Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Cultivating Teacher Renewal: Guarding Against Stress and Burnout

Teachers today are more stressed than ever. It is crucial that teachers develop the tools necessary to keep from falling prey to the potentially destructive effects of stress and burnout. Cultivating Teacher Renewal: Guarding Against Stress and Burnout offers the antidote by providing the knowledge, skills and practices that will keep teachers from surrendering to burnout. Cultivating Teacher Renewal is evidence-based presenting an extensive review of the abundant research on stress and burnout specifically applying it to the teaching profession. This book adopts a comprehensive approach spanning the fields of education, the social sciences, and the neurosciences. The array of strategies offered will help teachers become stress hardy to stay in a renewal cycle by, building up defenses against burnout, successfully negotiating the emotional terrain of teaching, instilling new ways of thinking and behaving to preserve well-being, and limiting stress exposure by exercising healthier choices. This book will also help you to maintain a work-life balance and develop practices to sustain resilience and optimism. Review In a field where people might think there is nothing new to be said about stress and burnout among teachers, Cultivating Teacher Renewal squarely acknowledges that burnout and stress are, in the end, emotional conditions and therefore require a sophisticated inclusive understanding of the factors that affect teachers' emotional states. Barbara Larrivee does not peddle her own pet theory of emotion at teachers' expense, but creates a magisterial synthesis of the research on emotions in many traditions in order to help the teachers who are the audience for her book. Cultivating Teacher Renewal is a book with a sweeping yet solid theoretical base, and this enables it to set out very practical ways of diagnosing, anticipating, offsetting and ameliorating the onset of stress and burnout, that is such a scourge of the profession today.--Andy Hargreaves, Research Professor, Boston College, Director of CHENINE (Change, Engagement & Innovation in Education), University of Ottawa; President & Co-Founder, ARC Education www.atrico.org This is an important book. Teaching is an inherently stressful - and often distressful - experience. Cultivating Teacher Renewal provides a practical and helpful set of guidelines and concrete strategies that will not only support and help teachers who are experiencing significant stress/distress but also promote health and wellness. I hope that all educators have the opportunity to read this book.--Jonathan Cohen Ph.D., Co-President, International Observatory for School Climate and Violent Prevention Today's stressed-out teachers need this book. It consolidates the abundant research coming from multiple domains to help teachers develop a repertoire of proven strategies for managing stress, maintaining emotional balance, and sustaining well-being. This book gives teachers the tools to keep flourishing in their teaching career and reap the joys of this wonderful profession.--Kenneth Pelletier M.D., Director, Corporate Health Improvement Program at the University of Arizona School of Medicine Cultivating Teacher Renewal is the best and most complete book on teacher stress and what to do about it on the market today. It takes the reader inside the problem of burnout and then shows clearly how to avoid or get out of it. Great ideas for reaching inside yourself, and outside to those around you to achieve new levels of energy and renewal.--Michael Fullan, best-selling author and professor emeritus, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto Without a doubt, Larrivee (California State Univ.) has written a must-read book for all classroom teachers. Grounded in a strong theoretical base and combining research from the fields of education, the health profession, and psychology, Larrivee gives readers a thoughtful approach about how to deal effectively