We’ve All Seen Burnout. But What Do Flourishing Educators Look Like?
We’ve All Seen Burnout. But What Do Flourishing Educators Look Like?
It turns out educator well-being can be measured, assessed, and then improved one factor at a time.
Years ago, during his first year teaching, Tyler Hester distinctly remembers crying into a plate of pancakes over breakfast with his mother. Busy and overwhelmed, he had tried to beg off, but agreed to meet her at IHOP where he broke down when she asked, simply, “How’s it going?”
It’s a scene that might feel familiar to virtually any educator. Experienced ones might recognize the symptoms of burnout bubbling to the surface, while Hester describes it as the “emotional vicissitudes of being an early career educator.”
It might also illustrate a larger point. Many of us can picture the sadness and crying jags associated with burnout, demoralization and teacher dissatisfaction. But what does a happy, flourishing educator look like? Or, as Hester later came to refine it, how do you define teacher well-being?
Like many of his peers, Hester isn’t in the classroom anymore—though he still works in education. A few years ago, after earning a doctorate from Harvard, he became a part-time administrator for a school in Northern California. While at Harvard, he began researching teacher well-being and started a company, Educators Thriving, that seeks to translate the research on what makes educators successful and contented with action-based courses that help them get there.
In September, the company co-published a report, Beyond Burnout, with the American Federation of Teachers that has sought to distill the rather nebulous concept of well-being into something tangible—by letting educators define it themselves. Starting with teacher focus groups, Hester and colleagues decided to flip the script a little. Instead of the kinds of questions I typically ask around how burnout looks and feels, they came up with new ones like, “What does it feel like when you get to the end of the day and you’re good tired, not totally depleted?” and “Tell us about a colleague who’s really at their best.” The focus groups helped design a survey, which was ultimately taken by more than 1,200 AFT members.
While the research itself is a little esoteric—there are “predictive factors” and a 26-item scale—the major findings are straightforward enough. Flourishing teachers need things like growth opportunities and personal fulfillment outside of work, but they must also possess an adaptable or flexible mindset when dealing with change along with a sort of zen acceptance to the fact that the work will always be somewhat challenging. Most of all, they need supportive administrators who take their concerns seriously, solve more problems than they create, set consistent expectations and trust teachers to do their jobs.
“We went through a long process to have educators define what well-being means for them,” explained Hester during a related session at the recent Education Writers Association annual conference. “I think the short version is, it means a set of personal dispositions that are drivers of well-being. But it’s also about the conditions that administrators create in the buildings where they work.”
All this is useful for educators and administrators, of course, in the sense that it’s helpful and affirming to hear what makes for happier teachers in general. But Hester’s company isn’t primarily a research group. Their stock-in-trade is professional development-like courses, which they refer to as “personal development,” that aim to grow stronger teachers by tackling specific traits and deficits one at a time. Thus, survey insights like the predictive factors are useful to them as market research in designing new teacher training courses that target these areas. (As a bonus, they can say the courses are rooted in “empirical evidence.”)
Here’s how it works: schools sign up for short courses on various themes—core values, relationships, prioritizing, developing healthy habits—which teachers take together like workshops. One hones in on getting teachers to identify their existing strengths by listening to a presentation on related research and taking an assessment. They talk it over with the group and then come up with ways to use those strengths more deliberately in their work.
Through an ongoing partnership with AFT, the company has already worked with at least seven local associations (or “locals” in union parlance), as part of an effort to reduce burnout, increase retention and strengthen communal bonds.
The New Haven Federation of Teachers, for example, focused their trainings on teacher retention, given the reality that teachers were leaving both the profession and the area for districts with more resources. Along the way, teachers realized what they were really leaving was an unwelcoming school culture that was, at least partially, within their control. As one teacher put it in the report, “Instead of running toward each other, we were shutting our doors on our prep [periods], complaining about other people complaining, talking in circles about the teacher shortage, and just not really helping each other get out of this.”
