“Historically, teachers’ rates of ‘job strain,’ stress from high demand/low control work, are higher than the average rate of all workers, writes Alexandra Robbins in Education Next. Alexandra Robbins is the New York Times bestselling author of The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.
“A joint American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association survey revealed that almost two-thirds of educators find work “always” or “often” stressful.
“The media often use the phrase “teacher burnout” to describe educators’ stress, exhaustion and overwork. But after interviewing hundreds of teachers nationwide for my book, I believe ‘teacher burnout’ is a myth—and the term should be ditched.
“Experts have identified several causes of teacher burnout, including inadequate workplace support and resources; unmanageable workload; high-stakes testing; time pressure; unsupported, disruptive students; and a wide variety of student needs without the resources to meet them.
“Coverage of teacher stress and burnout often emphasizes the negative effects of teachers’ stress on students. Pennsylvania State University researchers described a ‘burnout cascade’ with ‘devastating effects on classroom relationships, management, and climate,’ in which burned-out teachers become emotionally exhausted, can’t manage ‘troublesome student behaviors,’ and quit.
“Or, researchers claimed, surprisingly specifically, that teachers cope ‘by maintaining a rigid classroom climate enforced by hostile and sometimes harsh measures [while] bitterly working at a suboptimal level of performance until retirement.’ Authors of a 2020 study concluded that, ‘as hypothesized,’ students viewed teachers reporting higher levels of burnout as ‘significantly less socially and emotionally competent.’
“As I read those examples of teacher burnout literature, I was dogged by an unsettled feeling: While researchers mostly seemed sympathetic to teachers, their conclusions sometimes portrayed educators in a way I found disconcerting. Then I read two relatively splashy studies that crystallized what bothered me. A Belgian study warned of ‘burnout contagion,’ in which teachers can ‘catch’ burnout from colleagues. The researchers concluded that because teachers in close coworker relationships exhibited similar levels of burnout, their study ‘indeed demonstrated that burnout is—to some extent—contagious.’
“Rather than address the root causes stressing out teachers in the first place—insufficient classroom resources, support staff and administrative support; lack of input into decisions; unpaid overtime; high-stakes testing; and lack of disciplinary and other policy enforcement, all of which make a teacher’s job harder and a student’s experience worse—the literature scapegoated educators who are put in the impossible position of being ordered to meet shifting and expanding expectations by districts that don’t give them the tools necessary to do so. Burned-out teachers aren’t ‘significantly less socially and emotionally competent.’ They’re handicapped by lousy school systems, ignorant officials, or out-of-touch administrators.
“The premise of teacher burnout is a convenient fiction that blames teachers for not being able to cope rather than faulting school systems that set both teachers and students up to fail. This line of thinking isn’t meant to diminish educators’ thoroughly justified feelings of helplessness, stress, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and exhaustion. But let’s shift blame to where blame is due. Instead of presenting the problem as teachers having high or even the highest burnout levels of all U.S. industries, as a 2022 Gallup poll found, we should reframe the issue: School systems are the employers worst at providing necessary supports and resources for employees.
“Telling teachers to relax doesn’t cut it. A meta-analysis of 20 years of studies of the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing teacher burnout, including strategies such as therapy, mindfulness and relaxation, concluded that ‘intervention effectiveness is generally small.’
Instead of asking teachers to do the impossible and calling them ‘burned out’ when they can’t, school leaders should fix the underlying causes—school climate, staffing numbers, and resources—not just to prevent employee demoralization, but because that’s how a proper workplace should operate.
Education Week
