Teachers that work too hard are the ones that burn out

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I would like to share my thoughts about this statement “Teachers that work too hard are the ones that burn out”. First of all I’d like to say that I’m partly agree and disagree with this phrase. As I’ve learned from the lectures and from my own teaching experience – burning out is not only caused by hardworking, but also by:

the lack of willing (motivation) to teach (some teachers chose this job unconsciously or accidentally). For instance, I nearly lost my motivation to teach because I could see that some of my students weren’t interested in learning as they were from trouble families;

not being yourself (pretending someone else). The management of school where I used to work insisted on behaving strictly (shout at students, give bad marks), which I didn’t want because I’m always kind and soft with my students;

being a perfectionist (when a teacher tries to give more than he(she)can or to do more than he(she) can, for example to work all night long, checking tests);

dedicating all your life to profession, not being able to find a place for yourself and your family. For example when I worked at state school, I even couldn’t call in sick when I caught a cold, because I was thinking about my students firstly.

Of course working too hard in and of itself can cause a burn out, but only in case if you can’t find a right balance between work and leisure. And you, as a candle, can just go out one day. This is where I can agree with the statement above.

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I would like to share my thoughts about this statement “Teachers that work too hard are the ones that burn out”. First of all I’d like to say that I’m partly agree and disagree with this phrase. As I’ve learned from the lectures and from my own teaching experience – burning out is not only caused by hardworking, but also by:

the lack of willing (motivation) to teach (some teachers chose this job unconsciously or accidentally). For instance, I nearly lost my motivation to teach because I could see that some of my students weren’t interested in learning as they were from trouble families;

not being yourself (pretending someone else). The management of school where I used to work insisted on behaving strictly (shout at students, give bad marks), which I didn’t want because I’m always kind and soft with my students;

being a perfectionist (when a teacher tries to give more than he(she)can or to do more than he(she) can, for example to work all night long, checking tests);

dedicating all your life to profession, not being able to find a place for yourself and your family. For example when I worked at state school, I even couldn’t call in sick when I caught a cold, because I was thinking about my students firstly.

Of course working too hard in and of itself can cause a burn out, but only in case if you can’t find a right balance between work and leisure. And you, as a candle, can just go out one day. This is where I can agree with the statement above.

Burned out: why are so many teachers quitting or off sick with stress?

Huge workloads mean that, to keep up, teachers work an average of 60 hours a week during term time and through their holidays. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Huge workloads mean that, to keep up, teachers work an average of 60 hours a week during term time and through their holidays. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

It was a toxic routine: plan lessons until 1am, wake up at 5am in a sweat, vomit, go to work, teach. “I lost a stone and a half in two months,” Dan Lintell said. “I was having heart palpitations and panic attacks. My body was totally exhausted. I couldn’t go on.” He had barely completed his first half-term as a newly qualified teacher.

The start of the school year in September had been filled with optimism. After a successful 20-year career as a design engineer, Lintell decided he wanted to become a teacher. This made him what the government called a “high-calibre career changer”, who would revitalise schools and bring experience from the “real world” into the classroom – in his case, teaching physics at a comprehensive in Leicestershire.

“The idea was to spend time with my daughter, who was turning four,” he said. “The irony is that I barely got to see my family. I was doing my job, coming home, having dinner, then starting work at 8.30pm and working through until 1am, every night.”

Lintell was overwhelmed by two things: pouring his soul into “choreographing the classroom” five times a day; and seeing any hope of recovery disappear under a mountain of preparation for the next day’s performances.

“You’re meant to spend no more than an hour preparing for each lesson, but if you’re going to do a half-decent job, you need two hours. If you have 25 hours of lessons a week, that’s already 50 hours. And then you’ve got marking and other things on top.”

Welcome to England’s classrooms in 2018. Every teacher knows someone who has left the profession, retired early, had a breakdown, or been signed off work with stress. Just under 40,000 teachers quit the profession in 2016 – the latest figures available – representing about 9% of the workforce, according to government figures. And not enough of them are being replaced – there is now a shortfall of 30,000 classroom teachers, particularly at secondary level, where 20% of teacher training vacancies are unfilled.

