Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers is a guide to improving teachers’ wellbeing and practice through support of their emotional workload.

The book argues that teachers should be given a formal opportunity to debrief on challenging events, allowing them to reflect on and reframe these experiences in a way that informs future practice to prevent the emotional fatigue that can lead teachers to leave the field altogether. Each chapter opens with a teacher’s story, acknowledging the emotional layers present in the scenario and what learnings can be drawn from it. Each of these stories features tension between what is expected of teachers, and how they are limited to act, which is further fuelled by underlying assumptions.

This is valuable reading for teachers at all stages of their career, whether preparing for the complex work ahead or making sense of past and current experiences. This book offers a reflexive process that teachers and schools can implement to facilitate the useful exploration of their emotion. Such a process is vital for the overall wellbeing of any school.

Jean Hopman currently works in Initial Teacher Education at Victoria University and researches teacher emotional work, which was the topic of her doctorate. She has been a teacher in a diverse range of settings since 2000.