With their curated, glossy images, social media can ramp up anxiety and insecurity for students. It turns out that teachers, too, can feel pressured by the inevitable comparison game.
In the last two years, nearly a third of teachers say they have felt pressured to portray a certain image on social media when it comes to their teaching approaches, popularity with students, classroom decorations, or how they dress, according to a nationally representative online survey conducted this fall by the EdWeek Research Center.
The EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,135 educators, including school and district leaders, and separately analyzed results for a weighted, nationally representative sample of 731 teachers.
(A separate, non-scientific LinkedIn poll last week by Education Week found even more social media anxiety, with two-thirds of participants who saying they felt pressure.)
Elementary and middle school teachers were more than three times as likely as high school teachers to feel “some” or “a lot” of social media pressure about some aspect of their teaching. Similarly, teachers in urban settings reported more social media pressure than those in suburban or rural districts, the survey said.
The most commonly used platforms by teachers were YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest—all three image-laden platforms.
“As a new teacher, I think for a lot of things that you do on a daily or weekly basis with your students and your coworkers, you feel like you don’t have a lot of control over,” said Megan Ryan, a mentor teacher and coach in the Louisa County public schools in central Virginia. “You’ve been thrust into this new position, trying to manage this classroom of 1st graders and their parents and your administration, and it’s so much. And the one thing that you can have control over is how cute your classroom is.”
Shopping sites like TeachersPayTeachers might contribute to the pressure, as teachers can peruse (and purchase) decorations and lessons created their peers.
And teacher content creators routinely post images and videos of elaborate classroom setups on Instagram and TikTok— “but the teachers don’t realize a first or second-year teacher certainly doesn’t have the extra money to finance all these things,” Ryan said.
In the survey, a majority of Gen X and younger teachers said they also felt anxiety about how their students’ parents and administrators would react to their social media posts. (Less than a third of older teachers felt the same.)
Some teachers surveyed mentioned being held to a double standard—both encouraged to use social media by peers and administrators and scrutinized for anything they posted, whether professional or personal.
One Wisconsin high school civics teacher recalled being reprimanded by an administrator for posting on a personal account about feeling sad and melancholy during the pandemic.
“I was told that was inappropriate and that it implied teacher lives are more important than the lives of others, and that I needed to stop sharing such viewpoints,” the teacher told the EdWeek Research Center. “I have learned not to say almost anything on social media pertaining to my job, whether I like it or otherwise, because they have made comments to me about it in meetings.”
Ryan agreed that she sees a generation gap in teachers’ social media anxiety. Elementary grades can be particularly difficult, she said, both because many online images and videos of classrooms focus on lower grades, and because parents tend to be in schools and in touch with teachers more in elementary school. “If you have the combination of younger teachers and younger parents in their 20s or 30s, ... they all feel that pressure.”
Social media helps some teachers connect to the peers. Others find it stressful
Megan Forbes, a middle school history and English teacher in Southern California, has posted about her own instruction for more than a decade via blogs, YouTube, and Instagram under the handle “Too Cool for Middle School.” She sees social media not as a stressor but an avenue for teachers to collaborate on issues they might not get the opportunity to discuss at school.
For example, Forbes’ YouTube channel—dedicated to “Teaching. Style. Encouragement”—runs the gamut from book “unboxing” videos to lesson plans on the Stone Age to substitute planning for her maternity leave.
“Teaching can be a very isolating profession. Most of the time, you are in your own classroom, doing your lessons, and you don’t get a chance to see what other teachers are doing,” Forbes said. “I find teacher social media so helpful and inspiring because I get ideas from other teachers all over the country, and even in other parts of the world.
“I am often challenged by teachers who have a different perspective on topics like grading, ed-tech tools, equity, and anti-bias education,” she continued.
As a young elementary physical education teacher in Bend, Ore., in 2012, Adam Howell similarly considered being active on X (then called Twitter) and other platforms a key part of being a modern educator. But as his @TheDumbJockMyth account gained followers, stress overtook any professional learning.
“I always felt an immense amount of pressure to create and share new things, to continue to innovate to push the profession forward, and to give back to the greater P.E. and health community,” he wrote in a 2019 blog post. “These are values that I still hold, but the magnification that social media (and Twitter specifically) provided, I found it difficult to maintain any motivation and found my creativity stifled.”
Howell formally decided to “unplug” from social media and delete his X account in 2019. “For me, social media as a professional no longer made me a happy person,” he noted. “Being connected on social media does not make you a better professional. What you do every single day when you are working with students and colleagues is what makes you a better professional.”
Unplugging and observing other teachers in person—instead of through the screen—can ease teachers’ anxiety, Ryan said. She often asks mentee teachers who feel pressured by social media expectations to reflect on what they admire in the most effective teachers in their building or department.
“When you ask [mentee teachers] things that way, none of them say, ‘Oh, because she has great decorations in her classroom,’” Ryan said. “It’s hard to step back from what you’re seeing on social media and realize that that’s just such a small part of being an effective teacher.”
