The Worries That Keep Teachers Up at Night, and How to Manage Them

Over the summer, I had a coffee date with one of my all-time favorite teacher friends, and the conversation inevitably came around to the start of the school year. “It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been teaching,” she confided. “Every year around this time, I get anxiety dreams about students standing on their desks being completely insane while I scream at the top of my lungs and nobody listens.”

“Has your dream ever come true?” I asked.

“Now and then, to a degree,” she admitted. “Enough that the dreams don’t go away. I’m not sure I’m ready to go back.”

Teachers have a lot to worry about, but as the saying goes, a worry is not a plan. Identifying some of the top difficulties we face is not difficult, but managing them is another story—we cannot control everything that happens throughout our workdays. We can, however, look directly at what is making us anxious and prepare for likely scenarios by developing a few responses before we need them. That preparation can make even unpredictable moments feel more manageable.

Student Behavior

In my 16th year of teaching, I had one of the most difficult classes of my career. It was humbling because I thought I had classroom management largely figured out, and I was very wrong. One student entered every day loudly asking whether I had candy. If I did not, he proceeded to do no work. Other students followed his lead, and I found myself constantly trying to refocus the room.

When a class goes off the rails, it can be difficult to remain calm, especially when the situation resembles our worst teaching nightmare. Yet even disruptive behavior is a form of communication. Students may be expressing, however unproductively, that something is not working for them. Instead of responding only to the visible behavior, we can gather information and look for the source of the behavior. Uncovering that requires a scientific approach and diagnosis, with questions like the following:

• What was I (the teacher) doing when the disruption began? What were students doing?
• Is there a pattern to how disruption begins each time, or does it start differently? Are there similarities between incidents, and if so, what are they?
• Is the disruption started by the same students, or is it more widespread?
• What is happening instructionally as misbehavior sets in? Are students engaged, or are they expressing boredom or confusion?

These questions help us replace panic with a problem-solving stance. For example, the question about instruction can reveal whether students need greater clarity about what they are supposed to know and be able to do, or a different way into the learning.

Many teachers also live in fear of students refusing point-blank to do any work. Coming to school with a plan for work refusal alleviates that anxiety. The most important consideration is not to get into any kind of power struggle with students, since that is always a losing proposition for the teacher. Instead, presenting the work at hand as a choice that is in the student’s power to make can be much more effective than getting upset. In my experience, this approach works far better than any kind of confrontation.

It also helps to calmly explain the logical consequences of not completing work without threats. If a student is sitting in front of a blank set of geometry problems, a teacher might say, “I know you might not feel like doing this right now, but it would really be beneficial to both of us if you could try a problem or two. That will help me understand what I can do to make this better for you, and your success is important to me.” This response does not guarantee immediate compliance. It does, however, help the teacher stay grounded, communicate care, and keep the interaction from becoming a battle.

Tons of Work, No Time

For several years, I taught courses in which I assigned a high volume of writing. When students completed timed writing in class, I felt grateful for the temporary quiet but also a sense of dread about the hours of grading ahead. We all know that time at school is not the whole job: Students generate work for teachers, and it’s not just the endless piles of grading. We also need to reflect on whether students are meeting learning goals, determine how to course-correct, plan upcoming instruction, make copies, respond to emails, and complete a steady stream of small but necessary tasks, most of which cannot be done during class time.

When work begins to pile up, the fear is not simply that there is too much to do—it’s the feeling that there will never be enough time to do it. One effective time management strategy is known as batching, or assigning tasks to a specific chunk of time instead of dealing with them as soon as they arise. For example, my inbox can get scary very quickly, and instead of responding to every ping, I set aside two times a day when things are a bit slower—early in the morning and later in the evening—to handle emails. This allocated time has a hard stop—if I can’t get to every message in 45 minutes, I’ll flag whatever is left and save it for the next block of email time. This method not only helps me stay organized but also prevents me from responding to anyone who emails during my protected personal time.

This approach can work for grading, paperwork, and other tasks. When something arrives outside a designated time block and seems urgent, pause before reacting. Is it truly urgent, or does it reflect someone else’s misplaced sense of urgency? Feeling stress when tasks land on our plates is normal, but we need to keep that feeling from determining what we do next because many of these tasks can wait.

Leadership Shifts

Before transitioning to district leadership, I worked in several schools and well remember the anxiety that came with getting a new principal or assistant principal. What would this leader be like? How much would my professional life change as a result? School administrators bring different backgrounds, priorities, and areas of expertise, and adjusting to a new person with significant influence over the direction of a school can feel intimidating.

Teachers leave the profession for many reasons, including shifts in school leadership. When we struggle to connect with new leaders who might be presenting barriers to our work, it helps to be proactive about the areas that might be causing frustration. One rookie assistant principal I worked with alienated a lot of teachers quickly by micromanaging them—for example, giving unsolicited advice about classroom decor and insisting on seeing daily lesson plans for every teacher regardless of experience or skill level. At the time, I thought there was nothing to be done with someone who seemed so unreasonable, but eventually I realized that it would have been more productive to reach out to them and build a connection with moves like the following:

• Offer to help plan in-house professional learning that is relevant and applicable to teaching practice.
• If a request from a leader is unclear, ask to meet and discuss the request, and keep the focus on solutions.
• Be honest (and polite) about what you need to do your job successfully.
• Check in with your leaders to make sure they’re doing OK and to ask about their lives—the job is hard, and everyone is human.

We may not know exactly how a leadership transition will unfold, but building a relationship early can reduce the sense of being out of the loop.

Communication Challenges

At the first school where I worked, parents were extremely involved in their children’s lives. At first, I saw their constant presence as a downside of the job, particularly after an unforgettable conference in which a parent directed what was likely misplaced anger at me. After a few months, I began reaching out proactively with good news. I sent a quarterly parent newsletter and made calls to families whose children had done something worth noting. Over time, these steps changed the dynamic.

While caregivers and teachers both want what is best for students, wires can get crossed and make it feel as though they are at odds. To build relationships that move us from a place of fear to one of collaboration, opening lines of communication is tremendously effective, and it makes our classrooms visible to families who want to know how their children are doing. For example, beyond sending out grades or progress reports, we can share information through Canvas, Blackboard, or Schoology about the weekly calendar and what students are learning, complete with links to instructional resources. This practice has the added benefit of answering a question that many caregivers have: What can I do at home to help my student? By increasing the transparency of our classrooms, we also reduce our own anxiety about parent communications.

Teachers have plenty to fear, and pretending otherwise does not change that. However, when we look directly at what is making us anxious—whether it’s a difficult class, a new leader, an overwhelming workload, or a challenging caregiver interaction—we can begin to replace dread with a plan. We may not be able to control every outcome, but we can prepare, ask for support, and remind ourselves that the things we fear most often become more manageable once we face them.