Leaders Must Address Teacher Wellbeing with Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk

There’s nothing wrong with boxes of sprinkle donuts and one-off stress management workshops. 

But they can give school leaders the illusion that they’re doing enough to improve teachers’ working conditions, offering “perfect self-care moments” to fuel teachers up before they return to the classroom focused and refreshed. 

As the demands of the job and the school year accumulate, crowded classrooms, heavy workloads, and the ongoing emotional and physical needs of students can lead to distress, exhaustion, or burnout among educators. Brief moments of self-care cannot alleviate these burdens, says Chase Mielke, a teacher and speaker focused on preventing teacher burnout. As a teacher, “I'm not going to breathe my way out of this one—I can't,” Mielke says. “The massage is great during my planning time, but that's still not going to change my perception of how the school’s culture treats me, how parents are treating me right now, how students are functioning and behaving.”

Meanwhile, principals around the country are exploring solutions that go beyond “cutesy wellness,” taking the responsibility of workplace wellbeing off teachers’ shoulders in favor of larger system changes within the school building. Among the leaders we interviewed, they too seemed tired of superficial gestures—and the term “self-care” now pushes everyone’s buttons: “To be just brutally honest, I'm tired of hearing about it,” says principal Mathew Portell. 

Genuinely supporting educator wellbeing is “less about initiatives and more about setting a tone that we approach everything collaboratively,” says Karen Bacigalupo, an executive principal at Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Tennessee. A healthy school culture signals to adults at all levels that they “have ownership, have decision-making power, and a voice in what the school community looks like,” says Jill Bohnenkamp, an associate professor of psychiatry at University of Maryland's School of Medicine and faculty at the National Center for School Mental Health. “We've got great evidence that that shared approach really helps to foster a work environment that people want to be a part of.”

We interviewed leaders from California to Maryland about how they’re working to transform school culture so it’s collaborative, supportive, and most importantly, sustainable.

Start With Teachers 

Effective teachers survey their students and assess their progress regularly. The same is true, Mielke says, of good school leaders: “If I’m not assessing the state of my culture, the state of how teachers are feeling, and I’m not responding to that, then I can’t expect growth and change to happen.” 

Multi-Channel Feedback: Regularly assessing teacher wellbeing through one-on-one meetings or anonymous surveys is a good place to start, says Michele Lew, a California-based high school principal. The practice allows her to “see the themes and trends when it comes to what would be most supportive,” and respond accordingly. Former principal Adam Drummond suggests asking each teacher the same set of questions—including: “What is the most frustrating aspect of being a staff member in this school?”—which helps identify overlap in responses and tease out priorities to act on first. 

In addition to keeping an open door policy, Ryan Daniel, principal of Fort Foote Elementary School in Maryland, does daily morning walks around the building. It’s an opportunity to forge and strengthen relationships while also allowing her to provide impromptu support. “I not only want to see how everyone is doing and feeling,” she says, “but if something happened the previous day, I’m following up and checking in on that.” 

Basic Needs First: Maslow before Bloom doesn’t just apply to students, it’s relevant for teachers too. “We know you can’t help others until you help yourself,” says Natalie Vadas, a special education teacher at Fall-Hamilton Elementary. “Sometimes you just need a minute.”

When Mathew Portell was principal at Fall-Hamilton, he implemented a “tap-in/tap-out” system: Teachers submit a request via text message—no explanation needed—and within minutes two adults arrive; one adult takes over the class while the other checks in with the teacher. It’s been so successful that he's brought it over to his new school, Goodlettsville Elementary, and the practice remains in place today at Fall-Hamilton, too. “We utilize it for basic needs, but also when teachers need time and space to regulate themselves,” says Karen Bacigalupo, Fall-Hamilton’s executive principal. 

Likewise, the essentials—like having time to use the bathroom and eat lunch—writes Sarah Miles, a former educator and now director of research for the non-profit organization Challenge Success, are non-negotiable and leaders should prioritize scheduling time for teachers to meet basic human needs. This communicates that leadership prioritizes “stopping to fuel your body” and encourages staff to “take a break, slow down, see friends, and break bread together,” Miles says.

Found Time: For teachers, it can feel as if the task conveyor belt never stops, Mielke says. Occasionally, leaders should allow the schedule to flex by identifying little windows of free time for staff to catch up on workloads. On days allotted to professional development, for example, Mielke says some leaders allow half the day to remain unscheduled so staff can use the time as needed. “That was in response to when leaders would ask staff ‘what do you need?’” he says. “A lot of them said ‘I am having a hard time keeping up.’”

Meanwhile, spending hours creating substitute coverage plans is often enough to convince teachers to just work the day—even when they’re in desperate need of a sick or personal day. One of professor Alex Shevrin Venet’s former school administrators carved out time for teachers to create emergency sub plans: “She gave us a folder, a format, and then set aside time during professional development in-service so that we could put everything together.” It wasn’t a perfect system, Venet acknowledges, because “the sub plans you make during in-service aren’t always going to be relevant,” but “it was really nice to just have the problem acknowledged.”

