Listen Up

PODCAST SCRIPT

Music intro Welcome to Beyond the Classroom: Teacher Burnout, Mental Health, and Attrition: my Name is Maria Sedzro and I’m your host today bringing you the  conversation about teacher burnout, teacher well-being, and why some educators ultimately consider leaving the profession.

When we speak about teacher attrition, the conversation often focuses on staffing shortages, salaries, recruitment, and vacancies. Those issues certainly matter. But today, we want to look deeper at something that may receive less attention—the mental and emotional demands teachers experience and how those demands may contribute to burnout and decisions about whether to remain in education.

 I think this is an important conversation because teachers are often expected to take care of everyone else—their families, students, classrooms, and school responsibilities. But we do not always spend enough time asking, “Who is supporting the teacher?”

And burnout is more than simply having a difficult day or feeling tired after work.

Teachers  experience ongoing stress, emotional exhaustion, heavy workloads, pressure to meet academic expectations, challenging student behaviors, administrative responsibilities, and the emotional demands of supporting students who may have significant needs. When these demands continue without adequate resources or opportunities for recovery, they may affect a teacher's well-being and normally they do so.
And so this brings us to mental health, a factor that we see but sometime look away.

Sometimes the visible signs of teacher burnout can be misunderstood. A teacher may become emotionally exhausted, frustrated, withdrawn, less motivated, or feel that the work they once enjoyed has become increasingly difficult and boring.

The response cannot always be, “You just need to practice more self-care.”
Self-care can be helpful, but burnout should not automatically be treated as an individual failure to cope. We also must examine the environment in which teachers are working.

The Job Demands–Resources model provides a useful way of understanding this issue. Demerouti and colleagues proposed that high job demands can contribute to exhaustion, while appropriate job resources can help employees manage those demands.

For teachers, those resources might include administrative support, adequate planning time, manageable workloads, supportive colleagues, autonomy, professional resources, and opportunities to seek assistance without feeling judged.

CO-HOST:
So instead of only asking, “How can this teacher handle stress better?” we should also ask, “What is creating the stress, and what can the organization or school site these teachers  do about it?”

And that is especially important when discussing teacher attrition.

A teacher's decision to leave may not result from one bad day or a difficult student. It can develop over time as demands accumulate and the resources available to manage those demands do not feel sufficient.

Research following the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to examine teacher stress, coping, burnout, and intentions to leave the profession. Reinke and colleagues (2025), for example, examined these issues together, demonstrating why teacher mental health and plans to leave should not be viewed as separate concerns.

There is another issue we should discuss: emotional labor.

Teachers do not simply deliver academic content. They are expected to remain patient, supportive, encouraging, and emotionally available even when they are experiencing stress themselves. A teacher may be dealing with personal stress or exhaustion while simultaneously supporting students who are experiencing behavioral difficulties, family problems, trauma, academic struggles, or mental health concerns. Some teachers could be reliving their trauma through the lenses of students experiencing trauma. That emotional responsibility is significant because what are these teachers doing to cope when their experience is as such. And teachers also fail to hesitate to say, “I'm overwhelmed.”

There can be an expectation that educators should simply keep going because teaching is viewed as a calling or because students depend on them. But caring deeply about students and not caring deeply about themselves does not make someone immune to stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or burnout.

That is why school culture matters.

Teachers need environments normalized where discussing stress and seeking support are rather than interpreted as weakness or lack of commitment. Mental-health resources are important, but simply making a resource available is not enough. Teachers also need reasonable opportunities to access those resources and confidence that seeking help will not negatively affect how they are viewed in their profession.

We should also be careful not to reduce this conversation to mental health alone.

Teacher’s attrition is complex. Compensation, workload, leadership, working conditions, school climate, professional autonomy, student needs, career opportunities, and personal circumstances may all influence whether someone stays or leaves.

Burnout can be one part of that larger picture.

This also leads to a question for school leaders:

What would meaningful support look like?

It might begin by listening to teachers rather than assuming administrators already know what teachers need.

That point is central to this conversation.

We need to ask teachers directly:

What aspects of your work contribute most to stress and burnout?

What resources are currently helping you?

What support is missing?

And what changes would make you more likely to remain in the teaching profession?

Those questions shift the conversation from simply identifying that teachers are leaving to understand why they may be leaving.

They also recognize that teachers themselves are valuable sources of information about the conditions in which they work.

Addressing teacher burnout should involve more than telling teachers how to become more resilient. Teacher burnout should examine job demands, workplace resources, organizational practices, and the mental health supports available to educators.

, as I close, we want to leave you with three questions.

What are we asking teachers to carry?

What resources are we providing to help them carry it?

And are we truly listening when teachers tell us what they need?

Teacher burnout and teacher attrition are not issues that can be understood through numbers alone. Behind those numbers are teachers with experiences, challenges, perspectives, and voices worth hearing.

Thank you for joining me today  Beyond the Classroom.

Until next time, let's continue the conversation about how we can support the people who support our students every day.