In this video, Sydney Jensen, a high school teacher from Nebraska, USA, discusses the importance of supporting teachers’ emotional wellbeing.
“As teachers, we work every day to provide support socially, emotionally and academically to our students who come to us with diverse and tough circumstances,” she says.
While some of her students end their school day sitting around the dinner table with their family, others are living in homeless shelters.
In this talk, she discusses how the emotional trauma of students can have an emotional impact on teachers too.
She explains the concept of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, where “we absorb the traumas our students share with us each day.”