what they are learning.
I want to close at this point with a very simple piece of advice.
If you only remember one thing from today -
this applies especially to the men in the room -
I strongly encourage you always to wear dark suits.
Thank you.
(Laughter) (Applause)