According to a 2021 poll, about three-quarters of Australian teachers endure significant stress during a typical work week. More than half of those surveyed in a 2019 Australian study reported having anxiety, and one in five were classified as having moderate to severe depression.
Hence, it is not unexpected that more and more instructors are quitting their jobs. In the meantime, fewer students are enrolling in degrees in education.
Underfunding and burnout among teachers in Australia and around the world highlight the urgent need for legislative measures to enhance their working circumstances. But can anything else be done?
Our research shows one way teachers may be able to take more control over their well-being at work is by “job crafting.”
What is job crafting?
Job crafting is the process of modifying your work in an obvious way to make it more interesting and fulfilling. You can make modest or significant changes to this on your own initiative. Employees are encouraged to “craft” their careers to better reflect their values and self-perceptions.
Job crafting emerged in management research in 2001, and has since been studied in a range of occupations. There are at least three different ways employees can craft their work:
- Task crafting is about changing the number, scope, sequence, or types of tasks in a job
- Relational crafting is about making changes to how you relate to people at work
- Cognitive crafting refers to changing how you interpret or think about your work.
According to studies, job crafting is linked to employee performance, engagement, and well-being. Studies have also shown that when staff members are given training in job creation techniques, their performance and engagement at work improve.
Our research
In 2022, we conducted 46 in-depth interviews with teachers across all levels in Australia about how they used job crafting. Teachers told us they modified the activities they gave pupils and included other teachers in their classes as examples of job crafting.
One elementary school teacher described how he integrated his card-playing pastime with his math lessons.
“I bring a lot of those card games into class with the kids and we find the maths in the games … I think they can definitely sense my passion for the games and that makes them more excited. I’ve had quite a few parents say, ‘My child now loves maths because of the way you play the games,’ which is really nice.”
A different primary school teacher described how they emphasized their love of reading in their lessons and looked for novel ways to read with their kids by working with other instructors.
“Just because I love reading books, after lunch we might read a book, or go to another teacher’s class and read a book with their kids, and that teacher will come to mine. It means I get to meet new kids and they’ve got someone different in front of them, and my kids also have someone different in front of them.”
A secondary teacher gave us another example of how they work with colleagues during the day, to change classroom dynamics:
“I love saying to the other teachers, ‘Hey, do you want to drop into my class because I think you’ll like it’ or ‘This kid misses you, he hasn’t seen you in ages, do you want to come swing by?’ It’s so nice to have other adults in the room … And for teachers that you have really good relationships with, you can then model what a healthy relationship looks like to the kids.”
‘Helping human beings’
Other teachers spoke of how they used cognitive crafting by expanding their ideas of what they consider to be the role of a teacher. As one primary teacher noted:
“I see myself as helping human beings grow rather than teaching academic knowledge.”
A secondary teacher also talked of the importance of thinking beyond the daily “grind” of their job:
“I think teachers can, especially when they’ve been teaching for a while, kind of get into a bit of a grind. And it’s just they see teaching as delivering content. But I don’t see it that way. To me, teaching is all about building relationships with my students and using the content as a vehicle to build those relationships and to hopefully get them to where they need to be in later life.”
Cognitive strategies such as this are key to connecting the job to a larger purpose. This gives work more meaning, which is essential for employee well-being.
What helps job crafting?
Our interviewees also spoke of the things that helped and hindered their job crafting.
They claimed it was challenging to explore new strategies due to the excessive time constraints and administrative demands. They added that it was challenging to be creative because of the rigid structures, lack of autonomy, and lack of time in their institutions. One secondary teacher noted:
“If you’ve been teaching for a while, or even if you’re a grad teacher, you spend a lot of time, you know, just surviving. Then to have the energy to think about changing things, even if it is for the better, it’s difficult.”
Teachers said they needed time to reflect on their work. They also said they needed school leaders to support their ideas, so they felt safe and free to take risks, which research shows is important for job crafting.
One primary teacher noted how many teachers are fearful of being judged at work.
“We preach mistakes being okay and risk-taking with our kids, but we don’t really with our staff. We like our staff to be neat and ordered and to tick the right boxes …. So I think that whole idea of taking risks and challenging educational philosophies would allow people to be more curious in that space. “
Job crafting works, but we need to do more
Our research shows teachers are using job crafting to make their jobs more manageable, more enjoyable and more effective.
They also told us the overall school environment can either support these different approaches or make it too difficult to try.
While there is a lot of opportunity for job crafting to support teachers in demanding roles, it’s vital to remember that enhancing teacher wellbeing is a shared duty. Additionally, it is up to the government, schools, and the larger society to properly support the crucial work that teachers do.
