Chapter 1: I Don’t Really Have Time to Think, do i Feel Happy or Sad?: The Role of Self-Awareness as a Change Mechanism in Stress Management Interventions

Teaching has long been seen as a stressful profession (Bachirova, 2005; Fragoulis & Papadopoulou, 2010; Kyriacou, 2001; Murta, Sanderson, & Oldenburg, 2007). Teacher stress can be generated by personal factors, interpersonal relationships, and systemic factors (Clausen & Petruka, 2009), although sources of stress for individual teachers will vary as can the sources of stress in teachers between different educational systems (Kyriacou, 2001). Identified sources of teacher stress include lack of pupil motivation, maintenance of discipline, workload, poor working conditions and time pressure, dealing with colleagues, self-esteem, role conflict and ambiguity, coping with change (Kyriacou, 2001), clashes between teachers’ values and the values of the education system in which they work (Bachkirova, 2005), perfectionism and mismatches between teachers’ needs and environmental constraints (Clausen & Petruka, 2009), and the pressure of standardized testing as a measure of teacher accountability (Lambert & McCarthy, 2006).