The Top Ten Stressors for Teachers (2024)

As a teacher with four years of experience, stress is a daily reality to my mental health.

When you think of the stressors teachers face, you probably picture a hectic scene inside a disruptive classroom. But, maintaining classroom discipline is only one of the factors that cause teachers stress, and it is not even the most common stressor. In my fifth year teaching, classroom management is only the tip of the iceberg of teacher stressors.

The sources of stress for teachers fall into three main categories and are felt to varying degrees by teachers around the world. There are stressors related to workload, student behavior, responsiveness to stakeholders such as parents, administrators, and oversight authorities.

The OECD presented teachers’ sources of stress in the TALIS 2018 Results. The TALIS or Teaching and Learning International Survey is an international, large-scale survey of teachers that was conducted in 48 countries.

For this article, “stressed teachers” are teachers who report “quite a bit” or “a lot” of stress in their work. There was not a big difference between teacher stress levels across education levels. The stress levels for teachers were similar from elementary to high school.

All data is from the TALIS 2018 Results.

25% of stressed teachers reported increased stress related to extra duties due to absent teachers. When a teacher is absent, you might assume that it would not impact the other teachers at the school, you would be wrong. Sometimes a competent substitute is available, but often other teachers are forced to take on extra responsibility.

Some schools split the class of an absent teacher into other classrooms, increasing class size, and introducing a new group dynamic that can turn out to be disruptive. Stressors also include adapting or scraping the day’s lesson plan, worrying about when their colleague will return, and being overwhelmed by managing the extra students.