Spotlight on Supporting, Sustaining, and Celebrating Teachers

May 22, 2024

The resources in this Spotlight reflect an admiration for the extraordinary things teachers do on behalf of their students and communities every day.

Educators can de-stress after tough days with the self-help resources at the Virtual Be Well Space, learn how small work-style tweaks pay off in greater calm and resilience in the classroom, and access information about efforts to increase teachers’ compensation.

See our Supporting, Sustaining, and Celebrating Teachers E-Bulletin for more resources.

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Evidence-Based Strategies to Increase Well-Being and Support Emotional Regulation

No doubt about it, teaching can be one of the most challenging and at the same time most rewarding jobs around. So, how can educators navigate through challenging times? The Virtual Be Well Space is designed to provide education professionals with a range of strategies to effectively manage their emotions.

The Be Well Space, developed by the California Center for School Climate, a California Department of Education initiative led by WestEd, aims to provide research-based strategies, supports, and ideas for understanding and working with the brain’s natural tendencies to practice self-regulation and manage stress.

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Cultivating Adult Well-Being and Creating a Culture of Care

Teaching is a helping profession, but educators can’t help others when their own emotional reserves are tapped.

“We don’t have to be in perfect condition to be helpful,” says Dr. Christina Pate, a nationally recognized leader in social–emotional learning and supportive learning environments, “but we certainly can’t be in a debilitating condition or under so much stress that we can’t really show up for other people.”

In this Leading Voices episode, Dr. Christina Pate, Deputy Director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, and host Danny Torres share a rich discussion about the importance of educator self-care for improved well-being and better student outcomes. Dr. Pate is also Director of Safe and Supportive Learning Environments (SSLE) services at WestEd. Dr. Pate describes her personal experience of burnout and offers a framework for addressing educator well-being.

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Overcoming the Barriers to Improving Teacher Compensation

Teacher salaries are persistently low compared to salaries in similarly credentialed professions and have not kept pace with the increasing demands on these specialized professionals. Traditional teacher compensation models are typically inflexible and too complex to change due to historical inequities in education funding models and the localization of salary structures.

The Teacher Compensation Initiative was developed to surface these challenges and find, articulate, and share with states and school districts creative ideas that could lead to larger solutions.

Stay up-to-date on the effort to improve teachers’ financial picture with the Teacher Compensation Initiative’s resource center, which brings together reflections on the issues from invested educational experts, relevant news, and interviews from insiders who explain how and why compensation should change for today’s educators.