7 Proven Tips to Prevent Teacher Burnout and Stress

Do you feel depleted, anxious, stressed and irritable all term long? Do you resent having to say no to seeing your friends or family just to keep afloat at school? Do you feel negative and cynical about your work and your workplace? You could be suffering from burnout and chronic stress.

I remember in my first few years of teaching I felt exhausted all the time. I didn’t want to see my friends and family and I felt overwhelmed most of the time. Now I know that I was burnt out through chronic stress which led me to be depressed. I know that teachers don’t need to feel this way and I hope that the strategies in this post help to improve your life for the better.

Ps. If you want all the tips just on one page to remind you of what you should be working towards, I’ve created a poster that summarises all the tips. You can keep it in your planner or put it up in your office. It will help you stay on track to make changes that count.

What is burnout and why is it an issue?

• Teacher burnout is a serious issue that should not be ignored. It affects you as a teacher, your students, your school and ultimately the entire educational system.
• First thing to know is that burnout is not the same thing as exhaustion, depression or general stress. While these conditions have symptoms that appear similar, burnout is a condition specifically connected to work.
• The term was first used by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s. According to Freudenberger, burnout was a result of severe stress and high ideals in “helping” professions.
• The World Health Organisation has recently redefined burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
• The symptoms of burnout include feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job and reduced professional efficacy.
• Aside from the heavy personal price you are paying, if you are burnt out, you cannot do your best teaching. It probably also means your relationships with students are suffering, which in turn negatively impacts their learning. A study published in 2016 found that “teachers who experience burnout are more likely to lash out at students and to have little or no patience”. Sound familiar?
• Increased burnout means there’s a risk that the quality of teaching will suffer, that more sick leave will be taken and ultimately, teachers will leave the profession.
• High turnover and poor staff retention is costly not only to individual schools, but also to the entire education system. Ultimately, the system loses professional knowledge and expert teachers. And sadly, it is the students at the most disadvantaged schools that will suffer the most.

Why does burnout happen?

• Burnout is an issue with a workplace not managing the stress of their employees.
• While the ultimate responsibility for preventing teacher burnout lies with schools and education departments, there are lots of things you can do to help yourself.
• Managing burnout is not just as simple as reducing the amount of workload.
• While feeling overwhelmed by workload is one predictor of burnout, other contributing factors are teachers feeling they have a lack of autonomy, classroom management problems and importantly teachers feeling unable to meet the demands put on them.
• For these reasons, I feel very strongly that teachers using pre-made unit and lesson plans does not help resolve burnout.
• The way to address teacher autonomy and ensuring that teachers can meet the educational demands put on them is by empowering teachers to work smarter, not harder. To create their own lessons and units but in a sustainable way. Furthermore, the way we structure our teaching impacts directly on how students behave in the classroom. For this reason, my tips and strategies prevent teacher burnout by reducing teacher workload, increasing teacher autonomy and reducing behaviour management issues.
• As I began to employ more and more of these strategies, I moved from working all the time to only working at home when necessary. My relationships with students were better and I felt like work was manageable. Hopefully these tips will help you to work less, rejuvenate and spend more time outside of work doing the things you love.

7 Effective Tips to Reduce Your Teacher Stress and Stop Being So Burnt Out.

Before the classroom: Planning and Curriculum

Preventing stress and exhaustion starts from the foundation. The following tips will help you regain headspace and mental energy in order to be able to help your students in the classroom and focus more on yourself outside the classroom.

Tip 1: Teach less stuff

• Dieter Rams, a well renowned designer and academic, expounded the principle of “Less, but better”. This should also be your guiding principle.
• Cut down the content and skills that you are teaching. Your focus should be depth over breadth.
• Don’t feel you are being a bad teacher by cutting things out, it’s actually the opposite. Less content improves student learning and supports them to develop deeper thinking skills. It especially supports students who have low literacy levels or have learning needs.
• Not only is teaching less stuff much better in terms of ensuring student success and mastery, it will ensure your attention can be more focused on what matters, providing feedback to students.
• If you have a choice of teaching a few topics or one. Choose one. For example, I would advise that you read 5 articles all on poverty rather than one on racism, one on poverty, one on anxiety etc. Students can begin to understand the complexities of an issue, rather than having a poor understanding of many.
• If you are teaching maths or science, map out the concepts that are foundational to mastering the senior curriculum and cut the rest (if you can).

