Is Burnout a Systemic Issue?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that teacher burnout is a systemic problem caused by impossible working conditions, not an individual failure of resilience.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout is systemic, not personal - The system creates conditions that burn people out; blaming individuals is unfair
- Self-care can't fix a broken system - No amount of yoga or mindfulness compensates for an unsustainable workload
- Change the conditions - Reducing the scope of the teaching role is more effective than teaching people to cope with an impossible job
Transcript
Is burnout an individual issue or a systemic issue?
I'm here at the Learning Forward Conference in National Harbor in DC and there are a ton of sessions at this year's conference about turnover, burnout, supporting new teachers.
I'm presenting tomorrow on supporting new teachers with my co-author of Mapping Professional Practice and I think we've got to really understand the nature of this issue of burnout and how that leads to turnover and there's a there's a great new article that ASCD has published just recently on how there's new research showing that burnout is not an individual issue.
It is a systemic issue.
And when we see organizations that have a lot of churn, that have a lot of people turning over, burning out just over and over and over again, it no longer makes sense to see that just as an individual issue.
So read that article, definitely check that out.
It looks like a great set of solutions for thinking about burnout, a great way of thinking about burnout.
But I also want to acknowledge the individual side.
No matter how healthy your organization is, individuals can choose to burn themselves out.
There is no organizational fix for a personal overcommitment.
If you personally overcommit yourself and are committed to burning yourself out, your organization can't help that.
So I really think we need both emphases.
I think we need to solve both heads of this dragon, fight both of them, because it is not going away.
And if you want to have a profession One of the things I heard today that was most sobering to me in one of my sessions was this idea that a lot of the people who are entering the profession now aren't necessarily committed to seeing it as their profession, right?
They're not committed to being professionals yet.
It's a job for now.
Maybe they will become professionals, but not necessarily.
And I think we've really got to fight for this to be a profession that people will stay in year after year and do professional work.
But let me know what you think about that.
Let me know what you think about burnout.
Do you see it as mostly a systemic issue, an individual issue, both?
Leave a comment.
Let me know.