A lack of teachers means classes are getting bigger. Bigger classes are harder to control. Losing control stops teachers teaching. With less teaching time, students make less progress. And that can be catastrophic for teachers.

“One bad year can be career-ending,” said Valentine Mulholland, head of policy at the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). “In no other profession would you have that. You can have one year of pupils which is very different from previous years, which they have no control over. If you live with that sword of Damocles over your head, it’s difficult not to cascade that fear to the rest of your school.”

Some schools have tried radical solutions to this crisis of being unable to find or keep staff. In Daventry, Northamptonshire, Ashby Fields primary floated the idea of closing early on Fridays, sending children home at 1.15pm, with the possibility of an after-school club for children of working parents. The problem, the headteacher said in a letter to parents, was recruitment, retention and workload, which had a “direct, major impact on, not only our children’s education, but on their well-being and confidence. The huge workload ensures teachers work an average of 60 hours a week during term time and through their holidays to keep up. Many teachers, despite their love of frontline teaching, cannot manage this workload and maintain a healthy work/life balance, and subsequently resign.”

Parents arriving at the school – which is part of a shopping precinct bolted on to a 1990s housing estate where there are no street corners, only gentle curves and cul-de-sacs – were unimpressed.

“It’s hard enough to find a job that finishes within normal school hours,” Emma Lennox said. “How would I find a job that finishes at 1pm? It’s £8 for an afternoon session and I’ve got three kids. That means all my wages would be paying for their care.”

She and friend Kim Burns agreed that teacher turnover was high. “We’ve had nine teachers in one year for my daughter’s class,” Burns said.

“We had eight,” Lennox nodded. “They need more time to plan, but don’t they have six weeks’ holiday?”

Victoria Hewett, head of department at a Tonbridge secondary school: pressures in an earlier teaching role led her to have a breakdown. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

But holidays, in teacher-speak, simply mean a break from the classroom. For Victoria Hewett, they meant time to catch up on work. As head of geography at a new academy in Kent, she was responsible for setting up the department and teaching about 240 children across the school.

“I could feel I was on the edge before Easter,” she said. A few days before the break, she broke down in class, but struggled back to finish the half-term. “I worked all Easter break to catch up. The minute I got into my classroom, I just walked out again. I couldn’t do it. The anxiety was crippling.”

Another teacher found her and asked if she was all right. “I just burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for two hours. I was sent home – I have no idea how I got there. My memory is just a blur. I went to bed and slept until Tuesday morning. I had barely had any sleep over the holidays.”

After taking advice from the Education Support Partnership (ESP), a charity that offers mental health support to anyone working in education in England and Wales, Hewett was signed off work for three weeks and prescribed antidepressants. ESP says that over the past 12 months it has seen the number of teachers calling its confidential helpline rise by 35%, to 8,668 cases.

“What we’re hearing is that people have lost a sense of agency,” said Julian Stanley, ESP’s chief executive. “There is constant change – new initiatives, new curriculum changes. A number of pressures tell us that it’s not a whinge; it’s a fact. Teachers feel they need to be trusted, and need support.”

Hewett felt in an impossible bind – she was expected to show constant improvements in her students’ assessments, but classroom time was frequently undermined by unruly behaviour. She felt there was no backup from her senior leadership team when she tried to deal with troublemakers. “You had these targets to meet, but you didn’t have the support to meet those targets.”

Research shows that people in a high-performance job can cope with stress if they have support and autonomy, a model known as “decision latitude”, said Dr Almuth McDowall, head of occupational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. “It’s well established that you can cope with a very stressful job if you’ve got control and support,” she said. “If you take support out, things become much more difficult. If there is a lack of control and autonomy for a long period while you have high job demands, things start to go very wrong.”

Dan Lintell, at his PGCE graduation last year. Teaching left him overwhelmed after a change of career from 20 successful years as a design engineer Photograph: Courtesy of Dan Lintell

So if more support is the solution, where will it come from? Since not enough teachers are being trained, schools are turning to supply staff: 71% of headteachers say they are spending more on temporary staff.