Tip 2: Make yourself a knowledge organiser for the unit

• If you don’t know what a knowledge organiser is, get to know them – they are a GAME CHANGER.
• At a very basic level, a knowledge organiser is a one pager filled with all the content knowledge that students need to know for the unit.
• It is important that the knowledge organiser is made by the teacher, NOT the students. Creating the knowledge organiser ensures you have clarity on what the students will need to know in the current unit. This helps keep your planning focused.
• To be clear, this is not a unit plan. The unit plan lists what is to be covered in a unit but the knowledge organiser actually puts that content down in one, easily accessible place. Think of it as a cheat sheet. See below an extract of one of my knowledge organisers for the study of ‘Gran Torino’.

• Best practice means you would create the knowledge organiser before the unit begins. However, this is not always possible. If you’re running low on time, create a weekly knowledge organiser, or even one just for one lesson.
• Instead of wasting class time waiting for students to copy notes down (which many students lose, bring the wrong book or miss when they are absent), students can immediately begin to practice applying knowledge.
• Knowledge organisers especially support the most disadvantaged students. They are often the ones who have been absent or have lost their notes from a previous lesson. This way all students are on an even playing field and can jump right into application of content instead of sitting around causing mischief because they don’t know the content to apply.

In the classroom: Teaching and Learning

Tweaking the way you structure your lessons can help to reduce your workload and your stress levels. The following strategies will support your students learning and also give you a breather.

Tip 3: Lock down your learning routines

• By learning routines, what I mean is lesson activities that occur repetitively and consistently.
• By having learning routines that occur repeatedly, you will know exactly what to do to prepare for your next lesson, reducing stress and speeding up lesson preparation.
• The brain only has limited decision making power and when that is used up, you feel like you have nothing left to give.
• Teachers are constantly making decisions, some reports suggest teachers could be making up to 1,500 decisions a day!
• Learning routines help to reduce the number of decisions you make, thus freeing up your energy for other things.
• I want to stress that learning routines will not make your lessons boring, in fact the opposite is true. When both you and your students do not need to use limited cognitive energy thinking about what will happen next, you will be able to be more creative and inspiring within the structures you have created.
• All children, and especially those with learning needs, feel safe and supported by routines where they know what to expect. Therefore, learning routines will help reduce misbehaviour and support the learning needs of all students in your class.
• An example of learning routines that I implemented was starting each class with a mini quiz of one or two questions from the previous lesson. This was marked in class. We then worked on vocabulary. Thursdays was Topic Test Thursday which was a longer test of knowledge of the week.
• I encourage you to think of some learning routines that would help make put your lessons on “auto-pilot”.

Tip 4: Stop marking work outside of class time

• Sorry, this title is a little false. There will probably still be work that you need to mark outside of class, but try to limit these only to those that are necessary, for example senior school final assessments etc.
• And those that you do need to mark outside of class, don’t waste your time with extensive comments and feedback, ESPECIALLY if it is a summative assessment. If it’s a summative assessment and the student is done with the unit and will not be able to re-take the test or essay etc, keep your feedback minimal. 9 out of 10 students will just look at the mark and toss it out. Save your energy for what really matters, immediate feedback in the classroom.
• In order to make this happen, you will need to restructure your lessons to ensure that you have time to work with students in class and provide immediate feedback on their work.
• You can also incorporate self assessment or peer assessment, if possible. I find this works best when the assessment is testing content knowledge rather than skill application.

