Preventing teacher burnout

As the end of the school year approaches, students and parents often feel exhausted, but so do teachers. Between wrapping up lessons, managing transitions, and supporting families, the demands can take a real toll. Practicing compassion resilience, which is the ability to care deeply without losing yourself, can make a meaningful difference.

Rogers Behavioral Health’s Patrick Uselding, project lead for School Partnerships for Wellbeing for Community Learning and Engagement, shares what burnout looks like and provides practical ways teachers can stay energized as they eye the end of the school year.

How do you define compassion resilience as it relates to teachers?

Compassion resilience is about staying well while doing work that asks a lot of your heart. Teaching is full of moments where you’re holding students’ emotions, supporting families, and being a steady presence for your colleagues, all while managing your own life.

Compassion resilience is the ability to care deeply without losing yourself in the process. It’s:

• Noticing what gets in the way of learning
• Partnering with families and coworkers in healthy ways
• Taking care of your own well-being so you can keep showing up with energy and compassion

Why is compassion resilience important for teachers?

Compassion resilience matters because the work of education is both beautiful and incredibly demanding. Most people enter this field because they care deeply about kids and community, but the daily realities of stress, trauma, inequity, and constant pressure can slowly chip away at that original sense of purpose.

Focusing on compassion resilience helps adults reconnect with what matters most while giving them practical tools to:

• Manage expectations
• Set boundaries
• Build trusting relationships
• Take care of themselves in real time
• Create space to acknowledge the bigger forces that shape fatigue, like systemic inequities and the emotional labor that often goes unseen

How do teachers and schools benefit from practicing compassion resilience?

When schools intentionally build compassion resilience, everyone benefits.

1. Trust grows between teachers, families, students, and administrators, which makes it easier to try new ideas and support one another.
2. Staff feel more grounded and less isolated.
3. Teams become better at noticing gaps in support and advocating for what people actually need.

Because compassion resilience blends trauma-informed and equity-centered practices, it doesn’t just help individuals cope. It helps whole systems shift toward cultures where people feel included, empowered, and able to thrive. When the adults in a school feel supported and well, the entire community feels it.

Why can the end of the school year be challenging for teachers?

There are several reasons the end of the school year can be challenging for teachers.

Heightened expectations: The transition to summer comes with heightened expectations for everyone. We’ve built a lot of ‘finish lines’ into this time of year and approaching them is layered with hope and fear. A teacher can feel that their success is closely tied to the success of their students. Even though learning doesn’t end in June—teachers know it’s a life-long journey—they can question, “Did I do enough?” Within 24 hours, a teacher goes from having 100+ people they’re attending, to having only their social circle and household. While this transition is envied by many outside of teaching, it is challenging. It can be a sudden confrontation of personal expectations and boundaries combined with exhaustion.

Feeling of heaviness: The end of the school year can feel surprisingly heavy, even though we often talk about it like a finish line. By spring, educators are carrying months of accumulated emotional labor. They’ve supported students through tough moments, navigated family stressors, absorbed systemic pressures, and juggled their own lives outside of school. Energy is low, patience is thin, and the gap between what you want to offer and what you realistically can offer gets wider. And right when people are the most depleted, the demands ramp up with testing, transitions, celebrations, evaluations, and all the last-minute tasks that always seem to land in May.

Lots of emotions: There’s also a lot of emotion in the air. Students feel the transition coming, which can show up as excitement, anxiety, or challenging behavior. Staff are trying to wrap up loose ends while already thinking ahead to next year. And underneath it all, there’s often a quiet grief that comes with saying goodbye to students, routines, or colleagues, or feeling the weight of what didn’t get done. When you combine emotional fatigue, increased demands, and the natural turbulence of endings, it becomes a perfect storm. Naming that reality helps people give themselves and each other a little more grace.

What does a lack of compassion resilience look like?

Lack of compassion resilience usually shows up gradually. It’s the slow wear and tear that happens when caring for others starts to outweigh caring for yourself.

Teacher burnout symptoms can look like:

• Feeling drained by situations that used to feel manageable
• Finding it harder to stay patient, curious, or connected with students and colleagues
• Becoming more reactive, withdrawn, or cynical, even though you still care deeply
• Feeling like the work is getting heavier and farther from the values you care about
• Feeling stress which isn’t just personal. It’s shaped by inequities, systemic barriers, and the emotional labor of working in environments where not everyone has the same access to support.

When compassion resilience is low, staff may feel isolated or stuck, and teams might avoid hard conversations because everyone is running on empty. Over time, this can lead to compassion fatigue, that feeling of wanting to help, but having nothing left to give. Naming these signs isn’t about blame. It’s about acknowledging the real conditions educators are navigating and creating space to rebuild energy and connection.

What causes teacher burnout?

Common causes of burnout include:

• Focusing energy on helping others to an extent that makes it challenging to help oneself.
• Experiencing chronic exposure to other people’s stress, trauma, or unmet needs. Educators spend their days supporting students and families who may be struggling academically, emotionally, or with basic needs, and that emotional load adds up. When you layer on high expectations, limited resources, and the pressure to be everything for everyone, people can start running on empty without even noticing.
• Lacking true recovery time. When the pace never slows, planning time is scarce, and emotional labor goes unacknowledged, there’s no space to reset. This is especially true for educators who hold marginalized identities or work in systems where inequities go unaddressed. The emotional toll is heavier, and the support is often thinner. Over time, all of this can lead to feeling depleted, detached, or disconnected from the values that once felt energizing.

What are strategies for teachers to build compassion resilience?

As the school year winds down, I recommend seven strategies for teachers to build compassion resilience:

1. Give yourself permission to slow your internal pace, even if everything around you is speeding up. That might mean choosing one or two things each day that truly matter and letting the rest be “good enough,” or taking a quiet moment between classes to breathe, stretch, or reset. Those tiny resets help your nervous system recover, so you’re not carrying every stressor forward.

2. Get clear on what’s yours to hold and what isn’t. End-of-year emotions run high for everyone, and it’s easy to absorb more than you intend. Compassion resilience grows when teachers can say, “This is hard, and I care, but this isn’t mine to fix alone.” Setting gentle boundaries, asking for help, and leaning on colleagues for shared problem solving keeps the load from leading to isolation.

3. Reconnect with purpose in small ways, which can also make a big difference. Celebrating student growth, even the tiny wins, or sharing appreciations with teammates can counterbalance the fatigue that builds up by spring. These moments don’t erase the stress, but they remind you why your work matters.

4. Lean on your community. Checking in with colleagues, normalizing the exhaustion, and making space for humor, honesty, and mutual support can turn the end of the year from a solo marathon into something more shared. When teachers feel seen and supported, they’re better able to offer compassion without burning themselves out.

5. Practice mindful self-awareness. It’s easy to overlook your stress signals, emotional shifts, and energy levels when busy. Pause before a difficult conversation to take a breath, check in with your body between classes, or name what you’re feeling at the end of the day without judgment.

6. Revisit your core values to stay anchored. Reconnecting with the values that brought you to teaching in the first place, like compassion, empathy, justice, curiosity, or care, acts as a compass that helps you decide where to focus your limited energy and set the rest aside with less guilt.

7. Tend to your physical wellness. It’s easy to deprioritize sleep, movement, and meals when the pace picks up. Physical wellness is a genuine protective factor against burnout. Even small, consistent choices like a short walk, eating lunch away from your desk, getting to bed a little earlier, can replenish the reservoir you draw from.

For more resources to support you and your school’s resilience, please visit the Compassion Resilience Toolkit. You can also find other well-being and stigma reduction resources available on the WISE Initiative for Stigma Elimination website.