Becoming a supply teacher is seen by some as an attractive career option: they can avoid the paperwork and marking of a full-time post and simply do the job they love. But that could be harming children’s education, according to a study by Asma Benhenda of the Paris School of Economics. Her analysis of 100,000 teachers and 3 million students shows that “teacher absence has a statistically negative impact on student test scores”. The disruption to the flow of learning caused by using substitutes – however good they are – is equivalent to using teachers who are in the bottom 15% of the profession, Benhenda says.

Even if enough people were going into teacher training, heads believe they wouldn’t have the money to hire them anyway. Although schools have seen a rise in funding, the NAHT says they’ve been hit by various new costs, including an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions and new rules on pensions.

“That adds up to a real-terms cut of about 8%, even after the government found £1.3bn down the back of a settee last July,” Mulholland said. “We’ve still got an issue that is becoming chronic – 80% of our members say they have no idea how they’ll make their budgets balance in two years.”

One primary head, speaking anonymously, said they were at the stage where any more cuts would affect children’s learning. “Secondary schools are able to cut subjects and make those teachers redundant,” the head said. “We’re asking ourselves, is there a hidden talent of parents who can come in and do some things for free, so we can make people redundant and still get the work done? And can parents contribute more financially than we’ve realised and, if so, how much?”

Cake sales and other fundraisers now pay for vital equipment such as whiteboards – and some schools ask parents to set up direct debits. The Harris Westminster Sixth Form academy in central London is advertising for a “major gifts fundraiser” to work part time and “lead a programme to take on annual donations from £500,000 to £1m”.

For those without dedicated fundraisers, early closing on Fridays is a more attractive option. This is already in place at all four schools run by the South Essex Academy Trust in the Basildon area, as well as at Bordesley Green Primary in Birmingham, the City of London Academy, and King’s Hedges and Westwood primary schools in Cambridgeshire.

At Westwood, early closure is designed to help teaching assistants become teachers. Headteacher Gill Thomas says: “In these days of recruitment and retention being a real issue, I have teaching assistants with the capacity to get their degree. We felt that, as we are upskilling our teaching assistants, involving our TAs in planning, preparation and assessment would help that.”

Yet the funding shortfall means many schools are losing teaching assistants too, the NAHT says. Cuts to services such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, educational psychologists, and speech and language therapists mean that many children are not getting help, which leads to more behavioural problems.

“We can attribute the rise in exclusion to children not getting the right support early enough,” Mulholland said. Children excluded at age 12 are four times as likely to be jailed as adults, according to research by the University of Edinburgh.

Lintell still has an appetite for teaching, despite the scars. “I’ve gone back into design and it’s nice to feel truly competent again. But in time, if the environment were to change, perhaps I would go back into teaching.”

There are some signs that the environment may be changing. Damian Hinds, the education secretary, said last month that his priorities were to reduce teachers’ workload and the fear caused by the “spectre of our accountability system”.

Lintell will be watching closely. “My instinct is to fix things – I’m a design engineer,” he said. “I don’t know what the solution is. It’s not just money. But the constant increasing of class numbers because they can’t afford enough teachers and support staff is not helping. I have seen very caring, very capable teachers who, for self-preservation reasons, say, ‘I just can’t take any more of this’.”

Case Studies

The aim was to become an outstanding school.

I was doing 60- to 70-hour weeks. I would start work at 7.30am and wouldn’t stop until 6pm, then I would work for several hours in the evening, to about 9.30pm. At weekends, I would work all day Sunday, planning my lessons for the following week. I became really insular and lost a lot of friends because I didn’t have the time to spend with them. There were days when I left the morning briefing and burst into tears before I got to the classroom because we had been told there was even more work to do by the end of the day.

Extra work included things like observations. Because we were a new school I had about eight observations in a year, when someone from the school or the DfE would come into the classroom. But you don’t know which of the five lessons in the day they’ll observe, so that meant spending more time on lesson plans, data collection on student progress, extra copies of teaching resources. That would add about seven hours extra to my day. There were data drops for every year group where you give them a grade. They weren’t staggered so I had to do all of it in one week for 12 classes.

Now [after time off and a course of antidepressants] I am at a different school. Being relaxed helps because you become more approachable. Now, because I’m not stressing about behaviour, I find I can give feedback during lessons. I do a lot more group work, and the students make more progress.

