TEACHER FATIGUE IS REAL!
“A teacher’s job has become so much easier. She no longer has to manage a class full of children. In fact they are doing half her job” — These are some of the statements I have heard more frequently over the last one year. But has it really become that simple? No, it is quite the opposite!
I had just wound up an online workshop on zoom and I immediately fell asleep with my head on the table. Waking up, I called my friend and asked if she also felt strained after a video conference. She said, “You bet. It feels like all my energy is scooped up. How I wish we could have a face to face interaction!”
Until last year our team was facilitating teacher training workshops full of people whose emotions we could easily gauge, even as we navigated topics as varied as gender roles, self-awareness and relationship skills, all of which demand a high level of conversational nuances and empathy. But, now like many other people across the world, the pandemic has pushed our lives into a virtual reality. For more than 18 months, in the context of this international health crisis, we had to reinvent teaching to ensure successful learning. The teachers and students switched to online education over night. However, after months of virtual interactions, a new condition called digital fatigue has emerged as a consequence of overusing the digital tools in the teaching and learning process, leading to burnout.
TEACHER FATIGUE IS REAL
The sudden shift from face to face teaching to online has left many teachers and students in doldrums. On a population scale, there is research showing that virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain. Why is video conferencing experience surprisingly difficult to most of the people given that the medium seems neatly confined to a small screen and presents few obvious distractions?
We humans communicate even when we do not talk. In a face to face conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from numerous non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they are showing signs of disinterest by fidgeting, if they are maintaining an eye contact or where are they looking.
Perceiving these non-verbal cues comes naturally to most of us, takes little conscious effort to analyse, and can lay the background of an intimacy at an emotional level. Direct person-to-person contact triggers parts of our nervous system that release a “cocktail” of neurotransmitters tasked with regulating our response to stress and anxiety making you better equipped to change. Such cues allow teachers to naturally screen the environment and adapt to the moods of the class.
However, in a typical online medium, these hardwired abilities are impaired and the brain needs to exert an intense and sustained attention to words instead. The possibility of viewing the body of a person is eliminated, forcing the brain to decode so many people at once along with ensuring that teaching and learning happens in a smooth manner.
This leads to problems in which group video chats become less collaborative, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Parallel conversations become impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can’t recognize how non-active participants are behaving — something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision. This leads to other problems such as the audience getting distracted.
The teachers and students had no choice in these unprecedented times. Overnight the teachers were asked to completely redesign what school looks like. Student learning, children being fed, needs being met amidst a global crisis. And, they did it all. But, if you think that a teacher’s job has become easier during the pandemic, then think again. Not only does a teacher have to put in extra efforts to make sure the lessons are made interesting enough for an online medium, he/ she also needs to to keep the kids on the other side of the Zoom call even remotely engaged.
Bottom line- The pandemic has not been easy on anyone! But we have a choice. To support every teacher who is learning new techniques and taking extra efforts to connect with our children. And please never say this again,“ those who can’t do anything else just go to become teachers.“
Stay tuned for further updates on what could be done to reduce digital fatigue and burnout.
Reference: National Geographic
