Teacher Exhaustion and Burnout

BY STEVE NUZUM

I left my career as a full-time teacher two years ago, after sixteen years in the classroom. 

Recently, I was invited by a former colleague to return for a day to score capstone presentations for a senior research class. We sat at a plastic folding table, watched students give 10-15 minute academic presentations on a variety of subjects, and asked the students pre-selected questions from a list. We took notes, gave feedback, and scored using printed rubrics. We did this from 9AM to 4 PM, with a 20-minute break for lunch.

On paper, this is a pretty standard work day and likely doesn’t sound very taxing to anyone who hasn’t been a teacher.

But when I got home that afternoon, I almost immediately collapsed into my bed and slept like a rock for two hours. This took me back to the days 16-17 years earlier when I was in my first years in the classroom. I would get home, launch myself into a couch or bed, and lose consciousness until it was dark outside. 

What is so exhausting about the profession?

Wang et al, in the literature review portion of a recent psychology paper, write:

“Teacher emotional exhaustion stands as a fundamental dimension of occupational burnout within the educational landscape, characterized by a profound depletion of emotional resources due to chronic stressors associated with the teaching profession (Chang, 2009; Maslach and Leiter, 2016; Klusmann et al., 2023). This state encompasses feelings of being emotionally drained, overextended, and lacking the energy necessary to meet the profession’s emotional demands..."

According to the same study, prior research shows that, “The persistent strain stemming from diverse student needs, administrative pressures, and workload demands significantly contributes to this emotional drain (Kyriacou, 2001; Hui et al., 2022). Moreover, emotional exhaustion often corresponds to a perceived decline in effectiveness and accomplishment in the professional role. Teachers “experiencing emotional exhaustion may feel a reduced sense of achievement and efficacy in positively impacting students’ lives or contributing meaningfully to their education (Maslach et al., 2001; Rumschlag, 2017).

Or, as I explained to my principal at the end of what turned out to be my penultimate year as a teacher, the profession had left me “emotionally, physically, and spiritually tired”.

“Decision fatigue”

Teaching has always been a challenging job, and teachers have probably always faced obstacles in balancing effective work in the classroom with overall mental and physical health, but in recent years the profession has seen a significant increase in burnout and retention issues. And teachers often report feelings of stress and overwork as major drivers in decisions to leave their current jobs, or to leave the profession altogether.

One commonly-cited source of stress is that teachers are constantly making decisions, and excessive decision-making can certainly lead to fatigue. An article from the American Medical Association defines decision fatigue as “a state of mental overload that can impede a person’s ability to continue making decisions.”

Throughout the day, teachers have to constantly “monitor and adjust,” responding to a wide range of verbal and nonverbal feedback from students to fine-tune the way they address each class and each student. 

During planning periods (or, as I’ve heard many students, parents, and others outside of the profession call them, “free periods”) teachers are generally monitoring hallways, attending mandatory professional development or accommodation meetings, grading papers, making calls, and responding to student emails and messages. They are perhaps taking their first restroom breaks of the day, or their first sips of water. 

During lunch, transitions, and before and after school, they are often called to duty stations. These include duties that require them to be perhaps the only adult supervising hundreds of students in a cafeteria, or in a busy hallway. I vividly remember my lunch duty weeks, when I wouldn’t even have a radio to call for help if some kind of emergency occurred.

And that’s just the most common core functions of the job and the “other duties as assigned”. Teachers also have to deal with student conflicts, with mental health crises, with violence, with shooting threats, with fire alarms and lockdowns.

Things got worse during the pandemic.

Many of these exhausting trends have been slowly building over decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic intensified them.

A recent report from the RAND Foundation found that, “More teachers and principals

than other working adults reported symptoms of depression and not coping well with their job related stress. More teachers than other working adults reported burnout, and about half as many teachers reported feeling resilient to stressful events compared with other working adults.” 

The same study found that “In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and

principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year,” and that educators’ intention to leave the profession was significantly correlated with feelings of stress and burnout. 

This fits with what we learned when I conducted a survey of about 2,200 South Carolina educators and school staff for SC for Ed in November 2020: “Only 56% of current teachers and staff surveyed plan to continue in their current positions beyond this school year. 39% of current teachers and staff plan not to return to their current positions, a significant increase from the 27% who had the same plans during our previous survey.”

These self-reported intentions and feelings translated to real losses in school staff. SC’s 

Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA) has reported increasingly record-breaking numbers of vacancies and departures from the profession over most of the past five years. 

