How can we avoid teacher burnout?
Busy teaching timetables, endless hours planning lessons, students’ homework that keeps piling up, report writing for parents, tiring admin work, compulsory meetings – you may already know what overwork looks like.
The question then becomes: How can we reduce our workload so we can avoid teacher burnout?
Here are some suggested strategies.
Avoid Teacher Burnout by Reducing Lesson Planning Time
Maria Glazunova is a Ukranian EFL educator who experienced teacher burnout. Spending hours preparing lessons made her feel, in her own words, like “a squeezed lemon.”
She recovered and in 2021 self-published How to Reduce Your Time Preparing for Online Classes and Prevent Emotional Burnout, a book aimed at creating a positive work-life balance for educators as well as supporting teacher well-being and mental health.
Her story may resonate with you. It certainly resonates with me.
When I first started teaching in 2015, I had a 25-hour weekly timetable. I used to teach Monday to Friday until 3 pm. But my job never stopped at 3 pm. I would go home and plan my lessons for the next day until late. (Late: 11 pm!)
I came close to burnout. I started wondering if the rest of my life was going to be a long lesson planning session. I even considered quitting – like the 24% of novice teachers do within the first year of their career.
Then I found a strategy suggested by Rose Aylett (a teacher trainer) that helped me spend less time on lesson planning. It’s all about limiting your preparation time by setting deadlines.
“The most important thing is to set deadlines before you begin, and stick to them. One way of self-enforcing this is by arranging an appointment, such as a coffee date, when your planning time is up. Alternatively, beginning your planning shortly before your class has the same result.” (from a member-only article published in Modern English Teacher)
Set a time limit. Once the time’s up, stop planning and embrace the idea of bravely walking into your classroom with whatever you’ve planned.
Scary? Very much so! But…isn’t this one more reason to do it?
Avoid Teacher Burnout by Using Your Colleagues as a Resource
If you and your colleagues are teaching the same class, the same level, or the same materials, wouldn’t it be a good idea to plan your lessons together?
The goal is not to make identical lesson plans, not least because what works for one class may not work for another. The goal is to help each other so you can reduce the mental and physical workload.
Your colleagues make the photocopies for you while you cut up strips of paper for them. They suggest a successful role-play activity they used last week, and you help them with a grammar point they’ve never taught before.
Group or pair lesson planning can help you avoid teacher burnout because 1) it saves you time, and 2) it makes you feel less alone in your job.
You Are Not 100% Responsible for Your Students’ Learning
We often tell our students not to worry about making mistakes. We remind them that communication is a two-way process the listener and the speaker are 50% responsible for.
But how do some of us react when our learners fail a test or don’t use a grammar structure we spent hours teaching them? What do we do when our students struggle to make the progress we hoped to see?
We beat ourselves up.
“I didn’t do a good job,” “I’m not a good teacher,” “I should have worked harder.”
Why do we react like that? It’s simple: we care.
But engaging in negative self-talk won’t help anyone. Instead of doing that, we can remind ourselves (or start believing) that responsibility for learning is 50% in our hands and 50% in our students’ hands.
This belief shouldn’t give us an excuse not to do a great job. It should free us from an imaginary heavy load we carry on our shoulders and help us prevent teacher burnout.
Avoid Teacher Burnout by Reducing Marking Time
A study conducted among 911 teachers in the UK revealed that 60% of teachers consider marking the main cause of stress.
In another study, researchers surveyed 9,405 teachers from England, Australia, Alberta-Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. The results showed that marking (and lesson planning) generates the greatest increase in workload stress among teachers.
If we want to avoid teacher burnout, reducing marking time seems a sensible thing to do. How can we do that? We covered this extensively in another blog post on the Teacher’s Corner.
In short, we suggest the following:
1) Adopting a process writing approach;
2) Teaching students to self-edit;
3) Giving focused feedback.
Final Thought on Teacher Burnout
Teaching is one of the most rewarding professions. You teach because you want to help, you want to see another human being grow and evolve. Teaching makes us feel human.
But teaching is also a demanding job that can generate a great deal of stress, so there might be times when you’ll feel burned out.
When that happens, ask for help. Talk to your academic manager. Talk to a colleague or your mentor if you have one.
With self-care and generous help, preventing teacher burnout is possible, and so is recovering from it. Don’t let it get in the way. Don’t let it weaken your passion and enthusiasm.
You’ll need these to keep inspiring your students.
About the author:
Fabio Cerpelloni is a non-native English teacher and a writer. His credentials include a Cambridge CELTA and a Delta, and he is currently working on his MA thesis in Language Education.
Beyond the classroom, Fabio is a freelance writer, author, blogger, and podcaster. Currently based in Cogliate, Italy, Fabio is also the author of the book 'Any Language You Want,' which is heading towards a second edition.