A Parent Sounding Board: Communicating with families can be challenging for teachers and, especially for new educators, sometimes goes off the rails. Daniel encourages staff to seek her assistance as needed, whether it’s reviewing and editing a response to a parent or occasionally, she’ll even craft a message on the teacher’s behalf. Staff also know they can BCC her on emails so she’s in the loop and CC her when they need her more directly involved. 

When staff make a mistake while communicating with parents and caretakers, Daniel uses the opportunity to address issues collaboratively rather than punitively. “When teachers are wrong, I let them know, but we handle it together,” she says. “We apologize for the behavior and we learn from the experience. I never leave them hanging out to dry.” 

Adopt a Subtraction Mindset: When considering ways to improve a system, research suggests people often default to identifying what they can add rather than what might be beneficial to remove. Gather the team together and discuss “what you can get rid of,” suggests educational consultant Michelle Blanchet. “Provide a space for teachers to talk about what matters to them—and what doesn’t—so that you can figure out how to spend time accordingly.”

For example, Daniel, the Fort Foote Elementary principal, has no qualms about nixing a meeting from the schedule if it’s not needed. She asks herself what is important at that moment and if staff “need a thought partner to unpack it.” If it’s information they can parse on their own, it becomes an email or is disseminated through her weekly staff newsletter. And when meetings drag on, she’ll often cut them short so that staff can make better use of their time: “You have to be able to read the room and know when their tank is full.” 

Treat Teachers Like Professionals

“A good principal never forgets what it’s like to be in the classroom,” says Carise Echols, principal at Theodore Jones Elementary School in Arkansas. Likewise, a principal never forgets that educators inside the school building are skilled practitioners, writes instructional technology specialist Mary Beth Hertz. “The best way to appreciate a teacher is to appreciate the hard work that they do and their high level of expertise.”

Rethink Dress Codes: Alexis Neumann, the superintendent of Rapoport Academy Public Schools, doesn’t have a problem with staff wearing jeans to work. On many days, she joins them. “We’re not worried about what you wear,” Neumann says. “We’re really only worried about the learning that’s happening in the classroom. We treat our staff as professionals, and they respond as such.”

Erika Niles, principal of Green Trails Elementary School in Missouri, believes that teachers should have the freedom to dress according to their daily needs and preferences, and she addresses any issues that arise privately on a case-by-case basis. “The pushback I’ve heard is, ‘Well, what if they wear a Speedo?’ Quite frankly, I trust my teachers to make those professional decisions,” Niles says. “Teachers are professionals. They should be given autonomy and trust unless they prove otherwise. And then, it’s a conversation and not a reprimand. We are in this together.”

Include Flexibility in PD: A lack of buy-in on professional development doesn’t just hurt teachers, the impacts trickle down to students, writes educator Sarah Elia: “Student achievement has been found to increase by up to 21 percent as a result of teacher participation in well-designed professional development.” As with any compulsory task, attaching a degree of independence helps, says middle school teacher and curriculum coordinator Heather Wolpert-Gawron, especially concerning “choice in what teachers can learn about and choice in how to learn it.” 

As an instructional coach, Mielke worked with school leaders to make professional learning opportunities more customizable. Teachers could opt in to create a portion of their own professional development hours; those who didn’t want to do that could follow a predetermined path set by the school leader. “We allowed a little bit of choice and set staff up; ‘here's how you can spend those 15 hours pursuing something that's really relevant to you or that you’re passionate about,’” he says. 

The impact can be substantial: Before shifting to a more flexible, choice-based PD model, less than 30 percent of staff reported that professional learning “met their needs and supported them as educators,” writes Tracy Dabbs, a district coordinator of technology and innovation in Washington. Now that teachers have more say, that percentage consistently sits at 95 percent.

Protect Planning Time: When planning periods get consumed by meetings or administrative tasks, there’s a higher chance of teachers bringing work home, Mielke says, eroding the boundaries of work/life balance. There are ways to prevent this. After extensive pre-planning with the master scheduling team, specialist teams including physical education teachers and library staff at Fort Foote Elementary coordinated a plan to move students between rooms while classroom teachers attended a 90-minute weekly collaborative planning block each Wednesday. “Second graders may have media for the first 45 minutes and then they have P.E. for the next 45 minutes,” Principal Ryan Daniel says.

Fort Foote Elementary teachers know that if they have a problem on Monday or Tuesday, they have Wednesday to sit with their colleagues and troubleshoot. “If I'm a second-grade teacher, I have a third-grade teacher in the room, a first-grade teacher in there,” she says. “I'm able to bounce ideas off of everyone.”