The RAND study found that, after pay, the number one factor that would influence educators to stay in the profession was “Spending less time on non teaching duties (e.g., meetings, paperwork, bus duty)”. Similarly, the SC-specific data showed that, in particular, the third most common suggestion selected by educators for how to retain them was, “Treat staff as professionals by allowing them to make decisions about their areas of expertise.” (Again, better compensation was the number one choice.) 

And many teachers specifically referenced exhaustion, stress, and fatigue as major problems at their jobs. Here are some representative examples from teachers who participated in the SC for Ed survey and responded to the optional free-response questions: 

• “I’m tired of feeling beat up by our district that has optimistic mission statements but doesn’t protect their teachers and staff first” (Charleston). 

• “We are stressed. Tired… not valued and being a fairly new teacher, it has me questioning whether I want to teach anymore. Or whether it’s just like this in South Carolina” (Dorchester 4). 

• “Teachers are being overworked and are exhausted, yet more demands keep being placed upon us” (Lexington/ Richland 5). 

• “Exhausted with the increasing usurpation of both my planning and personal time” (Richland 2). 

• “I would love to stay in SC but am exhausted by the endless amount of ‘extra duties’ assigned with no notice and no extra pay to compensate for extra work.. My current plan is to sell my house and move back to a state with strong unions, tenure and clearly defined contracts” (Horry). 

• “They need to figure out how to take something off my plate. I have more to do and less time to do it in. I'm exhausted!” (Laurens 55). 

(It should also be emphasized that multiple studies have reported that teachers of color are even more likely than white peers to suffer from stress and fatigue. And it is probably no coincidence that in South Carolina and throughout the country, the teaching population includes statistically fewer people of color than the student population, by a significant degree.) 

So what, if anything, is to be done? 

As many teachers in the SC survey suggested, teaching, while challenging, does not inherently have to be exhausting or stressful to the point where it damages mental health and makes teachers want to quit. Some cited a need for union or professional organization protections that South Carolina’s anti-labor laws and a culture encouraging teacher martyrdom have made difficult to sustain.

A need to reform teacher contracts came up repeatedly in the South Carolina data, as did a focus on non-teaching duties. And nationally, RAND found that “The amount of time teachers spend instructing students has declined during the pandemic, while time spent on non teaching duties (e.g., planning, paperwork) has increased.” 

So clearly, even small steps toward reducing paperwork, such as the proposed SC Educator Assistance Act, which aims at partly addressing some of the major concerns with teacher contracts, are vital. And even if the state passes the Act, there will be a great deal of work to do in making the profession less unnecessarily stressful. 

And it’s unlikely that we can address burdensome paperwork without also addressing state- and district-mandated testing. The testing and accountability obsessions that took hold of America post-A Nation at Risk have been self-perpetuating. During the No Child Left Behind era, they represented a misguided bipartisan consensus that many of society’s problems-- some real, like childhood poverty and unemployment, and some largely imaginary, like a supposed rise in illiteracy-- should be solved by schools, alone, and that it was “failing schools” that were the primary drivers. In the ensuing years, they have been a ready weapon for those pushing school vouchers.

For example, freshman SC House member Jeff Bradley notably berated an educator who was testifying during the sole public comment period around S. 62, the voucher bill being fast-tracked through the SC legislature. Bradley repeatedly, and without citing evidence, based his angry rhetorical questions-- which were the subject of an entire op-ed from The State about the loss of civility in the legislature-- on the premise that South Carolina is full of “failing schools” and that we spend “billions of dollars” without seeing any return on that investment.

Representative Jeff Bradley (Beaufort) 

This hyperfocus on “fixing” schools-- and on defining “effectiveness” in schools in more and more self-servingly impossible ways-- has led to a greater and greater burden of testing, pre-testing, post-testing, and paperwork, exhausting teachers, administrators, and students, and leaving less and less time and energy for the complex work of actually teaching.

While teachers were often told during the height of the pandemic that they needed to engage in “self-care” (and while practices like mindfulness, exercise, and leaving schoolwork at school are probably great ideas for dealing with individual stress), we can’t self-care our way out of systemic issues, many of which have been either intentionally generated or embraced by people who want to defund schools and fund school vouchers. 

To address teacher exhaustion and burnout, we need to reject the narrative that schools are fundamentally the problem, or that more testing and more paperwork will make schools better. We need to focus on how important schools are in most communities, the many purposes they serve, and repair what isn’t working for all of our students. But we also need to stop piling real and imaginary social ills on the backs of some of the only public servants actively working to address them.