Is it Burnout? Or are we being set up to fail?

You don’t have to look very hard to reach a shocking headline about the challenges our students in K-12 are experiencing. Sobering report after sobering report about the long slog of pandemic recovery, the rising need for mental health and special education supports, and the critical shortages of providers run across my newsfeed daily.

Complicating matters is that solutions for this crisis are often short-term solutions that rely on short-term funding, like the expiring ESSR Covid Relief funds.

As funding dries up, so goes the extra mental health staff, the tutoring and academic recovery programs, and additional mental health programs for kids.

Flipping The Burnout Epidemic Narrative

As a school psychologist and founder of Thriving Students Collective, I travel across the country providing burnout prevention support to teachers, administrators, and mental health providers in schools. I talk with educators every day who are giving 110% effort and burning their own mental health to the ground trying to keep up with the growing demands of the profession.

In today’s world, every teacher is now a de-facto special education teacher, whether they have a credential or not.

Every school employee is now a first line mental health responder, whether they have a mental health degree or not.

But they don’t often have the tools or training. This fuels burnout.

Gone are the days where we can just refer kids who need additional support to the school psychologist, school counselor, or school social worker–because there simply aren’t enough to go around.

In fact, in my career as a school psychologist, I have never had less than 1200 students on my caseload. And my experience is not unique; In some areas, the ratio is double and triple that. And yet, every single day, I work with dedicated school psychologists and teachers on the brink of burnout, still putting in the work, despite getting bombarded by the public sentiment that it’s still not enough.

I want to flip the script on this narrative.

Our educators aren’t “burning out.” They’re being set up to fail because we aren’t giving them them the support they need.

So how can we provide more support to our educators? How can we give them “Tier Zero” burnout prevention support for themselves and the tools they need to feel efficacious in supporting complex learners?

And importantly, how can this be done in the reality of expiring and limited funding for extra support?

Build Capacity for Thriving Schools

One strategy is to offer up professional development to upskill and support our current school staff with the tools they need to feel efficacious working with the growing complexity of student needs.

Professional development (PD) funds are made available year over year, so this is a place where we can build internal capacity.

But not all professional development is the same, people. I’m all for PD, but any teacher will tell you, it’s often done in an old school and ineffective way–the classic “one and done” session on a random Friday in January. But what if you have a kid having a mental health crisis today? How can you get information on supporting neurodiverse students and students with mental health and behavioral challenges in the flow of work when you actually need it?

As I shared in my previous Thrive Archive newsletter, we can do so much better with how we provide professional development to schools, starting with the following key principles:

1) Embrace the Science of Burnout: Stop treating burnout like a worker problem and treat it like a workplace problem. Telling teachers to “self-care” more is a simplistic downstream solution to a complex upstream problem. After work self-care is important, but knowing how to handle stress on the job, and proactively preventing stress with tools is even more important.

2) Apply the Science of Adult Learning: We individualize for students, why aren’t we individualizing for adults? Adults learn by short, on-demand social-media like videos that are searchable by challenge. They profit from practical “done for you” tools and technology to automate paperwork demands, and they learn by listening to thriving influential voices they trust, not folks who haven’t ever been in the classroom.

3) Upskill ALL Adults: Gone are the days where only school psychologists and special educators can address student needs. Thriving schools provide wraparound support to all adults in a school community, including parents. Adults learn in community, and we need to provide spaces where we can learn best practices from both research and reality.

At Thriving Students Collective, we’ve designed our professional development platform to transform “too late and too long” PD into thriving PD. Learn more here!

Fangirl Moment of the Month!

I’ve been a longtime follower of Arianna Huffington‘s pioneering work at Thrive Global, whose mission is to improve the world’s health and productivity through science-backed behavior change.

Her story of burnout recovery has always resonated with me, and on a whim one day, I reached out to her and shared my personal story of burnout and thanked her for being a silent mentor over the years. I’m honored that she replied and then shared an excerpt of my new book, Small Habits Create Big Change: Strategies to Avoid Burnout and Thrive In Your Education Career on her Thrive Global website! (Cue embarrassing fangirl-style blushing).

Many thanks to the Thrive Global community for spotlighting our critical work to end the cycle of burnout in K12 education!

Cringe TikTok of the Month

Burnout is definitely no laughing matter…but my 13-year-old daughter writing the marketing copy for my new book sure is! Check out the TikTok here to see her run away from me in horror in Barnes & Noble.

See you in November for the next Thrive Archive digest!

If you’re interested in being a part of the Thriving Students Collective community and would like more information about how to bring the Thriving Students Platform to your school or district, CLICK HERE to connect with us.

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Dr. Rebecca Branstetter is a school psychologist and co-founder of The Thriving Students Collective, which provides professional development, engaging online courses, and a supportive online community that prioritizes whole-school wellness and equips educators and parents with practical tools to empower every learner’s success. She also has a TikTok account all about burnout prevention in K12 that her middle school daughter has endorsed as “Cringe, but good dancing.”