The Effects of Mindfulness Programming on Teacher Burnout, Perceptions of School Climate, and Organizational Commitment

Teacher burnout and teacher perceptions of school climate are both significant factors that create and maintain one of education’s biggest problems: teacher turnover (Bartlett, 2004; Belcastro & Gold, 1983; Dunham, 2002; Grayson & Alvarez, 2008; Ingersoll, 2001; Moore, 2012). According to researchers Grayson and Alvarez (2008), school climate, turnover, and burnout are joint factors that are closely correlated and can influence one another multi-directionally. Examining intervention literature from a reciprocal determinism (Bandura, 2001) framework provides a lens for understanding how applying a treatment to one factor, can influence all factors. Researchers have found that implementing mindfulness practices, specifically Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), can influence both teacher burnout and climate (Flook et al., 2013; Frank et al., 2013; Gold et al., 2010; Kielty et al., 2017). I conducted a mixed methods study with a pretest posttest design to explore how MBSR practices could decrease self-reported burnout, in turn increasing positive perceptions of school climate, and ultimately increasing teacher organizational commitment. The 23 participants in the study completed surveys and 7 completed semi-structured interviews prior to and after an 8-week modified MBSR workshop series. The Maslach Burnout Inventory for Educators (MBI-E), Teacher Climate Measure (TCM), Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), Organizational Commitment Measure (OCM), and semi-structured interview protocol were utilized to measure change in teacher perceptions. Statistically significant differences were found in overall self-reported burnout and some dimensions of school climate, mindfulness, and organizational commitment. Qualitative data also revealed significant changes in burnout theme frequency