Dan Lintell, who worked for three months as a newly qualified teacher at a secondary school in Leicestershire
I spent nearly 20 years as a design engineer and had got a little disillusioned with the commercial world. I had always wondered about teaching. I enjoy helping people understand complex things.

I did well in my PGCE and looked forward to becoming a science teacher. A school I had done a placement with couldn’t offer me a science position, but asked if I fancied teaching maths and science.

When I started in September, I hit the ground running but soon found I couldn’t keep up. I was up until 1am every night. By the end, I was having palpitations and panic attacks. I was totally exhausted: waking up at 5am and throwing up, every day. I lost a stone and a half in weight. I got to Christmas and knew I couldn’t go on.

You can have the lesson plans and get some resources from other people, but, ultimately, teaching a class is choreography, an art form. It’s knowing when to pick your battles and how to pick them. It’s happening every second: you’re reading situations and reading body language. You can only get that experience in the classroom.

What really makes it hard is the differentiation [giving each child individual attention according to their ability]. Doing that for every child for every lesson is unrealistic. I think my lack of experience showed – more experienced teachers might take the view that, if they manage differentiation for 80%, that’s OK. But attempting to do it for every child takes so much preparation time.

You’re meant to spend no more than an hour preparing for each lesson. But if you’re going to do a half-decent job, it’s two hours. If you’ve got 25 hours of lessons a week, that’s already 50 hours, and then you’ve got marking and other things on top. I was doing my job, coming home and starting after dinner at 8.30 and working through until 1am, every night.

The 7 Best Ways to Avoid Teacher Burnout in 2022

June 15th, 2022 | 6 min. read

Chris Zook is a contributing author to the AES blog. He enjoys everything about online marketing, data science, user experience, and corgis.

Teacher burnout is one of the biggest problems facing the American education system today.

In its worst-case scenario, burnout means you lose the will to teach. Students wear you down instead of energizing you. You slog through every weekend and dread the next school week.

When teachers get burnt out, everyone loses. The teacher, administrators, students, and even colleagues all feel the effects of one instructor losing the passion to teach.

So how do you keep your passion alive in an age of strict standards, individualized education, and other teaching challenges?

These seven methods are all proven to help prevent teacher burnout:

When you use them together, you can get through a school year (and even a single day) while staying happy.

1. Stay Healthy

Staying healthy is the single most important way to keep yourself happy and motivated throughout a school year.

Exercise is the best way to stay healthy. Set up a schedule for every day (or every other day) to work out. That could mean lifting weights, jogging, or even yoga. Regardless, you’re working out your body, which alleviates depression, anxiety, stress, and even Parkinson’s Disease.

Exercise also makes you feel ready for bed every evening. That’s important because sleep is the next way that you can stay healthy.

A good sleep schedule keeps your mind sharp. It also lets your body rejuvenate so you can meet the day with energy instead of fatigue. Aside from that, regular sleep schedules also help you deal with stress, anxiety, sadness, depression, heart issues, and way more.

Finally, you can keep yourself engaged in teaching by eating healthy. That means getting all the vitamins and minerals your body needs to stay in tip-top shape throughout your life.

Fresh fruit, complex carbohydrates, leafy greens, and hardy proteins form a healthy diet. When you stick to it, your body will show immediate improvement compared to snacks, soda, and other junk food.

By exercising, sleeping, and eating well, you’ll be physically and mentally prepared for the barrage of challenges throughout your school year. But staying healthy is just the beginning!

2. Indulge in Personal Time

It’s no secret that teachers have limited personal time. You work 10 hours per day in school, but you also have to plan lessons, grade tests, and remediate students, among everything else going on in your life.

But your personal time is just as important as your professional time — maybe even more important, depending on your priorities.

Hobbies are proven to make people happier, especially when you can actually enjoy them. That doesn’t mean you have to start buying model trains or Civil War history books. Hobbies can be as simple as bird watching. They can also be as complex as volunteering.

You can also just kick back, relax, and watch Netflix at the end of a long day. Regardless of what engages your mind during your free time, it should make you happy to indulge in those hobbies.

