Teacher Burnout. Feels like a ‘me’ problem. Actually more of an ‘us’ problem.
March 12, 2022
But we still have to deal with it on our own.
Teacher Burn out?
There is a cultural belief that teachers naturally become burned out with time, cynically repeating the same lessons for days on end, crossing off the years until retirement.
Teaching is so much work for so little recognition. . . maybe it’s time to stop pushing so hard. Maybe education is dead. Maybe civilization is coming apart at the seams, starting right outside the classroom doorway. Maybe.
If walking away sounds particularly appealing … it could be burnout.
The World Health Organization lists burnout as a condition
The World Health Organization lists cynicism toward one’s job as one of the three dimensions of the occupational phenomenon known clinically as burnout. This dimension also includes a sense of distance from one job and / or feelings of negativity.
1. Burnout: increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.
ICD, version 11, 02/2022
The problem with our popular conception of burnout is that we think of it as a ‘me’ problem, but really it’s an ‘us’ problem. Sure, the experience is all our own, but the condition – burnout – forms as a reaction to our work environment.
There are two other dimensions in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (the organization points out that burnout is a syndrome – an occupational phenomenon – but not a medical condition). The other two dimensions are familiar to all teachers (or anyone who lives with them!):
2. Exhaustion, or a sense of depleted energy.
3. Reduced professional efficacy.
Exhausted? Or Tired?
The exhaustion index is tough to measure. For a whole pandemic year, school blended into a room at home and I never felt like I got any distance between work and home. But we all got better at figuring out some structure. This year is much, much better. Some days this year, I’ve been exhausted. Lesson-planning and grading feel unmanageable when I’m tired. Still, it’s fatigue from (over) work, not the existential exhaustion that makes me pull up websites for career changers.
Quick check. Let’s imagine that you have a lovely weekend. Maybe you sleep late one morning, or take an afternoon nap. When Monday rolls around, is your energy back? Or does the start of classes bring with it a sense of existential exhaustion? If taking a break doesn’t do the trick, then there’s no simple fix. We can’t solve existential exhaustion with a relaxing weekend.
Effective at what, exactly?
That third item in the definition of burnout, “professional efficacy,’ speaks to the insidious feeling that nothing we are doing is making a difference no matter how hard we try. But maybe we need to change the yardsticks we use to measure efficacy. I’ve always thought that teachers are about 65% content specialists and 35% life coaches for students. Maybe those percentages got swapped around last year and maybe they keep moving around, but we can’t measure teacher efficacy by content alone.
Efficacy and classroom culture
Teachers don’t invent the knowledge they teach; they shape the environment that kids use to learn. Efficacy is more than the latest state scores. Teaching is about a thousand other things and our sense of professional efficacy has to capture all of them. Do your kids show up despite spending a year or two in which the building wasn’t even open? Are your students re-learning how to work with each other, share space, and all the little things that make communities hum? This, too, is “efficacy. “ In this sense, the teachers I work with have been amazingly effective. Whew. We’re getting some content work done in class, but we’re also working together on creating good school culture. Every day.
Burnout is measurable
The Maslach Burnout Inventory for Educators (MBI-ES) asks you to rate yourself on a 0-6 scale across a variety of questions. The questions overlap a bit but the idea is to get a good sense of where the teacher is across those three dimensions I mentioned earlier: Emotional Exhaustion; Depersonalization, and Personal Accomplishment. Other instruments, such as the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS), try to pinpoint the extent and likely cause of burnout.
Instruments such as these can quantify burnout, but there isn’t a parallel instrument that delivers the cure. As it says in the title, burnout feels like a ‘me’ problem, but it’s really an ‘us’ problem. Are we valued at work? Do the positive voices drown out the negatives? Are we in a district that works hard to preserve collaborative time, values innovation, and helps insulate us from the world so that we can focus on our students? Or are we in a district that drowns us in meetings, senseless PD, and endless suggestions for more work and more time? These things aren’t in our control; they are environmental factors that mediate our sense of self at school. And beyond.
There’s no easy solution, but …
There’s no easy solution to burnout, but some of the questions on the Maslach survey offer hints about how we might try to inoculate ourselves against burnout. The questions in the survey instrument circle around a few ideas that really feel meaningful:
- Do you have a relaxed atmosphere with your students;
- Do you think the the work you do is worthwhile; and
- Are you working too hard.
These things have nothing to do with the content we teach and everything to do with the culture we create. I think these three ideas hold the key to keeping burnout at bay.
Teaching is personal
I remind myself about those three positives ideas all the time. Is class relaxed enough that we can chat now and then as we work? Are the kids better off at lunch because we spent an hour together this morning? And am I still doing things I enjoy outside of school? Asking the questions lets me evaluate how I’m doing and keep me thinking positively about this career I almost always love. I recommend them to you as well (or at least your own personal variations).
Some of the other questions on the survey instrument have a more negative feel. How often do you feel used up, emotionally drained, stressed out, and insensitive. These aren’t as fun to think about, but we have to ask ourselves these questions as well. Think of them as trip-wires – ways to check in with yourself and make sure that we stay out of the World Health Organization’s definitional sight lines. We may never take Maslov’s survey, but a good self-check can help us decide what’s next. Is it burnout? Or will tomorrow be better? The care we take today helps make sure more of the tomorrows go our way. And if it’s burnout, so be it. That’s worth planning around too.
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