Mindful Self-Compassion as an Antidote to Burnout for Mental Health Practitioners.

The objective of this correlational study was to explore the relationship between levels of self-compassion and burnout for currently practicing mental health practitioners (MHPs) in the United States. All professionals are vulnerable to burnout based on various types of organizational stressors, but burnout is of particular concern for health care service providers who may need to adopt a stance of detachment, or emotional distance, as relief from intense workloads, with clients. The data were collected through an online survey. Regression analysis found that scores from Neff's Self-Compassion Scale were a significant negative predictor of levels of MHP burnout, as assessed by Schaufeli et al.'s Burnout Assessment Tool, p < 0.001. The implication of this finding is that cultivating self-compassion appears to be a pragmatic self-care strategy for MHPs to mitigate the negative effects of burnout. More educational and occupational training in self-compassion practices as self-care should be provided to help protect the physical and emotional well-being of MHPs. The deleterious systemic effects of burnout make MHP self-care an ethical issue, along with the need to identify protective factors, prevention, and treatment of burnout.

Does displaying the class results affect student discussion during peer instruction?

The use of personal response systems, or clickers, is increasingly common in college classrooms. Although clickers can increase student engagement and discussion, their benefits also can be overstated. A common practice is to ask the class a question, display the responses, allow the students to discuss the question, and then collect the responses a second time. In an introductory biology course, we asked whether showing students the class responses to a question biased their second response. Some sections of the course displayed a bar graph of the student responses and others served as a control group in which discussion occurred without seeing the most common answer chosen by the class. If students saw the bar graph, they were 30% more likely to switch from a less common to the most common response. This trend was more pronounced in true/false questions (38%) than multiple-choice questions (28%). These results suggest that observing the most common response can bias a student's second vote on a question and may be misinterpreted as an increase in performance due to student discussion alone.