The training helped them brainstorm concrete strategies for lifting the fog and making their schools feel more like a community: “This looks like warm greetings for students and staff in the mornings, leaving their classroom doors open more often, and turning complaints into proactive action to improve the school.”
Elsewhere, school leaders are turning to the courses to improve their own relationships with teachers, perhaps in recognition of the report’s finding that having supportive administrators was the biggest factor in determining educator well-being. Minnesota’s White Bear Lake Area Schools has already given the well-being survey—developed as part of the process in turning the research into an actionable program—to every principal in its district.
According to Alison Gillespie, the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at White Bear Lake, administrators ultimately want to improve their relationships with teachers, meaning the program wasn’t much of a hard sell for them, despite what she describes as the obvious vulnerabilities required of school leaders asking educators to give their honest, anonymous thoughts on the leadership they experience.
“Just like any other profession, it’s scary to get feedback from people that you supervise,” said Gillespie. (I would argue that it’s far scarier to get feedback from the people who supervise you, but I digress). “To know that educators have a hand in creating this survey, it makes it extra meaningful for them.”
The action component here, once all the data has been crunched and group discussions concluded, is that principals now work directly with educators to address some of the specific leadership gaps that emerge during the process. There’s no silver bullet for solving these issues, but given that less than half of respondents in the AFT well-being survey agreed with the statement “My administrator takes my concerns seriously,” it’s a step in the right direction.
To former teacher Tiffany Dittrich, now president of the White Bear Lake local, it’s actually more than that. It’s a way to fight systemic demoralization by giving teachers both a voice and a way to help engineer the solutions.
“As educators, it can be very defeating to think, how do I fight against this system that is not working to serve my students or serve me?” she said. “It feels so big and so overwhelming, especially when my responsibility is to be in the classroom every day, serving my students, teaching them, loving them. This is a way that that I can do things for me, while also trusting that the union president, the assistant superintendent, the superintendent, the school board are doing the things they need to do to address those systemic concerns.”
Perhaps this is what educator well-being really looks like.
👁 👄 👁 Show & Tell
Everyone can remember their best teachers, as well as teachers who were terrible at their jobs. In teaching, the crucial factor is the teacher—not a gimmick, a slide deck, a checklist or an office supply.
When you deprofessionalize a profession, you risk losing your best. While many dedicated teachers are choosing to stay and fight, it seems to me that the majority of us who are leaving are among the strongest and most beloved...But since veterans are often the most outspoken teachers, the cynical part of me wonders if pushing us out was the intention all along.
— Teacher Jennifer Mathieu Blessington, writing in the Houston Chronicle of her decision to switch districts over dissatisfaction with the policies of HISD Superintendent Mike Miles.
📚 Independent Reading
Hechinger Report: Last In First Out policies—which influence who gets laid off during cuts—hurt high poverty schools the most since teacher seniority is not spread evenly across schools, writes Jill Barshay. Experienced teachers tend to cluster at wealthier schools (and those with more white students), meaning they feel district-wide cuts the least. Research suggests higher teacher churn at schools that serve students living in poverty or those from minority backgrounds can hurt achievement. The solution might be to beef up protections from LIFO policies in those schools.
Adrian Neibauer: “Can teachers in their 20’s more easily engage and relate to their students? I posed this question to my own teenagers. My 17-year-old son relates to and respects his older teachers more. He’s obsessed the the 90’s and sometimes struggles to relate to his peers, or as he says, This generation. He loves learning and is pretty compliant with what is expected of him. My 15-year-old freshman hates school. He has always struggled academically because of his dyslexic thinking. Unfortunately, he has never really related to any of his teachers. My 13-year-old daughter cringes when her older teachers try to “relate.” She hates it when teachers try to talk about TikTok or pop culture. She swears that most of her teachers are condescending to their students. This could be more of a commentary on the culture of middle school, but her comment shows an important difference between relating and connecting.”
