The Burnout Conversation Schools Keep Avoiding
Educators are burning out and silence is making it worse.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of virtually meeting and hearing Dr. Kandi Wiens, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, speak about how emotional intelligence can help people build resilience and heal their relationship with work. Her research explores how emotional intelligence, resilience, and mindset shape how professionals experience and recover from sustained workplace stress. As I listened, I found myself thinking deeply about what this means for educators and school leaders since our work is so cognitively, emotionally demanding, and physically demanding.
Hopeful news from Dr. Wiens: burnout is not inevitable! With the right tools, Dr. Wiens proves that it is in fact possible to build what she calls “burnout immunity.”
So what else did I take away from the talk that I am still grappling with and now want to share with you? Quite simply:
Have any of your friends or family members ever told you that you are lucky because you have the summers off? If you are a school leader, they assume you have summers off, but let’s be honest, you do not. And if you are a classroom teacher, I would venture to guess that, like me, you worked through most of June, maybe carved out some time to travel or rest in July, and then felt your mind shift back into planning mode the moment August appeared on the calendar. Summers off? Not really.
I wonder if this widespread misunderstanding makes it easier for schools to stay silent about burnout, even internally.
Could this misunderstanding be part of why there is still relatively little research and public conversation about educator burnout?
Teaching is one of those professions people believe they understand simply because they once experienced school as students. After spending more than a decade in classrooms, many assume they know what a teacher’s day looks like, without seeing the invisible labor, emotional regulation, and high-stakes decision-making that define the work.
The data tells a different story.
A study from the American Educational Research Association found that American teachers are 40 percent more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety than healthcare workers, 20 percent more likely than office workers, and 30 percent more likely than professionals in fields such as farming or the military. Let that sink in.
Education consultant Devlin Peck, synthesizing research from Gallup, highlights another sobering statistic: nearly 50 percent of American teachers in 2022 reported feeling burned out often or always. While this data was collected in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic did not create educator burnout. Rather, I think it magnified long-standing structural and emotional demands that were already present in our profession.
So why, as teaching and learning communities, are we not talking about burnout more directly and more honestly?
Are we designing welcome-back faculty meetings that acknowledge burnout and offer real strategies to prevent it? Are we scheduling wellness days that address what is actually driving chronic exhaustion, rather than offering surface-level relief? I think we should be.
This is where Dr. Wiens’s work is particularly powerful. One concrete example she shared in her talk focused on positive outlook and mindset, not as naive optimism, but as a trainable leadership skill. Her research shows that professionals who are able to intentionally reframe stressful experiences and look for meaning, growth, or learning opportunities are far more resilient over time. Stress does not disappear, but its impact changes.
Perpetual optimism, when practiced deliberately and grounded in reality, becomes a force multiplier at work. It allows leaders and educators to recover more quickly, maintain perspective under pressure, and avoid the emotional depletion that so often leads to becoming burned out. This kind of optimism is not about ignoring difficulty. It is about training the mind to hold challenge and possibility at the same time.
In my own coaching, I often reference Dr. Wiens’s book, Burnout Immunity, because it reframes burnout as a systems and skills problem, not a personal failing. Burnout can be prevented. If you are already experiencing it, it can be mitigated. And if you are in the worst of it, it does not have to be permanent.
Before the teacher shortage claims another one of us, let’s start naming what truly challenges us as educators and school leaders. Then let’s commit to building the emotional intelligence and resilience required to thrive at work, not just survive it.
If you think you are getting close to burnout, let’s talk. Even better, if you want to be proactive about building your immunity against burnout, I can help you too. Email me at Anna@ForceMultiplierIQ.com or schedule a free introduction call with me here. ▲▲
