Teacher burnout continues to escalate, and the end of the school year offered an occasion for discussions of burnout factors.
As the school year came to a close, educators exchanged ideas about the factors in their profession that drive burnout conditions. They also identified challenges in education related to the gap between the classroom and the decision-makers.
Sample Educator Conversations:
- Teachers identify elements of their profession that drive burnout and prompt them to leave schools, including lack of deep respect, lack of flexibility and control over their own time, decreasing creative freedom, insufficient support for dysregulated students, pressures of standardized testing, changing programming, and curriculum requirements that don’t support the most vulnerable students.
- One illustrative quote: “There is no room for joy or excitement in teaching content anymore, for me OR for the kids. It’s constant assessment and data-collection, no time to build relationships or give kids time to let the learning sink in. It’s just drill, drill, drill.”
- School leaders examined what they consider the biggest challenges in the profession. They express that school-level administrators often don’t have the power to alleviate major stressors from teachers’ days, such as those imposed at a policy level, and that the experiences and needs of teachers and students are too far removed from the experiences of those making decisions around curriculum and testing.