Podcast: Challenge in Education

The challenge in education is the unrealistic expectations and extra work placed on teachers, leading to burnout and a decline in teaching quality. To address this, a monthly survey should be conducted by the district or state level, asking teachers for feedback on unnecessary requirements and ways to improve their mental health. This would help identify common concerns and prompt necessary changes to alleviate the challenge for teachers. Hi, this is Leah Barksdale, and the challenge in education that I'm talking about today is the unrealistic expectations set for teachers and the amount of extra work that is required of them to get their job done. These requirements and tasks that are given to them from the district and state level are oftentimes the things that are leading to teacher burnout right now and are causing people to leave the field of teaching, and that's really not how it should be. Teachers enter the field of teaching to teach young children and to grow their young minds, but right now there are so many other requirements that they don't find joy in that anymore and causes their quality of teaching to take the fall, and that's not how it should be. We should want teachers to feel prideful in the work they are doing and to still find joy in what they're doing. So one way that we can fix this is by having either the district or the state level have a form or survey that goes out to teachers each month, whether it be a Microsoft form or Google form in a very simple format, just asking teachers what can they do to take some of these requirements off of their plate? What is unnecessary? What needs to be fixed in order for the teacher's mental health not to be taken into their their joy of their job? And I think doing this would filter out a lot of the things because I'm sure most teachers have the same concerns and the same paperwork or the same requirements that are dragging them down, and having the system or the district see this will cause them to, you know, make changes necessary, and that is one way that I think that we could take this challenge away from teachers.