The point is that your free time matters. If you spend it working, you’re not actually away from work. Instead, you wind up working 12-18 hours every day with a brief break to sleep.

Teachers quickly burn out with that kind of schedule. But instead of overworking, you can find ways to enjoy your time away from work!

3. Talk to Your Colleagues

No one understands your frustrations and challenges better than your colleagues. Communicating with your peers is one of the best ways you can prevent burnout because they can offer you the best support.

After all, they perform a similar job in the same place. If anyone is going to understand your frustrations, it’ll be your colleagues.

On top of that, it’s important to establish relationships with your coworkers. Workplace friendships have a range of benefits in your life, including career satisfaction.

Besides, friends make their friends laugh. That means you can laugh off stress throughout your day instead of keeping it tensed up inside yourself.

You’ll probably help your fellow teachers feel more relaxed at the same time!

4. Recognize What You Do Well

As a teacher, it’s easy to get bogged down in what you do poorly. Whether parents are upset with a child’s grade or an administrator is giving you feedback, teaching often feels like the world is against you.

That’s why it’s so important to recognize what you do well throughout the year. Pride in what you do well can quickly make you happier when you see all of the great qualities you exhibit in the classroom.

Even if your best skills take place on off-hours — like grading or planning — you can see the positive results of that work every day. The key is to look for it.

Once you open yourself up to the positive results you produce, you can pride yourself on your abilities as an educator.

5. Prepare Ahead of Schedule

If you’re going to teach successfully, you have to have a solid plan going into each of your classes. Following a premade plan is much easier than playing a semester by ear.

If you’re not the planning type, it’s time to take a stab at laying out your lessons before the first day of class. You don’t have to outline an entire semester at a time, either. You can create and rework your class schedule at any point.

When you do, it’s important to give yourself enough time to get all your ducks in a row. You can do that before your weekend at any point. The most common time for teachers is on a Friday afternoon, usually right after school.

Teachers who wait until the last minute often plan lessons on Sunday night. That creates an effect called the “Sunday Blues” where teachers can’t enjoy their Sundays anymore. After all, now they’re workdays.

If you want to stay ahead of the Sunday Blues, you have to plan ahead.

6. Leave Schoolwork at School

When you want to keep yourself from burning out, the best idea is to create boundaries for yourself: keep work at work, keep home at home.

Segment the parts of your life that you think should be separate. This requires you to say no sometimes — to both personal and professional opportunities — but these boundaries will make you happier as a person.

You can start setting these boundaries for yourself by keeping your work at school. Draw a line in the sand. If you have to do some work after hours, do it at school. Keep home as the place where you can relax and enjoy time with loved ones.

This’ll also help you plan, indulge, and stay healthy too — all at the same time!

7. Make Yourself a Priority

Ultimately, to be a successful teacher and avoid burnout, you have to take care of yourself. When you’re happy and healthy, you’re a better teacher who can truly be there for your students.

If you’re enjoying your life, you’re more likely to enjoy your career. But when you burn out, even the smallest tasks become overwhelming chores. Keep yourself in good spirits by making your own wellbeing a priority.

This isn’t to say that you should be self-centered. Instead, you should make sure you’re living a healthy and balanced life where you can succeed at work and at home.

Rather than counting the days to retirement, you’ll find it easier to love every moment in the classroom.

Prevent Teacher Burnout with Digital Curriculum

Each of these strategies can be critical in preventing teacher burnout. But sometimes you need backup to keep yourself going.

That’s why Applied Educational Systems makes digital curriculum solutions with a learning management system.

We help health science, business education, career readiness, and computer teachers enjoy their lives by streamlining their responsibilities in one simple tool.

Want to learn more?

Click below to learn everything you need to know about digital curriculum!

Teacher Burnout: Warning Signs, Causes and Tips on How to Avoid

Written by Alicia Betz, reviewed by the EducationCorner.com Team

It feels so nice to go home at the end of an eight-hour work day, kick off your shoes, turn on your favorite TV show, and relax. Maybe you take your dog for a walk. Maybe you spend some quality time with your kids.