Tip 5: Ensure there is a lot of application time in each lesson

• This tip follows on from tip 4 to stop marking work outside of class.
• Ensuring application time in each lesson means that you can identify student gaps early, provide extension for those students who need it and also, build connection and relationships with students.
• When students are applying content, don’t be tempted to sit at your desk and catch up on other work. This may sound crazy but spending time working with students each class and providing feedback will actually reduce your workload in the long term.
• Many of us know John Hattie and his work on the importance of feedback but often we don’t know that in the introduction to feedback in his book “Visible Learning”, Hattie emphasises that feedback is “most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher” (Hattie 2009: pg.173)
• When you work one on one with students and in small groups, you obtain feedback on the gaps in student knowledge. You can then use that feedback to shape your next lesson, simples. This is the epitome of responsive teaching.

Outside the Classroom: Self Care and Productivity

Burnout negatively impacts your physical and mental health. Prioritising your self care will ensure that you can repair the damage being done through chronic stress. Revamping your productivity tools will enable you to take better control of your workflow and therefore, reduce your stress.

Tip 6: Nail your meal planning

• Planning your meals for the week in advance helps reduce burnout in three ways.
• Firstly, preparing food ahead of time ensures that you have nourishing meals each day that support your physical and mental health.
• Secondly, meal planning reduces the decisions you need to make for the week, freeing up mental energy and reducing exhaustion.
• Lastly, meal planning saves you time because you only need to do one grocery shop a week and you don’t need to spend your lunchtime buying lunch. You can use this time to go for a walk or undertake some mindfulness, or do something else to support your mental health.
• Diet plays a crucial role in preventing burnout. I remember in my first two years of teaching, there were days when I felt completely depleted. I had a headache, I felt weak and I couldn’t do a thing more, except turn to a sugary snack.
• On reflection, I definitely wasn’t fuelling myself properly. Often on a full day I wouldn’t eat properly, and I avoided drinking water as there was barely any time to go to the toilet.
• Nutrition is vital for not only your physical health, but also to support your mental health. If you are not properly nourishing your body and mind, you may exacerbate, if not actually cause your feelings of burnout, stress, anxiety or depression.
• According to naturopath Magdalene Nowakowski, diet is directly connected to your stress levels. “Food provides the building blocks required for energy production and supporting your adrenal glands. If your adrenal glands do not get the fuel they need, this can lead to fatigue and adrenal exhaustion” says Magdalene.
• Magdalene suggests you prepare meals full of good quality protein and unrefined carbs such as wholegrains and starchy vegetables like sweet potato and pumpkin. Magdalene’s go to snacks to ensure sustained energy levels are a handful of raw unsalted nuts and seeds or simply a banana

Tip 7: Time management: Align your task list with your goals

• Do you have a massive to do list each day? Does it feel like you never make any progress on the things you need to do? I sure did.
• I encourage you to set yourself one or two goals per term. Choose goals that will have a long term impact by reducing your workload, improving your classroom management or supporting your health.
• You may want to create a knowledge organiser for your units, or build a vocabulary program, or maybe implement some learning routines. Whatever your goals are, it is important to write them down, and not have too many.
• Each week, write out the first few steps you need to take to achieve your goals. Then assign them to specific times in your day. Prioritise these tasks above all others.
• In terms of your ‘business as usual’ to do list. I encourage you to review it each day and ask yourself what kind of impact the item will have on your students learning. If minimal, then ditch it or just do the bare minimum.

Conclusion

• Burnout is a serious issue. If left unchecked, it can lead to long term health issues.
• While it may seem like stress and exhaustion is inevitable for teachers, there are actions you can take to reduce the risk of you burning out.
• I encourage you to choose one or two goals that will move you closer to reducing your feelings of stress and exhaustion and prioritise the actions that align with achieving those goals.
• The best way to ensure you take action is to work with someone else, or a team of people to implement your goals. So, if you found these tips helpful and know of other teachers that would benefit from them, please share this information with them and then buddy up to work together to implement them. You can check in regularly and support each other by brainstorming next steps and providing encouragement to ensure you don’t get off track.
• I really hope this post has been helpful to you and that these tips assist you in reducing your stress and making you happier.

Want a handy summary, download the poster below: