Will your class get enough likes? Teachers feel pressure from social media

Social media, with its curated, glossy images, can increase students’ anxiety and insecurity. It turns out that teachers can also feel pressured by the inevitable comparison game.

Over the past two years, nearly a third of teachers say they have felt pressure to portray a certain image on social media when it comes to their teaching approaches, popularity with students, classroom decor or the way they getting dressed. survey conducted this fall by the EdWeek Research Center.

EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,135 educators, including school and district leaders, and analyzed the results separately suspendeda nationally representative sample of 731 teachers.

(Separate, non-scientific LinkedIn survey Last week, Education Week found even more anxiety on social media, with two-thirds of participants saying they felt pressured.)

Elementary and middle school teachers were more than three times more likely than high school teachers to feel “some” or “a lot” of social media pressure about some aspect of their teaching. Likewise, teachers in urban areas reported more pressure from social media than teachers in suburban or rural areas, according to the survey.

The platforms teachers most frequently used were YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest—all three image-heavy platforms.

“As a new teacher, I think a lot of the things you do on a daily or weekly basis with your students and colleagues, you feel like you don’t have much control,” said Megan Ryan, a mentor. teacher and coach in Louisa County Public Schools in central Virginia. “You’re thrust into this new position, you’re trying to manage this class of first-graders, their parents and your administration, and it’s just so much. And the only thing you can control is how cute your class is.”

Shopping sites like TeachersPayTeachers can contribute to this pressure, as teachers can browse (and buy) decorations and lessons created by their peers.

AND content creators for teachers regularly post images and videos of elaborate classroom setups on Instagram and TikTok — “but what teachers don’t realize is that a first- or second-year teacher definitely doesn’t have the extra money to fund all of these things,” Ryan said.

In the survey, a majority of Gen X and younger teachers said they also feel anxious about how parents and administrators of their students will react to their social media posts. (Less than a third of older teachers felt the same way.)

Some teachers interviewed noted that they are subject to a double standard, with colleagues and administrators encouraging them to use social media and also scrutinizing everything they post, whether professional or personal.

One high school civics teacher in Wisconsin recalled being reprimanded by an administrator for posting on his personal account about feelings of sadness and melancholy during the pandemic.

“I was told that this was inappropriate and that it meant that teachers’ lives were more important than the lives of others and that I should stop sharing such views,” the teacher told the EdWeek Research Center. “I learned to say almost nothing on social media about my work, whether I liked it or not, because I would get comments about it in meetings.”

Ryan agrees that she sees a generational divide in teachers’ concerns about social media. Teaching in the elementary grades can be especially difficult, she said, both because many online images and videos of classrooms focus on the lower grades and because parents tend to be in schools and interact more with teachers in elementary school. . “If you have young teachers and young parents in their 20s and 30s … they all feel that pressure.”

Social media helps some teachers connect with peers. Others find it stressful

Megan Forbes, a high school history and English teacher in Southern California, has been posting about her teaching on blogs, YouTube, and YouTube for over a decade. Instagram under the arm”Too cool for high school” She views social media not as a source of stress, but as an opportunity for teachers to collaborate on issues they may not have the opportunity to discuss in school.

For example, the Forbes YouTube channel dedicated to the topic “Training. Style. Encouragement” – the whole spectrum from the book “unpacking» video with lesson plans for Stone Age To alternative planning of maternity leave.

“The teaching profession can be very isolating. Most of the time you’re in your classroom doing homework and you don’t get a chance to see what other teachers are doing,” Forbes said. “I find social media for teachers very helpful and inspiring because I get ideas from other teachers all over the country and even other parts of the world.

“I am often challenged by teachers who have different perspectives on topics such as grading, edtech tools, equity, and bias-free education,” she continued.

As a young elementary school physical education teacher in Bend, Oregon, in 2012, Adam Howell also saw being active on X (then called Twitter) and other platforms as a key part of being a modern educator. But as his account @TheDumbJockMyth gained followers, stress overtook any professional learning.

“I have always felt enormous pressure to create and share new things, continue to innovate to move the profession forward, and contribute to the broader exercise and health community,” he wrote in a 2019 blog post. “These are values ​​that I still hold to today, but with the empowerment social media (and Twitter in particular) provided for me, I found it difficult to maintain any motivation and found my creativity stifled.”

Howell officially decided to “disconnect” from social media and delete his X account in 2019. “For me as a professional, social media no longer made me a happy person,” he said. “Communicating on social networks does not make you a better professional”. It is what you do every single day, working with students and colleagues, that makes you a better professional.”

Unplugging and watching other teachers in person rather than through a screen can ease teachers’ anxiety, Ryan said. She often asks mentor teachers who feel pressured by social media expectations to think about what they admire about the most effective teachers in their building or department.

“When you ask (mentor teachers) about these things, none of them say, ‘Oh, because her class has great decorations,’” ​​Ryan said. “It’s hard to step away from what you see on social media and realize that it’s only a small part of being an effective teacher.”