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Preventing Teacher Burnout

Educators faced a great deal of stress before COVID-19, but the pandemic and its resulting distance learning have been incredible stressors for many educators’ psychological well-being. They were forced to adapt quickly, learn new skills and technology for virtual teaching, and recreate lessons, all while being inundated with emails, texts, and calls from principals, parents, and students.  Some were facing new financial and emotional challenges like partner job loss and increased care for their own children and family members. They had to develop relationships with students while managing their fears of the virus and feeling more isolated from their peers and students. Exhaustion and stress take a toll,  blending into the kind of trauma that can shift the brain from higher-order thinking skills into a survival model and increasing the risk of teacher burnout.  

Dovetail Learning has created a mental health promotion approach, We Are Resilient™ for Educators,  that is especially helpful for stress management. Through social and emotional learning and resilience coaching, We Are Resilient™ improves teacher wellbeing, school and classroom climate, student connectedness online and in-person, and connectedness and engagement with families.  It facilitates staff engagement and support to provide professional learning in a virtual setting and the development of positive school culture and climate.  As mental health support, We Are Resilient™ can reduce student and teacher isolation and loneliness and reduces the burden on counselors. It mitigates teacher burnout and prevents negativity. 

The We Are Resilient™ approach works through practicing, modeling, and coaching. 

It begins within — applying the approach to ourselves. 

  • Educators, counselors, and school staff participate in interactive training and/or in Resilience Circles. They learn stress management and how to strengthen their own resilience. 
  • Educators practice the skills in their own lives, model for their students, and coach students in the patterns and skills of resilience. 
  • Counselor and student-peer leaders lead Resilience Circles. Students notice their peers who are experiencing stress and invite their peers into a Circle so they can increase their own stress management. 
  • Parents/Caregivers practice, model, and coach their children.  

We Are Resilient™ promotes a “practice, model, coach” method because we all need to practice the approach ourselves before we can model and coach others. The first focus is on helping educators and staff with stress management as well as the vicarious trauma that can emerge from working with students and families with trauma. When educators and teams have a safe way to address their own stress and trauma, they are more able to access their own resilience. This openness can prevent vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue that lead to teacher burnout and attrition. With stronger skills for resilience, educators often gain a new perspective on themselves, their colleagues, and their students. They strengthen their ability in creating transformative relationships with students and families. Through changing our hearts and minds, we change classroom climate and structures.

Dovetail has more than 10 years of experience training educators in social and emotional learning programs, providing high-quality professional learning opportunities and systems consulting.  We Are Resilient™  is based on research, focusing on improving measurable outcomes in educator, staff, and student emotional well-being. 

Dovetail Learning helps schools and districts develop and implement systems, structures, and procedures aligned with the We Are Resilient™ approach to support student and staff success.  Dovetail Learning provides We Are Resilient™ training, circle coaching, coach certification, system consulting, and resources to support teachers and staff. 

What Values Are Embedded in the We Are Resilient™ for Educators Approach? 

