Staying Power: What Teachers Revealed About Burnout and Belonging

  The Leadership Factor: How Administrators Shape Whether Teachers Stay This is the third post in a series sharing findings from my doctoral dissertation on teacher self-care and retention.  So far in this series, I've shared why I researched teacher self-care and retention, and what teachers actually meant by "self-care" once you moved past the wellness-industry version of the term. In this post, I want to focus on a theme that ran through nearly every interview I conducted: the outsized role school leadership plays in whether teachers stay or go. Leadership Came Up Constantly, Even When I Didn't Ask About It Directly I didn't set out to write a study about administrators. My questions were about self-care and retention. But teacher after teacher, when describing what made their job sustainable, or unbearable, brought the conversation back to their principal or school leadership team. That wasn't a coincidence. It reflects something anyone who has worked in a...

  What Self-Care Actually Means to Teachers This is the second post in a series sharing findings from my doctoral dissertation on teacher self-care and retention. In my last post, I introduced the research behind my dissertation: nine teachers, one central question: Does self-care actually affect whether teachers stay in the classroom? Today I want to dig into one of the clearest findings from that research: teachers and the education world at large often mean two very different things when they say "self-care." The Wellness Industry Got There First Walk into any school in August and you'll likely see a poster about self-care in the staff lounge, something about drinking water, taking deep breaths, or scheduling "me time." It's well-intentioned. It's also, according to the teachers I interviewed, almost beside the point. When wellness culture talks about self-care, it usually means individual habits: exercise, journaling, unplugging on weekends. Useful t...

  What Teachers Told Me About Burnout, Support, and Staying in Education Every year, schools lose good teachers. Not because they stopped caring about students, but because the profession slowly wore them down. As someone who spent two decades in K-12 education, as a teacher, a coach, and later a school administrator, I watched this happen more times than I can count. It's part of what led me to spend the last several years researching teacher retention for my doctoral dissertation. My study, The Perception of Teacher Self-Care and the Impact on Retention , is a qualitative study built around conversations with nine teachers. I wanted to understand something that gets talked about constantly in education circles but rarely examined closely: what does "self-care" actually mean to teachers, and does it genuinely affect whether they stay in the classroom or leave? Why This Question Matters Teacher turnover isn't just a staffing headache. It disrupts student learning, dra...