October may seem early for talk about teacher burnout. But as the excitement of the school year wears off, routines can start to feel like drudgery, and the workload piles up. It’s no wonder some teachers already feel the weight of the work.
An (unscientific) Education Week social media poll bore this out. It asked teachers: How do you avoid burnout? Respondents could choose from these options: “Avoid taking work home;” “Take a mental health day;” “Celebrate small victories;” or “Other.” Nearly 600 respondents voted (see chart below for a breakdown), and about 100 shared comments on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Many of the responses, like the one below, reflected a jaded perspective of the profession and its stress-inducing demands.
BOUNDARIES!!!! No working outside of contract time! (This is difficult to achieve your first few years, but attainable after that.) Learn to say NO! If your plate is full, do not take on any additional duties. The stipend is never that much anyway! Put your health and your family before work, ALWAYS!
Commiserating with colleagues, online or in person, can offer temporary stress relief—or at least the illusion of it. But lasting change requires that the conversation about burnout also include school administrators. So we asked what they thought. Here’s how they responded to the strategies teachers say they use to avoid burnout.
Should teachers avoid taking work home?
Grading papers, planning lessons, and communicating with parents all take time. Is it realistic to fit all of that into the school day? Some administrators don’t think so.
“Teachers can’t do their job between 7:30 a.m. and 3 p.m.; there are things they’re going to have to do outside of that window,” said Matt Haney, principal of Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Haney said he strives to build a workplace culture that respects teachers’ time and professionalism.
“Our administration tries to make it ‘uber’ clear that teachers’ time, when they’re not working with students or in a meeting that is about students or something related, is their time,” Haney said. “I don’t care if a teacher has to leave early to go watch their kid do a cross-country race.”
Still, he added, a strict cutoff for work hours would likely fall flat. “I’d love to just say, ‘Don’t do any work after X time.’ But I don’t think it would be that simple,” he said. “Educators really want to do a good job, and they put everything they have into it … so nitpicking exactly when they’re doing what work seems silly to me.”
Some administrators say the concept of leaving work at school is a misnomer.
“The technical aspects of the profession, such as planning, grading, etc., may be accomplished within the contract hours. However, teachers are constantly thinking about how they can better reach an individual student, reflecting on the day’s lessons, thinking about how to tweak them for the next day, etc.,” Chase Christensen, superintendent of schools and principal at Sheridan County School District #3 in Clearmont, Wyo., wrote in an email. “This is by its very nature an all-waking hours job, and part of why it is a stressful one.”
What about taking a mental health day?
The administrators Education Week interviewed generally agreed that teachers should be able to take a mental health day as needed. But some questioned its long-term effectiveness.
And yet, many districts are moving toward making it easier for teachers to take a mental health day by creating flexible leave policies that let teachers to take time off without disclosing personal details.
“Our district made the move to provide teachers with PTO days, rather than splitting them between personal and medical,” Christensen said. “Teachers should not be forced to be dishonest in any way if they are taking a day to refresh and prepare themselves to be the best they can be in the coming weeks for their students.”
But Haney said the intended goal of mental health days often goes unmet. Teachers can end up more stressed as they plan lessons for substitutes and worry about lost instructional time.
“What seems like what would be a simple thing to just step away for a bit and recuperate—that’s not really how it works,” Haney said.
Ideally, said Erik Lathen, principal of Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, Ore., schools should support teachers before they reach the point of burnout—so that taking a mental health day feels restorative, not desperate.
What about celebrating small victories?
One effective way to support teachers, administrators agreed, is to publicly recognize small successes throughout a school, whether attributed to students or staff.
Too often, said Lathen, administrators assess schools in terms of gaps and deficits (think test scores and absenteeism). “In my job, I’m constantly looking for the things that are positive that are happening in my school; in particular, interactions between me and students that are positive,” he said.
Lathen describes what he calls a “positive note system” that allows administrators or staff members to seek out and express gratitude for positive goings-on at school. Lathen and his administrative team have formalized the process through a system that records the “positive notes” in a Google Doc and then automatically generates emails to relevant adults to acknowledge successes big and small: teachers, parents, etc.
The forms are used mainly to recognize students, whether for scoring well on a test, supporting a classmate, or performing well in an extracurricular activity. “We’re a school of 300 and, to date this school year, we’ve already sent 1,600 notes out to our students,” he said.
Lathen believes the effort helps shift teachers’ mindsets “to look for the positives, and celebrate the small victories that happen daily in your classroom, which I think is a proactive way to support teachers and their mental health and their emotional well-being.”
At key times in the school year, Lathen also publicly expresses gratitude to teachers in front of students, then invites students to do the same. “All of a sudden, as it gets going, the students are in front of their teacher and their peers telling their teacher why they are grateful for them,” he said.
Now in his second year as principal, Lathen said the school saw its lowest teacher turnover in years—just one teacher didn’t return.
Lathen can’t say for sure that the positive culture he’s working to instill is responsible for the low turnover. But he, like other administrators, believes it’s essential to teacher morale.
“It is important that leaders are publicly praising their teachers and the profession in general,” said Christensen of Sheridan County School District #3. “Loudly.”
