How Three Heads Can Help When You’re Headed Toward Burnout

It’s no secret that teacher burnout is a growing concern. Combating teacher burnout has become a cottage industry led, in large part, by teachers and former teachers who want to help those in crisis combat the burnout, strategize to create boundaries that create a more healthy work environment, or provide access to resources to make a career transition.

Teacher burnout has led many teachers to leave the classroom, ourselves included. While it was tempting to walk away from education altogether, we started to consider how we could support other teachers headed down the same path. We thought about where we excelled as teachers. We thought about what parts of the job we loved most no matter how great our feelings of teacher burnout.

Lesson Planning and Curriculum Design

What most people outside of education don’t understand is that lesson planning is not just reviewing the district-provided curriculum before class begins. It is a time-consuming process of researching and creating materials that will make the district curriculum engaging and accessible for a diverse group of students. Much of this work is done outside of the school day: our paid hours are spent interacting with students, parents, and colleagues. This is a supremely unfair situation, and one that forces teachers into a painful dilemma: do I give up doing what I know is best for my students, or do I give up valuable personal and family time?

We want to help, whether you want to collaborate with us on one stellar lesson for an evaluation, a full unit for a novel you’ve been dying to teach but can’t find good materials for, or a rough plan for your entire school year.

We also know both the value and rarity of real collaboration with teachers you trust. We’ve spoken often on our podcast and here on the blog about how valuable our own collaboration has been, both in helping us to be better teachers and keeping us in a demanding profession, but we also know we’ve been incredibly lucky to have found one another.

Maybe you don’t have someone to collaborate with at your site. Maybe your approach just doesn’t mesh with that of the rest of your department. Maybe your department is competitive, and you don’t feel safe confessing that you’re struggling.

We want to help, whether you want to collaborate with us on one stellar lesson for an evaluation, a full unit for a novel you’ve been dying to teach but can’t find good materials for, or a rough plan for your entire school year. Maybe you want us to make your idea come to life. Maybe you just want us to take something off your plate. Whatever it is, we’re here for it.

Not quite ready to work together on a customized lesson or unit plan? Totally understand. Check out the resources in our store and see if we already have something that just so happens to be exactly what you’re looking for.

Or maybe you just want to know you’re not alone. Check out our Answers May Vary podcast where we tackle your teaching dilemmas and brainstorm workable solutions based on our own years of experience.

Teaching is a hard job, and if we don’t find ways to manage the workload and care for ourselves, the profession is going to continue losing high-quality teachers. Whatever it is you want back—time for yourself, time for your family, time to truly engage with your students—let us help shoulder that burden.

If you’d like to hear us talk more about our decision to leave the classroom, check out our “Why We Left the Classroom” podcast episode and YouTube video.