How to Buck the Burnout Trend: Equip Educators, Change Systems

Presenters

Tyler Hester, Educators ThrivingFollow
Hallie Fox, Educators ThrivingFollow
Laura Andersen, Educators ThrivingFollow
Katie LaPointe, Educators ThrivingFollow

First Presenter's Institution

Educators Thriving

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Dr. Tyler Hester is the founder and CEO of Educators Thriving. He earned an M.Phil in Education Research from the University of Cambridge and a Doctorate in Education Leadership from Harvard. In addition to leading Educators Thriving, he is the Vice Principal of a K-6 school in Richmond, CA.

Second Presenter's Institution

Educators Thriving

Second Presenter’s Email Address

hallie@educatorsthriving.org

Second Presenter's Brief Biography

Hallie Fox leads research and evaluation at Educators Thriving. She is a visiting faculty member at the George Washington University. She holds a Bachelor's degree in political science, a Master's in Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership, and earned her PhD in education from GW.

Third Presenter's Institution

Educators Thriving

Third Presenter’s Email Address

laura@educatorsthriving.org

Third Presenter's Brief Biography

Laura Andersen leads partnerships at Educators Thriving. She serves as a coach and consultant to values-driven leaders, and teaches undergraduate Leadership at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Laura began her career as a dual immersion kindergarten teacher, and holds her MBA from Berkeley Haas.

Fourth Presenter's Institution

Educators Thriving

Fourth Presenter’s Email Address

katie@educatorsthriving.org

Fourth Presenter's Brief Biography

Katie LaPointe leads implementation support at Educators Thriving. Her education career includes roles as a behavior interventionist, elementary teacher, and instructional coach for new faculty. Katie holds her Bachelor’s in Education and Psychology and her Master’s in Educational Leadership.

Document Type

Event

Primary Strand

Mindfulness and Wellbeing

Relevance to Primary Strand

Leaders, families, and educators themselves are calling for us to attend to the well-being of our educator workforce, but there is no clear understanding about the best methods to pursue this critical objective. Historically, we’ve sought to solve staff shortages and high rates of turnover by growing the pipeline of educators into the system rather than getting to the root of the problem. Unfortunately, many of these strategies and solutions are inadequate to meet the challenge. New approaches are needed to systemically support educator well-being in order to improve retention. This session illuminates two such approaches.

Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics

Professional Capacity

Brief Program Description

Participants will learn about the five pitfalls that most commonly lead to educator burnout, experience two strategies empirically proven to increase well-being, and explore how schools, districts, and county offices have implemented research-based approaches to combating burnout and attrition. Participants will also learn about a publicly accessible survey tool to measure staff member well-being and take action on the basis of the results.

Summary

Every educator should have the opportunity to experience well-being and reach their full professional potential. To realize this vision, we must pursue change on two levels. First, we need to equip educators with strategies that are proven to increase well-being. Second, we need to change school systems so that they have the tools they need to drive improvements in educator well-being at scale.

In this session, participants will learn about the five most common pitfalls that lead to educator burnout, and they will have the opportunity to experience and walk away with “I can use this tomorrow” strategies empirically proven to increase well-being. Participants will learn how schools, districts, county offices, and teachers unions across the country have implemented a well-being program with their educators to powerful effect. Moreover, they will understand how the use of measurement and data can shift system culture by driving improvements to educator well-being and retention. Participants will review our research process, experience our focus group protocol, and explore our publicly-available survey measure they can use to assess, analyze, and act on well-being data generated by their staff. Educators across this country are counting on us to do better - come learn concrete next steps you can take at the individual and system level to ensure we do just that.

Evidence

Educator stress, burnout, and attrition are rampant. Staff shortages - alarming before the pandemic began - are now at crisis levels. A recent, sobering report by RAND found that teacher and principal stress is running at twice the rate of the general working public (Steiner et al., 2022). Teachers have been repeatedly cited as the most important in-school factor associated with student achievement and success. Leaders, families, and educators themselves are calling for us to attend to the well-being of our educator workforce, but there is no clear understanding about the best methods to pursue this critical objective. Historically, rather than getting to the root of the problem, we’ve sought to solve staff shortages and high rates of turnover by growing the pipeline of educators into the system through recruitment efforts, alternative certification pathways, and loan forgiveness programs, among others. Unfortunately, many of these strategies and solutions are inadequate to meet the challenge. New approaches are needed to support educator well-being and improve retention.

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, coined the term “positive psychology.” For most of the field’s history, psychology researchers had sought to understand what makes people miserable and how they might eliminate negative emotions. Reacting against this emphasis on pathology, Seligman coined the term “positive psychology” to give a name to a new field of psychology that would focus on understanding and enabling well-being (Seligman, 2011). Seligman defined positive psychology as an umbrella term for “the study of positive emotions, positive character traits, and enabling institutions” (Seligman et al., 2005, p. 410). Since that time, the field has exploded in terms of the level of interest among researchers.

Seligman and others have gone on to identify a significant number of behaviors and practices that reliably increase a person’s well-being. For example, Seligman and his colleagues conducted a study that demonstrated statistically significant gains in a person’s sense of happiness that endured for six months after a person had identified their strengths and, over a one-week period, used one of those strengths in a new and different way each day (Seligman et al., 2005). In her book The How of Happiness, Lyubomirsky (2007) outlines twelve practices proven to increase a person’s sense of happiness including expressing gratitude, nurturing social relationships, committing to goals, practicing meditation, and engaging in physical activity. More than ever before, we know what we can do to increase our sense of well-being; however we have yet to incorporate these supports into our schools and school systems. This is shortsighted. Participants at our session will learn how to overcome this all-too-common omission in the supports that are available to educators.

Additionally, we must attend to the way we measure and subsequently manage educator well-being at scale. There is abundant evidence as to why educators leave the profession (e.g. Bodenheimer & Shuster, 2019; Brunsting et al., 2014; Guglielmi & Tatrow, 1998; Lancu et al., 2018). Until recently, however, there has been less attention paid to what facilitates educators’ well-being and likelihood to stay in the profession (McCallum & Price, 2017; OECD, 2020). Despite growing interest in educator well-being, there remains a lack of consensus as to what constitutes educator well-being and how to measure it (Fox, 2021; Hascher & Weber, 2022; McCallum & Price, 2017; OECD, 2020). Furthermore, the definitions and tools that have been put forth have predominantly emerged from theoretical frameworks and not from educators themselves (e.g. Collie et al., 2015 & Renshaw et al., 2015). We’ve changed that. By using an educator-generated definition of well-being and a multidimensional survey tool to measure it, leaders can assess, analyze, and act on well-being data generated by their staff to drive improvements in educator well-being and retention.

Learning Objective 1

describe the five common pitfalls that lead to educator burnout and leverage two strategies empirically proven to increase well-being.

Learning Objective 2

describe how educators define well-being and identify which factors are statistically most likely to drive improvements in their well-being.

Learning Objective 3

assess, analyze, and act on well-being data generated by their staff using a publicly available survey tool, ideas generated from discussion, and a bank of ready-to-use personal development resources.

Recommended Citation

Hester, Tyler; Fox, Hallie; Andersen, Laura; and LaPointe, Katie, "How to Buck the Burnout Trend: Equip Educators, Change Systems" (2023). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 20.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2023/2023/20

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