Or maybe, if you’re a teacher, you pull out your computer and huge folder of grading and get started on another couple hours of work. Or maybe you spend hours traveling to and from an away sporting event as a coach. Or maybe you go to bed at 8 so you can wake up at 5 so you can get to school early enough to set up your lab, before students start pouring in the door. No big deal; you’re getting paid for all the overtime you’re working, right? Not even close.

In all my time teaching, I have never met another teacher who could do their job strictly during work hours. It is almost impossible to be a teacher without taking work home, going to school early, and/or coming home late.

This is a problem. A problem that is causing half a million teachers to leave the profession every year.

When I was working toward my bachelor’s in education, I took all of my core teacher training courses with a group of about 30 other students. I vividly remember one day, we were sitting in class and our professor told us to take a good look around, that half of us wouldn’t be teachers in five years. We refused to believe it. Certainly not us. We were different. We would make it. We would make a difference. But when I looked back five years later, he was right. Almost exactly half of us weren’t teachers.

Here’s what some of my former classmates had to say about leaving the teaching profession (or never entering it in the first place)

“I loved teaching… after a few years of teaching, leading the middle school’s history department, coaching two sports, and leading two clubs, I was asked to take on more responsibility without an increase in pay. [The] rent in NYC is tough enough to pay, and my monthly student loan payments are just about equal. Ultimately, that’s why I switched into a better-paying position elsewhere. The work isn’t necessarily as fulfilling, but I also don’t have to spend my nights and weekends lesson planning or grading…”

“There were days that I loved teaching and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life, and then there were days that I hated teaching and I didn’t know how I was going to muster up the strength and energy to get up the next day and do it again. Unfortunately, the latter far outweighed the former. I just couldn’t rationalize putting so much time and effort into a thankless job, when I could make more money, be less stressed, work fewer hours, and spend more time with my family with a different career.”

“I eventually found other ways to incorporate my teaching skills at a university part-time while still writing full time. I get the satisfaction of teaching, but have more flexibility with my schedule and still get to chase both passions.”

These stories are sad. Every single one of these former teachers has a passion for kids and for helping people, but the demands of the profession drove them away. When my peers and I graduated with our education degrees, the field was saturated and it was hard to find a job. Today in many areas of the country, the opposite is true. Schools are struggling to fill positions, which only exacerbates the teacher burnout problem.

So what can be done? Why is teacher burnout such a big issue, not only in the United States but all over the world? Continue reading to learn causes, warning signs, and tips on how to avoid teacher burnout.

Causes of Teacher Burnout

First, it’s important to understand exactly what teacher burnout is. According to a recent study by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, teacher burnout is defined as “psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job.” Maslach and Leiter further explain that there are three main components that contribute to burnout: overwhelming (often emotional) exhaustion, feeling ineffective and lacking accomplishment, and feeling detached and cynical toward the job.

Another study for a Journal for Social and Behavioral Sciences found that causes of teacher burnout can be broken down into two categories: environmental and societal factors.

Environmental factors include:

Societal factors include:

In addition to these causes on the job, Dr. Jenny Grant Rankin identified lack of adequate teacher preparation as another cause of teacher burnout in “The Teacher Burnout Epidemic,” an article for Psychology Today. The first few years of teaching are extremely difficult as teachers adjust to the demands of the job and in many cases create units, lessons, and resources from scratch. When teachers enter the profession without proper preparation, these tasks become even more difficult and time-consuming.

Warning Signs of Teacher Burnout

With all of these causes, it’s no wonder teacher burnout is so prevalent. What are some of the warning signs that teachers might be starting to burn out?

You may notice some of the following signs in yourself or your colleagues:

*While burnout more commonly affects newer teachers who become overwhelmed and stressed with the demands of the job, veteran teachers can suffer from burnout when they get bored with the job. They find themselves teaching the same things and dealing with the same issues year after year after year and it wears them down.

How to Avoid Teacher Burnout

Clearly, teacher burnout is a multifaceted problem, and there is no one single solution. Following are some ways to attack the problem from multiple angles.

What Administrators and Other School Employees Can Do

Celebrate Teacher Accomplishments

A lot of focus is placed on the students, rightfully so, but teachers often feel slighted because they are the reason students have accomplished what they have. Even a simple gesture like a quick email to tell a teacher what a great job he did yesterday can go a long way in helping teachers feel appreciated.

Lighten the Load

So many teachers burn out because they’ve been spread so thin for so long, and they just can’t do it anymore. Administrators can work to decrease the amount of time teachers spend teaching, decrease the number of students teachers are responsible for, increase planning time, give teachers more breaks, and be flexible with schedules.

Plan Community Activities

Teacher burnout can be alleviated when teachers feel like they belong, but this is difficult for first or second year teachers to do. Even though teachers are with students every day, it can be a lonely profession. When teachers take the time to get together and vent, bond, and just talk, they often realize that they aren’t the only one struggling with a particular student or group of students. This alone can make the job much less isolating, and it can give newer teachers confidence when they realize that even tenured teachers struggle.

Community building activities can be just for faculty, but they can also be for the entire school. Shared experiences make people feel connected. Activities such as assemblies, pep rallies, spirit days, talent shows, etc. can help build morale and community that lifts up the overall climate of the school.

Create a Positive Environment

Administrators should work to make themselves approachable and available to teachers. According to a study titled “How School Climate Influences Teachers’ Emotional Exhaustion: The Mediating Role of Emotional Labor” from International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “First, principals should make an effort to foster a high quality working environment in which teachers will feel a strong sense of duty to devote themselves to their work.” Workplace climate is sometimes undervalued, but it is a huge aspect of helping teachers cope with the demands and stress of the job.

Improve Professional Development

Ideally, teacher preparation programs would get better, but if that is not the case, then administrators can do their best to plan meaningful and purposeful professional development opportunities. Every teacher has sat through meetings and training feeling extremely frustrated that their time could be better spent grading or planning in their classroom. Administrators can seek to provide truly meaningful professional development by doing research on options and getting teacher input.

What Teachers Can Do For Themselves

Take a Mental Health Day

I have long held the belief that mental health days are just as, if not more, important than true sick days. Sometimes you just need a break, and often when teachers take a mental health day, they come back better and more productive than they would have been otherwise. The important thing here is to take a true mental health day. Completely detach yourself—don’t worry about who your sub is or how many things you have to get done for work; let the day in your classroom unfold as it does and worry about it when you get back.

Almost every teacher I know takes a sick day occasionally to catch up on grading or planning. That alone should be enough to tell you that there is too much on teachers’ plates; they literally have to take a day off to do their job. Sometimes this can help with burnout too, but taking care of your mental health is essential.

Learn to Say No

You need to recognize (and so do your administrators) that you can’t do it all. The more you put on your plate, the more you are spreading yourself thin, and the less effectively you will do each job. When schools are low on personnel, teachers are usually great about picking up the slack, but at some point it just gets to be too much. If you already feel as though you have too much on your plate, be okay with saying no to taking on a new responsibility.

Leave School at School

This one is really hard to do for most teachers, but it can be extremely helpful with emotional exhaustion. If at all possible, aim to get all of your school work done at school, which may mean going in a little earlier and staying a little later. The benefit of this is that you can completely detach yourself once you are home. Many teachers also think and worry about their students when school isn’t in session, which is a natural consequence of how much teachers care. To the best of your ability, aim to leave your worries about your students at school, knowing that you’ve done the best you could to help them and you will do the same tomorrow.

Take Time for Yourself

Don’t lose yourself in a devotion to your career. Whatever this means for you, take time for yourself: exercising, going to the movies, spending time with your family, playing with your dog, doing yoga, hiking, reading, etc. It’s cliché but true: you can’t pour from an empty cup.

The Implications of Teacher Burnout

When a teacher experiences burnout, the effects directly impact students and the school as a whole. Burnout causes great teachers to leave the profession. When this happens, not only do students lose a great teacher, but the rest of the teachers in the district are often left to pick up the slack, as many schools are not replacing teachers due to budget cuts.

If a burned out teacher chooses to stay in the profession, they are still negatively impacting students because most likely, they are not doing their job to the best of their ability. They also tend to have a negative attitude, which is contagious.

The problem of teacher burnout likely won’t be fixed unless there is a culture change surrounding education. If, however, all school employees work together to take care of each other by following some of the above strategies, many teachers will find themselves much happier in their careers.