The current generation of elementary and high school students could be considered a deprived group because their learning has become greatly limited since COVID-19 and with the wars. They have missed many classes, and matriculation exams will undoubtedly cover much less material than usual. Being forced to learn by Zoom or telephone calls and unable to learn in classrooms and meet their friends, Israeli children and teens have suffered and fallen behind. But what about their educators?
A new published study by researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beersheba has found that some 40 percent of teachers reported levels of anxiety and depression that crossed clinical thresholds.
About 12% suffered from severe depression and 5% from severe anxiety – rates that are significantly higher than those found in the general population during non-crisis times.
“The current situation for teachers and students is very much like that during the pandemic,” Dr. Moti Benita, a senior lecturer at the School of Education at BGU, said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. The emotional health of both was sacrificed to protect their physical health. After COVID-19 ended, there were many psychopathologies in children and teens.”
When the war is over, “their emotional health will be negatively affected for years,” he said.
“And teachers need to feel needed. Especially in lower grades, educators want to be close to their students. We didn’t study kindergarten teachers and pupils, but I suspect their situation is even worse. Young children need an attachment figure in class.”
Benita supervised research on Jewish teachers conducted for a doctoral thesis by Shahar Nudler-Muzikant, the study’s lead author. It was published in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education under the title “Teachers’ emotional labor during wartime: Autonomous and controlled reasons as predictors of ill-being.”
“In wartime, the teacher is often the first line of support for the children, but who supports the teacher? Our research proves that it’s not enough to ask teachers to ‘be strong’ and cope with their feelings,” Nudler-Muzikant said.
“If the teacher feels that resilience is being forced upon them as an external requirement, it can lead to collapse. The key is to develop the teachers’ educational identity as caregivers who identify with their work and recognize its importance.”
'Teachers want to work in the classroom'
BENITA HAS two children in elementary school, one in high school, and a daughter who is about to enter IDF service. “It’s unfortunate that education – the well-being of students and teachers – is not currently part of the public discussion. Teachers are getting their salaries; money is important, but they’re not working in the classroom, which is what they want to do,” he said.
The current situation demands that representatives in the Education, Defense, and Health ministries, in the Home Front Command, and others sit together and consider all aspects in order to make balanced decisions about what must be done. Classes can be divided up into different hours; classes could be held in places where there are protected rooms to go during missile attacks,” he suggested.
“Teaching is a demanding and stressful profession, and teachers are particularly susceptible to experiencing unpleasant emotions, but they are often restricted in showing their emotions toward students. For example, instead of showing anger or impatience towards a struggling student, teachers are expected to convey care and concern,” the team wrote.
Teachers often engage in emotional effort – managing emotions to meet job expectations – especially during wartime. The longitudinal study investigated how two emotional labor strategies, deep acting (genuinely trying to feel the required emotion) and surface acting (faking or masking emotions), along with teachers’ autonomous and controlled reasons for using them, predicted ill-being.
“Men do more surface acting; they hide their emotions,” said Benita. “But we found no differences between the genders in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
Ironically, a system that forces teachers to control their emotions only increases the risk that they will experience high levels of distress, Benita said.
How to reduce the risk of teacher attrition
HOWEVER, SHE added, “Although the situation looks dark, there are reasons to be optimistic because these stresses can be ameliorated. There are teachers who are resilient. If they use deep acting, they will feel better; if they do both deep and surface acting at the same time, if they identify with the value of being a teacher, they are better protected against depression, anxiety, and burnout.”
They sampled 259 Israeli teachers, each with an average of 15 years teaching of experience (almost two-thirds of them women) in a three-wave study during the Israel-Hamas War.
While the findings are based on data from that war, the researchers said, “they are also relevant today, during the current war with Iran, as teachers maintain the routine for their students while practicing emotional regulation in the classroom. Our findings stressed the value of supporting teachers’ autonomous motivation during periods of acute stress.”
The study’s authors argue that teachers’ motivation for engaging in emotional labor can play a crucial role in determining whether they can successfully cope with war-related stress. The wartime environment can severely impair family functioning due to increased stress and economic hardship in the family – so the classroom can serve as a safe haven, with teachers expected to buffer students from the adversities of war and provide emotional stability and support.
To reduce the risk of teacher attrition, training programs must shift toward fostering internal motivation and clear educational identities.
“Creating a school climate that allows teachers to express their values, rather than just faking a ‘calm’ exterior, is essential for preserving the teaching workforce during global crises,” they wrote.
Many of the teachers are parents themselves, sharing the same fears and uncertainties as the families of their students. This dual role leads to a profound emotional conflict: They are caught between their genuine emotional experiences and the emotions they are expected to convey in support of their students. In such contexts, the demand to engage in emotional labor becomes even more pronounced.
The study has several practical implications. Stressful circumstances, such as wartime, can increase teachers’ vulnerability to having symptoms of illness and wanting to leave the profession. Indeed, teacher attrition has remained persistently high over the past decade, both globally and in Israel.
“To reduce this risk, teacher-training programs can strengthen teachers’ resilience by enhancing their capacity to use deep acting rather than surface acting. An even greater emphasis should be placed on fostering teachers’ awareness of their underlying reasons for engaging in emotional labor.
“Encouraging teachers’ autonomous motivation to engage in such strategies, for example, by recognizing emotional labor not as a burden but as an integral part of their professional role, may reduce its psychological toll,” they concluded.