Teacher Burnout or Demoralization? Why It’s Important to Know the Difference

Doris Santoro is educating school systems on the difference between burnout and demoralization and sharing effective strategies to help teachers reclaim job satisfaction.

Over the past year, teaching has felt especially hard. “Burnout” is a common buzzword in education, but I believe much of the dissatisfaction many teachers feel is due to a different cause: demoralization.

Doris Santoro is a professor at Bowdoin College and the author of Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. She encourages teachers to understand how burnout and demoralization differ, both in their causes and in their solutions. Burnout is physical or emotional exhaustion, as a result of prolonged stress or frustration. Self-care is often prescribed to help with burnout. Demoralization happens when teachers are asked to work in a way that does not align with their professional values. While self-care strategies such as exercise or meditation can help with symptoms of burnout, teachers who feel demoralized need more autonomy in their profession.

Limitations of Self-Care

“I have entirely too many students, thirty in my homeroom, and eighty-nine that I see in a day. Parents seem checked out and not as responsive or supportive. Many students are struggling emotionally and are unable to focus in class,” Patty Swart* tells me. I interviewed Swart and several other teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools. FCPS is one of the largest school divisions in the United States, serving a diverse student population of more than 180,000 students. A veteran teacher of over ten years, Swart has found this year to be especially challenging. “I am not seeing the joy in learning that I used to see.”

Experts recommend self-care strategies to address burnout. While these can be invaluable tools for teachers grappling with the many stressors of the profession, Santoro says “these prescriptions for well-being assume that the problem is about individual resilience, tolerance of adversity, and managing workload.”2 Swart practices self-care strategies such as scheduling fun activities on weekends, but she doesn’t think it’s enough to address her demoralized feeling. Santoro agrees. “When we talk about resilience in teachers in teacher education, it’s usually centered around self-care. Now, I’m all for self-care, I believe in self-care, I participate in self-care. But that is an insufficient and entirely too passive way to address the problems teachers are encountering today,” Santoro says.3 “To look at people and say ‘the way to fix what you’re feeling is to meditate more’ is incredibly insulting and frustrating.”4

When teachers are experiencing dissatisfaction, we must be careful to identify the true source of the problem in order to effectively treat it. “A headache can be caused by many things, from dehydration to a concussion, but the remedies will be very different for those problems. Similarly, school leaders need to get to the root of teacher dissatisfaction so it can be diagnosed and treated properly,” Santoro says.2 “Teachers’ ongoing value conflicts with the work (demoralization) cannot be solved by the more familiar refrain for teachers to practice self-care in order to avoid exhaustion (burnout).”1

If teachers are feeling demoralized, there’s hope. When teachers understand the causes of their dissatisfaction, they can be proactive in problem solving to increase their professional fulfillment. “The burnout narrative comes down to, 'Sorry, you blew it! You couldn’t hack it, you didn’t preserve yourself.' With burnout, there’s nothing left, no possibility for regeneration. If you are demoralized, however, you are not done. For these teachers, it’s a new vocabulary.”3

What is demoralization?

Demoralization is a form of moral professional dissatisfaction that occurs when teachers encounter consistent and pervasive challenges to enacting the values that motivated them to become teachers. “I became a teacher because I love seeing students learn and grow. It is the one profession that teaches all of the other professions,” Naila Hudson recalls. “I just wish that teachers would be allowed to teach without it being so politicized. Through Covid and the fact that this pandemic is not over, it seems people who are not in education want to run education when they truly know nothing about it.”

According to Santoro, “Demoralization occurs when teachers cannot reap the moral rewards that they previously were able to access in their work. It happens when teachers are consistently thwarted in their ability to enact the values that brought them to the profession.”1

John Moore values teaching in-depth differentiated lessons and providing feedback students can use to improve. “The pressure to cover so much curriculum doesn't allow me to take the time to make sure all students really understand all the standards. We go through units way too fast, but we need to in order to cover all the required curriculum. With large class sizes I'm never caught up on grading and providing timely feedback to the students,” he laments.

Swart agrees. “I am very tearful as I anticipate my future. I am afraid to leave teaching but also afraid to stay. There was a time I loved it and looked forward to each day.” She attributes the decrease in planning time as one cause. “The downward spiral began and it keeps going down, down, down! Time is truly the issue. We do not have the time we need to truly do our jobs the way we know they can be done!”

In addition to pandemic restrictions, curriculum demands, and state mandated tests, teachers are being thrown into the political spotlight with culture wars. All of this turmoil makes it difficult for teachers to align their values with the work they do on a daily basis.5 “I feel powerless to enjoy work more,” Bob Jamison admits. He finds it difficult to shut out “the outside noise in our greater society that continues to denigrate and devalue our profession. I'm glad that I no longer teach in Florida, but I fear for the future of our nation's public schools. I feel like my finish line is within grasp, so it's doubtful that I'll leave the education field before I have 30 years under my belt. Whether I leave instruction altogether remains to be seen.”

Santoro believes demoralization is one reason some teachers are leaving education. They no longer see schools as a place they can enact their values. “By this I do not mean that they are seeking to indoctrinate students in their belief systems, but that they do not see teaching as a way to do what psychologist Howard Gardner and his colleagues call “good work.” Good work serves a social purpose (for example, supporting students to be critical thinkers in their community or enabling students to recognize the elegant logic of the periodic table) and upholds the highest ethical standards of the profession (for example, ensuring that all students are treated with respect and dignity or designing assessments that are the best possible representation of what students know and are able to do).”1

Take Action

With demoralization, teachers know they face a conflict between their vision of good work and their reality. “The values that teachers bring to the work (serving students and their communities, upholding the dignity of the profession) are still worthwhile, but are being thwarted by the conditions in which they work,” Santoro explains.2

To address demoralization, educators must be involved in the process of finding solutions. “You’re creating opportunities for authentic community and taking action, in a way that feels less isolating,” Santoro asserts. “The transformation that happens to these teachers when they can reframe what they are experiencing can be liberating and empowering. Teachers are able to access a whole new set of tools and possibilities when you are able to reframe your diagnosis.3

Santoro recommends teachers focus on connecting with their professional community, centering students, and pursuing teacher leadership opportunities. These strategies give teachers autonomy to address challenges in a positive and proactive way. Being proactive works for Cara Burbank. “I consciously think about what I enjoy and what I feel is missing in my work life and find ways to change that. For example, I miss the cohesive work family I have had in the past so this year I am chairing the social committee to try to change the climate of my school,” she explains.

When teachers consciously align their work to their values, they feel supported and connected. Reflecting on the parts of her job that still bring her joy, Swart says, “I enjoy tutoring. One-on-one is really rewarding. It reminds me why I started teaching in the first place. I get to see when a student understands something. I also enjoy collaborating with teammates.”

Collaboration and communication are important to help teachers connect with each other. “I love my support group of friends at Hirshorn Elementary. I feel like I can talk to them about what is bothering me and they will listen and I do not need to bring it home. I also truly love that I can speak to my administration. You don't get that very often,” Hudson says.

Santoro supports these reflective conversations. “Perhaps we all—school leaders, families, colleagues, policymakers, teacher educators, reporters, colleagues—could intervene with a simple question for teachers: What do you need to do good work right now?”1

Having an opportunity to connect with colleagues and reflect may help teachers clarify their values and what matters most about their profession. For Hudson, even being interviewed serves an important purpose. “These questions made me realize why I got into teaching and why I still enjoy it.”

*Names of teachers and school were changed for this article.

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