Staying Power: What Teachers Revealed About Burnout and Belonging

  What School Leaders Can Actually Do: Practical Takeaways from My Research This is the fourth and final post in a series sharing findings from my doctoral dissertation on teacher self-care and retention. Over the last three posts, I've shared why I researched teacher self-care and retention, what teachers actually meant by "self-care" once you moved past the wellness-industry version of it, and how much school leadership shapes whether teachers stay or leave. In this final post, I want to shift from findings to action — what can school and district leaders actually do with this? Retention Isn't Solved with a Program One thing became clear across all nine interviews: teachers weren't asking for a new wellness initiative or an extra professional development day on self-care. They were describing something more fundamental, a working environment where they felt trusted, supported, and able to do their jobs without constantly running on empty. That means the "...

  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...