  1. Strengths-based. We are Resilient™ was developed on the premise that all people have inherent strengths and resilience. Our work is to coach participants to recognize when their Cultural and Protective Patterns are helpful and when these patterns are getting in their way. The program also helps educators, staff, parents, and caregivers practice a range of resilience skills (strengthening sometimes dormant skills they already have) and learn to choose the skills that will best help them in any context.  By becoming more conscious of their own use of resilience skills, participants can more effectively help children develop resilience skills through modeling and practicing resilience skills together. 
  2. Two-Generation Approach.  From our experience with our previous deployment of a child-centered approach, We Are Resilient™ was deliberately created to serve the needs of adults first. When adults have better stress management and an ability to consciously choose specific resilience skills when they need them, they can better model the skills for children.  Through supportive coaching, educators and parents who have experienced trauma can disrupt the cycle of transmission through self-awareness without self-judgment and choose to model healthy, nurturing relationships with children.  
  3. We Are Resilient™ is trauma-informed, directly addressing the needs that educators have for tools to work with families who have experienced ACES and trauma. We Are Resilient™ acknowledges the reality that practices cannot be trauma-informed when we think that we are doing some activity ‘to’ or ‘for’ our partners, but rather ‘with’ them.  At the same time as the education community was recognizing the need for SEL skills teaching, the medical community was recognizing the cost—of poor physical and mental health—of not having skills to address stress and trauma.  In the late 1990s, two physicians released a landmark study on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) which documented the extensive toll of childhood trauma. In the two decades since, a huge amount of research has corroborated and expanded our knowledge from this first study, so that screening for ACEs is now starting to be incorporated into standard medical practice.  As both educators and health care professionals become familiar with the impact of trauma on those they serve, they have started incorporating “trauma-informed” into their practices and interventions. We Are Resilient™ was born from the trauma-informed work Dovetail Learning has been doing with schools for many years.
  4. Commitment to Social Justice and Equity. The We Are Resilient approach helps participants begin to acknowledge and understand their own Cultural Patterns, which are passed down through the generations and can be a source of strength and celebration but can also perpetuate racism and discrimination. Understanding our own Cultural Patterns can help us move toward equity. Additionally, by coaching participants in  Resilience Circles, We Are Resilient™ for educators builds on the knowledge that all participants in the circle have wisdom to share that can help everyone. It is a deliberate move away from the hierarchical transmission of knowledge that can happen in traditional training programs by encouraging strength-based skills that are generated from within.  Anchoring the work within the lived experience of the community allows for individuals to acknowledge the assets they have and the challenges they face. The authority for owning stress management and resilience exists within the group, and through coaching, there is a co-creation and generative interest that empowers and educates participants to access their own human development across race and culture.  
  5. Community Collaboration & Systems Integration. By developing a program that is useful for many adults in the community, Dovetail Learning creates systems that promote community resilience. We Are Resilient™ is being taught to healthcare providers, early childhood workers, business professionals, and parents/caregivers in addition to educators. Participants will see all sectors in a community use the same language and promote the same skills.  
  6. Focus on Prevention and Early Intervention.  While We Are Resilient™ for Educators can be used to support educators, parents, and caregivers in crisis, it is accessible to all and is aimed as a prevention program to support all educators and families by strengthening their innate capacities to be resilient. Rather than being viewed as something for “those with problems,” all of us can benefit from this approach and its practical skills to increase our resilience. 
  7. Focus on Tier I Universal Prevention. We Are Resilient™ focuses on the Tier 1 level, encouraging preventative mental health practices that can help strengthen resilience in all students. While we believe this approach also supports Tier 2, Targeted support, and Tier 3, Intensive Intervention, we aim to support all students by targeting the mental health of teachers and parents/caregivers first.. For mental health, learning how to keep ourselves emotionally regulated and centered is crucial to wellbeing. Often our reactive Protective Patterns throw us off base and inhibit healthy connections, relationships, and community. Giving all children the skills for how to navigate life provides a common language to talk about mental health together. 

SEL became a framework to align school programs and to begin to address the social and emotional needs of young people. While SEL has advanced a great deal, it is still not universally adopted. Moreover, researchers have realized that too many teachers have a difficult time teaching SEL skills because they don’t have the skills themselves. It has become clear that we need a movement to improve preventive mental health that is far broader than an SEL school program just for children. 

A key to understanding how all this fits together—social and emotional learning, resilience skills, ACEs, trauma, inequity, and mental health—is to remember that most of this learning happens intergenerationally. If we can help adults, children, and youth strengthen their resilience skills for stress management and mitigate and potentially prevent trauma and ACEs, we can change the mental health paradigm. Through the creative use of We Are Resilient™ and Resilience Circles, we are providing people with preventive mental health skills that can help them understand how to respond to the difficulties they encounter and how to create the kind of world we all want to live in.