It’s well-known that the rate of burnout among teachers is high. Often the first line of defense, teachers and education faculty are frequently tasked with supporting the mental health of dozens of students across one school year. This number increases again for school-related relationships that are fostered outside of the classroom, such as through sports, music, drama, and other extracurricular activities. Like mental health care providers, teachers are caring, empathetic, and have excellent social emotional skills to relate to young people and their needs or experiences. Unlike mental health care providers, who typically meet with clients one-on-one, classrooms are much more fluid, dynamic, and unstructured in the context of when care might be needed—it’s often left up to the teacher’s discretion unless a student approaches them first. In semestered high schools, for example, teachers may be engaging with approximately 80 students (approximately 21 per class). This number expands for non-semestered schools. With this in mind, we can see how an already dense workload could be compounded by consistent awareness and monitoring of your students’ mental, physical, and emotional states, further amplified by how much teachers truly care about their students’ well-being.



Teachers further experience the rising rates of mental health concerns in youth second-hand, bearing witness to students and their behaviour for the majority of each day. Among the rise of AI, drastic funding changes, and political attacks on resources, it may feel increasingly difficult to balance caring for yourself with caring for your community. Thankfully, there are ways to navigate and mitigate burnout, and burnout-adjacent symptoms, without sacrificing your values as a teacher.



1. Understand the difference between dedication & burnout


Particularly now, as mentioned above, you may feel overwhelmed as you acutely realize the importance of your role in society. Enacting dedication to accessible learning includes a positive set of attributes and skills, but it’s critical to note when what you’re experiencing isn’t acceptable ‘baggage’ or a ‘byproduct’ of your hard work. Is burnout in your job description? Likely not, but in the current educational climate, its likelihood is high, nonetheless. Caring for yourself, then, requires noticing—to the best of your ability—when you begin to experience emotional exhaustion, physical symptoms, cynicism, detachment, depersonalization, declining satisfaction, absenteeism, or withdrawal, for example. In this realization, it’s time to pause. Here are a few other supportive articles that explore teacher burnout symptoms in more depth:



2. Begin by building a values-centred classroom as the bedrock


Your day-to-day environment matters for you and your students. Build a classroom that centres your and your students’ values, including reading options, resources, and even decorative choices. An overlooked part of learning is understanding our vantage point and the lens we look at the world through. In the context of teaching, what is your promise to yourself and your students? What is their promise to you? Maybe this is a new question, or perhaps one you’ve forgotten you once had a clear answer to. Remember and remind yourself why you do this work. A few hours of hands-on brainstorming and intention setting together may help create a safe, grounded container (your classroom). Perhaps some of your students—or you!—need extra support, care, or sensitivity to feel safe. Outside the classroom, where/how is harm happening in racialized, immigrant, queer, trans, and non-binary communities? What is your relationship to these communities or identities? Include discussions about this, too, so your classroom can be as safe as possible for everyone to learn. This might mean it looks and feels very different from other spaces you and your students spend time in, and that’s a good thing—it might be one of the healthiest choices you can make for yourself and your students.


When you feel a loss of control, or overwhelmed, act where you can. Potent change happens in small communities—in your direct circle of influence. We can think nation-wide, but acting local, such as in a classroom, is vital. Knowing that you’re not only teaching in alignment with your values but creating spaces in alignment with your values will at least be steady ground to walk on when burnout creeps in. Tapping into the feeling that you’re teaching and practicing what you believe in, rather than a list of disassociated checkboxes, is what ‘learning as political’ means—you have a unique power, and you can wield it thoughtfully and intentionally. Rooted aesthetics and ethos are much more important than they’re portrayed, particularly for safeguarding mental well being and preventing burnout. They may not eliminate exhaustion, but they might be a balm for cynicism, detachment, depersonalization, declining satisfaction, or absenteeism.


3. Re-envision collaboration


For support with heavy workloads and exhaustion, let’s recall an oft-forgotten notion: learning is always collaborative! Rather than a hierarchical approach, everyone can be involved in grading assignments, classroom clean up, and lesson plan development, for example. You’re a guide, not a master. You have much to offer your students, which coexists with alleviating some of the weight you’re carrying (by allowing your students to carry some of it). One of the greatest lessons you have to teach is how to ask for help as an adult.


Another pillar of collaboration is community mental health. Be open, within reason, about how you’re feeling with your students. Maybe you’ve booked a thirty-minute online therapy appointment during a lunch break, or need to step out of class for a few minutes to calm anxiety. It’s okay to share this, and sharing doesn’t mean you’re placing an expectation on your students to offer/provide mental health care. You can state this clearly, too. But once you open a door, everyone can gather in honesty and vulnerability, and collaborate on how to support each other. For example, you might initiate a conversation with: “I’ve been feeling very anxious today, which is why I was a bit late coming back to class after recess. Is anyone else feeling anxious today? Or have you felt anxious this week?” You may even explore creating classroom ‘descriptors’ or language to describe what terms like ‘anxiety’ mean to you and your students. Gen Z and Gen Alpha might enjoy this—think ‘rizz.’


You may also want to connect with other teachers in your school. Perhaps send an invitation email to other staff members, asking if anyone else feels what you’re feeling. Chances are, they do, and perhaps there’s a way you can all support one another, and create an accountability system for care and balance. You may offer a secure group chat space, or, a meeting time/location to discuss after school one day. Together, you might wish to communicate with school board leaders who can influence policy decisions or broader school-wide changes that support balance and well-being.


Time is also collaborative. With your students, their parents/guardians, staff, and your own family/friends, discuss schedules and boundaries that support your life, health, and needs. This can include when or how quickly you reply to emails, phone calls, or grade tests, for example. Importantly, these boundaries should be communicated clearly to support not only you, but everyone, rather than something to wield as avoidance or an excuse for lack of communication. In addition, if you’re flexible and kind to your students about asking for assignment or exam extensions due to mental health, then don’t you think they’d do the same for you? It’s always okay to let students, their parents/guardians, staff, and supervisors know when you need a bit more time to reply to emails, grade school work, complete reports, or return a phone call.



Lastly, collaborate with yourself. If you need to work at home, after hours, or on a weekend, try to pair it with something that you enjoy or a form of self care. For example, maybe you visit your favourite pastry shop to grade essays, or pair a walk with taking a phone call with a parent. Maintaining an internal, collaborative—rather than shaming—dialogue with yourself speaks to the phrase “use it or lose it.” This phrase references the pathways in your brain—if you don’t maintain them, they disappear over time. Cassandra Lam, a somatic practitioner and liberatory rest educator, often says that many people have forgotten how to ‘speak’ the language of the body, the same way you might’ve forgotten high school Spanish if you haven’t spoken it since you were eighteen. Restoring and nurturing this conversation can help you identify when you’re burning out. It will allow you to ask what you need with your brain, and respond to the question with your body and heart.


This brings us full circle to understanding burnout as different from dedication, building values-centred classrooms, and re-envisioning collaboration. These three pillars, braided together in practice, can be supportive as you work within a system that continues manufacturing burnout. Sadly, this is a truth of our time. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope, or that you’re powerless. Reclaiming and honouring where you do have power revitalizes hope for not only you, but your students as well, so that even when your fire flickers in harsh wind or rain, it won’t ever burn out completely.