Teaching Profession

Understanding Teacher Burnout

By Anthony Rebora — May 23, 2012 1 min read
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Are you heading toward teacher burnout? Over on Edutopia, Rutgers University professor Maurice Elias highlights recent research on contributing factors and warning signs. He also suggests that resolving burnout generally isn’t just a matter of taking a couple of days off to refresh or somehow bucking up and putting a smile on your face. You may need to confront deeper issues related to school culture:

Teacher burnout is most often an organizational problem and it is insidious because it can remove dedicated teachers from the field of education, sometimes even before they physically leave their jobs. Its solution is found most often in creating a positive, supportive school culture and climate, where teachers are treated as professionals and given the opportunity to collaborate, problem solve, and get needed, reasonable supports in timely ways.

I suspect most teachers instinctively know that already—but now you have some scholarly backing.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.