Peter Lutzker - The Art of Foreign Language Teaching

One of the most pressing issues in teacher development today is finding ways to alleviate the widespread problems of high stress levels and burnout among teachers.174 Just how prevalent these symptoms have become in the teaching profession became dramatically apparent in the landmark Potsdam study, Psychische Gesundheit im Lehrerberuf published in 2004.175 In an unprecedented, large-scale study the mental and emotional health of teachers was examined and compared to people working in other social professions. The result of this study based on data from 17,000 people accumulated over years was that teachers experienced significantly higher levels of stress and burnout than any of the other groups who were studied including nurses, policemen, firemen, prison wardens, kindergarten teachers and founders of new companies. Inordinately high levels of stress and burnout were found to exist among teachers throughout Germany (most extremely in the new Bundesländer ); equally distributed among teachers working in all types of schools ( Grundschule, Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium ).176 There were no significant differences found between the stress levels found in Germany and control samples drawn from other European countries.177 The reasons teachers gave for stress and burnout were essentially the same in every country, region and type of school: the reason cited most often was the behaviour of difficult pupils, followed by the size of classes and the amount of teaching hours.178

The results of this study matched official statistics in Germany which show that the number of teachers who retire early due to sickness is vastly higher than in other professions. In data taken from 2001, 72 % of teachers were forced to retire early solely due to health reasons. Taking into account those teachers who retired early for different reasons or in the framework of early retirement programs [ Altersteilzeit ] , only 5 % of teachers worked till the age of 65. There is no profession which is even remotely comparable in this respect.179

The authors of the Potsdam study draw a series of far-ranging conclusions from their extensive material, ranging from a revision of pre-service teacher education to concrete suggestions as to how to improve the social climate in schools. Most relevant in the context of this study are the conclusions which they draw in regard to the role of in-service courses for teachers. In noting that in the course of a teaching career the levels of job satisfaction appear to become progressively lower, they see a pressing need to address these problems at all stages in a teacher’s life. They emphasize the necessity of developing a range of competences enabling teachers to more successfully address and live with the challenges they have to meet on a daily basis. In this context they consider in-service training to have a potentially decisive role:

Thus, it follows that in the context of acquiring competencies, a more appropriate manner of dealing with one’s personal expectations and workload also needs to be developed. This will require considerable personal effort including the willingness to take part in in-service teacher development.180

At the same time, they point out that such courses have to be concretely designed to directly help teachers in those areas which have been deemed most critical:

Teachers themselves refer to the problem that the content of such courses is often inadequately matched to those competencies which are most decisive in their everyday work. Unquestionably, providing worthwhile teacher development courses that are relevant to the real demands of teaching is also essential with respect to health .181 (italics mine)

Wolfgang Hagemann, the director of a clinic which specializes in treating teachers suffering from burnout syndrome, has also argued that a highly significant and generally ignored task of both pre-service and in-service training should be to help teachers to find their own ways of establishing psychological and emotional balance in their lives:

Both in pre-service teacher training, as well as in the in-service training that is offered by the school authorities, the main emphasis lies on methodology and the didactics of the individual subjects, new teaching methods and – at least this – new methods to motivate pupils. However, neither team skills, nor guidance with respect to personal psychological hygiene play any role.182

He sees the continued professional education of teachers – the teacher as a committed learner and thus an authentic example for her pupils – as a potentially vital component in achieving mental and emotional health:

Hartmut von Hentig speaks of school as “a place of life and experience”. He describes the teacher more as a pedagogue who as an educated person and role model guides pupils, comes to terms with the abilities and interests of individual pupils and the group, that is to say, the class, and who puts his personality everyday into the living process of teaching, prepared to take things on, to hold back, to question himself. (…) The pre-service education in the universities and the in-service courses both within schools and outside of them should supplement their work on didactics and teaching methods with a much more pronounced emphasis on teacher development. In this respect, every teacher is clearly called upon to take personal responsibility for his own educational development. This means, as Montessori pointed out, it is not the children who need to be educated, but rather the teachers.183

In considering the Potsdam study, the critical issue of teachers’ health emerges as a paramount educational issue. The fact that this study has gone relatively unnoticed from either the public or policy makers, particularly in comparison to the unprecedented attention which the PISA study has received, must be viewed as highly disturbing and significant. There can be little doubt that the deficiencies which were highlighted in the PISA study and which have caused a sudden and fundamental revision of many educational policies cannot be redressed unless the report and conclusions of the Potsdam study are also taken into account. Up until now, this does not appear to have been the case.

In taking into account the types of demands made on language teachers today, it is unsurprising that traditional models of in-service courses, generally focusing on new methodological procedures, have increasingly been viewed as both outdated and inadequate. The realities of the lives of many language teachers indicate they have different needs. They point to the necessity of introducing new forms of courses which potentially offer something far more meaningful and transformative than what has commonly been found in most in-service teacher training. In the context of this study of an in-service development course for language teachers, the issue of personal development and growth as well as the factors of stress and burnout are considered to be essential in considering the potential value of such courses.

In the sense in which Edelhoff refers to the development of personal qualities such as enthusiasm, openness and empathy, or in Legutke’s emphasis on the necessity of taking risks in order to affect change, visions of teacher development which clearly transcend traditional conceptions have also been offered. Achieving such dimensions of personal change requires that a number of factors be taken into account in regard to both the content and structure of such courses.

The following chapters will address these issues directly. Many of the clowning courses which will be the focus of this empirical research study took place during the annual intensive five-day in-service course for English teachers in Waldorf Schools – the English Week . Some also took place in the context of the English Fortnight , a two-week summer course offered in the years 1999 and 2000 in Emerson College, England, at the Baltic Seminar in July, 2003 in Helsinki, Finnland, and at the Institut für Waldorfpädagogik in Witten-Annen, Germany, in January, 2005. All of these programs were designed as in-service programs for foreign language teachers (mostly, but not exclusively English teachers) at Steiner schools throughout Europe.