More than four out of ten teachers report sleeping six hours or less per night, according to researchers at Ball State University. Nearly half admit to missing work or making mistakes due to “serious lack of sleep,” according to the report in Teacher Magazine.
While the study doesn’t correlate teachers’ reported sleep problems with instructional quality or student performance, the researchers speculated that the potential effects on schools could be significant, based on what is known about job performance and lack of sleep. ‘Sleepy teachers are at higher risk of providing insufficient supervision and inferior classroom instruction,’ notes Denise Amschler, a professor of physiology and health sciences and co-author of the study.
It’s not discussed in the report, but I’ve often wondered if sleep deprivation is a factor in poor teacher retention rates, particularly in low-achieving schools. The relentless push for high achievement often feels physically unsustainable. It is very easy to find yourself going weeks on very few hours of sleep per night.
I never felt tired while teaching — it would hit me once I stopped and took a break
What I hate are those nights that you do sleep…but you spend the entire time dreaming that you’re teaching (and, of course, nothing is going right). I wake up feeling like I’ve done a double shift before the day has even started.
I would have to agree that many small school teachers, such as myself, lose much sleep over the months of teaching. I was very energized during the summer to where I was able to concentrate on my development classes and conferences. I feel that I have retained more information and have the ability to synthesis everything I had learned for that summer. Once school has started, I started to lose more and more sleep. I will be greatful to even have 6 hours of sleep a night. Last year I had taught three grade levels of Mathematics ( 2 classes each), then I have three periods of tutoring. Two of them were manditory. There are only 8 periods to a school day which tutoring became the 9th period. I did not have the time to be able to plan efficently, therefore I did not feel that I was effective. This year, I have more off periods. I actually have three, and I have only two levels of mathematics to teach. I know that I do not have the same amount of students a regular public school has, but every student is on different levels, so therefore I have so many lesson plans. Our school is small, therefore one – on -one is excepted of us more then a public school. I believe that if teachers had the ability to have less duties to allow them to have more sleep, I feel the school system will be able to make more improvements.
Here’s a portion of a press release, “Nearly a fourth of teachers say their teaching skills are significantly diminished and half admit to missing work or making errors due to a serious lack of sleep, according to a survey of 109 teachers, administrators and support staff.”
I didn’t see any data about a control population which should tell us whether teachers are getting more or less sleep than other professionals. With over 3,000,000 teachers in the U.S., is 109 a reasonable sample? Just asking? And note that not all of the respondents are teachers.
Lack of sleep is chronic for teachers and it might affect performance and retention rates? How much money did they spend to figure that one out?