A teacher’s self-care guide for building resilience, boosting emotional strength, and finding hope in the face of daily stress and overwhelming challenges. If you’re an educator who works with children, you often face intense pressure in the classroom. This was true before the pandemic, but now you may be feeling it even more. You aren’t alone. From having to adapt to remote learning on the spot, to balancing the impacts of the pandemic on your personal life, many teachers are experiencing record levels of stress, trauma, and burnout. In addition, as an entire generation of students struggle to meet the academic and social emotional learning (SEL) challenges caused by a extended remote learning, you may be dealing with kids who are anxious, traumatized, and likely a year or two behind developmentally as they return to the classroom. It’s a lot to manage, and you may feel like you are at your breaking point. Written by an educational director at the Greater Good Science Center, Surviving Teacher Burnout is a 52-week self-care guide for teachers that features simple, low-lift strategies for increasing resilience and fostering greater well-being, confidence, and hope. Grounded in research-based positive psychology, the book offers tons of practical activities and journal-style prompts to help you cultivate feelings of gratitude, optimism, mindfulness, forgiveness, empathic joy, self-compassion, purpose, and curiosity—so you can return to your classroom each day with renewed energy and inspiration. You’ll also find doable strategies to share with other educators to help infuse more positive energy in classrooms and schools, and create more supportive systems that promote a sense of meaning, belonging, and connectedness among teachers and students. If you’re like many educators, you may feel you lack the time and energy to engage in self-care practices. This guide offers bite-sized insights and activities that are simple, approachable, and usable, so you can thrive in the classroom, in your community, and in life!

Teachers have long faced extraordinary challenges in the classroom-and this is true now more than ever. As an entire generation of children struggle to meet academic and social emotional challenges caused by a year of online learning, teachers are also dealing with unprecedented levels of stress, trauma, burnout, and emotional exhaustion. This important and much-needed book offers evidence-based and easy-to-implement self-care strategies and activities for educators who wish to build resilience, boost emotional strength, and stay motivated in the face of daily stress and overwhelm.

Stay inspired and motivated with this ultimate teacher self-care action plan designed to help educators avoid workplace stress and burnout. Any educator will tell you it's no surprise that 50% of teachers leave education within their first five years. Being a teacher is deeply rewarding and inspiring, but keeping that big picture in mind is hard after long days, difficult students, and limited resources. On top of it all, teachers have the added burden of managing an entirely new digital learning environment. But burning out doesn't have to be your only option. Don't Just Survive, Thrive offers hardworking teachers a sustainable blueprint for becoming unshakeable at school with the power of self-care. Through mindfulness, connection, and creative art, you can work toward building a trauma-informed, self-aware strategy that fosters resilience and results in more engaged and effective teaching. Just five minutes a day or more of implementing the practical ideas in this book can result in powerful change. These strategies include: - Ten ways to practice mindfulness during recess duty - Guided journaling to celebrate what’s working in your classroom - Daily routines to keep you in the present moment - Quick practices for self-regulation during a conflict situation - Sentence stems to encourage internal dialogue and positive self-talk Whether you're a special education teacher, paraprofessional, speech pathologist, counselor, or any type of educator, this book offers a guide to becoming not only a social-emotional role model for students but a better, healthier teacher.

Are you feeling like you are just surviving teaching? So many teachers are struggling with burnout, especially after COVID-19 shut the world down and changed it forever. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves because the stress just keeps mounting, and enrollment in teacher training programs is down. How can we keep teachers in the classroom? How can teachers cope with the ever-growing demands placed on them? In From Surviving to Thriving, you will discover: How to heal from and prevent burnout What burnout is and why it happens What the symptoms of burnout are and how it impacts others Practical exercises to implement what you learn from the chapter Further resources to help you learn more about each topic How to find your joy again You might think that you are too burned out for this book to help. But if you are willing to go in with an open mind, you truly can overcome your burnout and become a happier version of yourself. Rest assured if you are worried about this being another book about teacher burnout from a non-educator. Ileigh Simons currently teaches high school English and has been an educator for the last 8 years. She was a teacher before, during, and after the pandemic changed the face of education, and she is still fighting the good fight! Teaching is more than a profession; it is a calling that we choose to answer. If you want to do what you can to rediscover your love of teaching and stay in the classroom, read From Surviving to Thriving.

Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay offers a timely analysis of professional dissatisfaction that challenges the common explanation of burnout. Featuring the voices of educators, the book offers concrete lessons for practitioners, school leaders, and policy makers on how to think more strategically to retain experienced teachers and make a difference in the lives of students. Based on ten years of research and interviews with practitioners across the United States, the book theorizes the existence of a “moral center” that can be pivotal in guiding teacher actions and expectations on the job. Education philosopher Doris Santoro argues that demoralization offers a more precise diagnosis that is born out of ongoing value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school practices. Demoralized reveals that this condition is reversible when educators are able to tap into authentic professional communities and shows that individuals can help themselves. Detailed stories from veteran educators are included to illustrate the variety of contexts in which demoralization can occur. Based on these insights, Santoro offers an array of recommendations and promising strategies for how school leaders, union leaders, teacher groups, and individual practitioners can enact and support “re-moralization” by working to change the conditions leading to demoralization.

Teachers everywhere are experiencing unprecedented rates of burnout and demoralization—feeling dispirited, losing confidence and hope (Santoro, 2018). The top words they use to describe their feelings are anxious, fearful, worried, overwhelmed, and sad (Cipriano & Brackett, 2020). If you are a teacher, chances are you have moments when you ask yourself, “What do I need to move forward with hope in this career?” Maybe you love your job on many levels, but you also struggle to keep up with its relentless demands. This guide is written by Dr. Amy L Eva with hope in mind. Dr. Eva is the Associate Education Director at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the key developers of Greater Good in Education, a popular website that features research-informed practices for creating kinder, happier schools where everyone belongs. In the guide, she presents four simple well-being strategies that require very little time and investment but go a long way in helping teachers navigate daily challenges while elevating positive experiences in their lives and their work. They are Name your emotions Practice compassion for yourself and others Savor good things Reconnect with your strength and values For each strategy, the guide offers “try it” exercises and “ask yourself” reflection questions. By dedicating just a few minutes each day to practicing the simple, research-based strategies outlined in the guide, teachers will find themselves feeling a stronger sense of agency in their lives and greater emotional resilience. They will also be better able to provide emotional support to their students.

Offering clear strategies rooted in research and expert recommendations, First Aid for Teacher Burnout empowers teachers to prevent and recover from burnout while finding success at work. Each chapter explores a different common cause of teacher burnout and provides takeaway strategies and realistic tips. Chapter coverage includes fighting low morale, diminishing stress, streamlining grading, reducing workload, leveraging collaboration, avoiding monotony, using technology to your advantage, managing classroom behavior, advocating for support from your administration, securing the help of parents and community, and more. Full of reflection exercises, confessions from real teachers, and veteran teacher tips, this accessible book provides easy-to-implement steps for alleviating burnout problems so you can enjoy peace and success in your teaching.