A Case Study Exploration into the Benefits of Teaching Self-Care to School Psychology Graduate Students
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A Case Study Exploration into the Benefits of Teaching Self-Care to School Psychology Graduate Students Bradford D. Daly 1
&
Rachel A. Gardner 1
Accepted: 12 October 2020 # California Association of School Psychologists 2020
Abstract It has long been established that school psychology practitioners experience high levels of burnout. As a means of preventing burnout among future practitioners, school psychology training programs are frequently encouraged to teach and model self-care to students. This is particularly important as the current generation of graduate students experience high levels of anxiety and depression, but there have been very few examples in the research literature of how training programs should teach self-care and whether it is actually effective. The current study presents results from an exploratory case study, which integrated self-care instruction into graduate school psychology curriculum with a small sample (N = 22) of first-year school psychology students across two separate cohorts. Students created written plans with self-care strategies that they attempted to implement over the course of their first semester in graduate school. A qualitative review of their plans and written reflections revealed that students described many sources of stress upon entry into training, and most needed to revise their strategies for coping as stresses changed during the semester. Overall, student reflections revealed that the self-care activities were helpful to meet the demands of their graduate education. Keywords School psychology . Graduate training . Self-care . Graduate student mental health
With the field of school psychology facing shortages in the near- and long-term future, the profession can ill afford to lose practitioners or prospective practitioners due to attrition. An estimated 5% of school psychologists leaves the field each year for reasons other than retirement (Castillo et al. 2014), a number that in most regions of the USA exceed the projected number of new school psychology graduates entering the field each year. While the exact number and reasons that school psychologists leave the field are unclear, one potential reason that has been proposed is the high level of susceptibility of practitioners to burnout. Research of school psychology practitioners (e.g., Wilczenski 1997; Kaplan and Wishner 1999; Mills and Huebner 1998; Huebner and Mills 1994; Worrell et al. 2006) has consistently found that while school psychologists have high levels of job satisfaction, they nevertheless also experience high levels of emotional exhaustion, feelings of depersonalization, and reduced sense of personal
* Bradford D. Daly [email protected] 1
Division of Counseling and School Psychology, Alfred University, 1 Saxon Drive, Alfred, NY 14802, USA
achievement, which unmitigated may result in burnout. Newman (2020) proposed that unaddressed burnout can lead to problems with professional competence and engagement in ethically questionable practices. Application of self-care strategies has frequently
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