A 2022 Gallup poll reported what many of us already suspected: K-12 educators have one of the highest burnout rates of any segment of the U.S. workforce. It's a growing crisis but not an insurmountable one.

To help explore burnout's root causes, repercussions and remedies, we turned to Annie McKee, who wrote the book on being happy at work. A senior fellow at Penn GSE and NYT-bestselling author, Annie has a candid conversation with host Kimberly McGlonn about the emotional intelligence and resilience necessary to navigate the intricate landscape of modern education. Then, former classroom teacher Stacey Carlough joins Kimberly to discuss some of the systemic and individualized strategies employed to alleviate burnout. In her new role, Stacey leads programming centered around teacher mental health and developing top-down solutions, like communities of care. Stacey emphasizes that burnout is not an individual problem – it's up to school leaders to create a nurturing, sustainable educational environment where their teachers, counselors and other employees can thrive.

GUESTS:

• Stacey Carlough, Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning, Office of School & Community Engagement, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
• Annie McKee, Adjunct Professor & Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

NEWSLETTER:

• Subscribe to the Educator's Playbook newsletter for ongoing resources and content

RELATED PLAYBOOKS:

• No. 65: Tips to avoid burnout for teachers working this summer
• No. 34: Why you should make a career plan (Even if you aren’t looking for a new job)
• No. 29: Facing a problem? Ask yourself these questions
• No. 26: Discussing Nondiscussables
• No. 23: How to be happy at school
• No. 20: Taking a minute for your mental health
• No. 12: Reimagining leadership in your school
• No. 3: Saving the parent-teacher relationship from stress

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES & RESOURCES:

• “How to be happy at work: The power of purpose, hope and friendship.” by Annie McKee (2017)
• Gallup: K-12 Workers Have Highest Burnout Rate in U.S.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

This is the Educator's Playbook from the Penn Graduate School of Education. After I finished my PhD in curriculum and instruction, I taught high school English for 20 years. I loved being a classroom teacher, but it was at times absolutely exhausting. Rewarding for sure, but exhausting. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, K through 12 workers have the highest burnout rate compared to any other segment of the US workforce, which is why in this episode of the Educator's Playbook we're taking a hard look at educator burnout and more importantly, the changes being made and resources available to prevent burnout moving forward.

I promise you two things, you're not alone and we're going to end this episode on a high note. My first guest today is Stacey Carlough. She's a former classroom teacher and now the assistant director for teaching and learning at Penn GSE's Office of School and Community Engagement. She works with teachers, principals, and administrators to help them realize the importance of community and to help them build support systems. After all, solving this can't fall to individuals. The solution is more than take a walk to clear your head.

Stacey, thank you so much for coming in to share your work today. Can you introduce yourself?

Sure. So I'm Stacey Carlough. I am an educator, a writer, an artist, and a parent to two school aged kiddos. I spent 14 years teaching high school English, and I started a writing center at the school that was run by students and I started the school's instructional coaching program way back. And then since 2019, I've been working in higher ed at GSE, at their Office of School and Community Engagement. I serve now as the assistant director for teaching and learning there.

We're constantly hearing, it feels to me anyways about the crisis of teacher burnout in America across the country. But how do you define this phenomenon of teacher burnout?

Yeah. So I both know a lot about it from my personal experience as well as sort of studying it and thinking about it through the lens of how we can help equip future teachers to be more burnout resistant. I think it's largely a systems problem, but there is some kind of personal accountability and strategies that anybody in the helping professions can do to make themselves a little bit more resistant to that while sort of fighting the bigger fight.

I think everyone involved in helping professions is doing hard work, but the closer you get to the point of service, so the student, the patient, and being asked to do maybe more than what is reasonably expected of a human, or you're being asked to do too much beyond the scope of maybe what you set out to do initially or that you've been trained or developed to do, or particularly the things you're being asked to do in addition to maybe being too much or too outside of your scope are at odds with your values or your priorities or your beliefs or your knowledge in the case of teachers about young people and your profession.

And that was certainly the case for me. So I think it's that friction between what you want to do, what you know perhaps from experience or just your soul is the best thing that children and young people need and what you perhaps are being told to do or asked to do or questioned about not doing.

When you think about your own experience, I certainly worked with teachers in the 20 years I was in the classroom that I got the sense and many of us collectively knew that they were drowning in that tension that you described. What do you think it looks like? I think that it's one of the challenges we have in addressing this crisis is that we don't always know what we're observing so that we can figure out as educators, either from an administrative perspective or a collegial perspective, how to offer support. What should we be looking for?

You're asking what are the indicators or signs that somebody might be?

Yes.

So there's some things that you can look for in the human, and there's some things you can look for in the space. And so if you're looking into a classroom, you see 35 plus children, some of which don't have desks to sit in and there's no air conditioning that's working. That's just a sign right there that it's a shock-

This setup exists.

... to that person. Exactly, right? Or the systems that exist in word don't exist in deed. So when teachers are saying, "You've asked me to do X, Y, and Z, when I face this challenge in my classroom. Student X has run from the classroom."

What do I do? I can't chase them. I call someone, no one picks up. I look down the hallway. The person who's meant to be the NTA in the hallway isn't there? What are we truly supposed to do? Because in that moment, that is a breakdown in a system and when that happens over and over and over again-

It will burn you out.

... it clearly leads to demoralization and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness that nobody can survive. Nobody put in that type of situation no matter how well-intentioned or loving or giving or charitable they are, which is a whole other kind of narrative that I want to disrupt, but it doesn't matter. Anyone put in a situation in which you're asked to do something that you cannot affect change immediately enough around will succumb to burnout. I want to start with that. So it's not even the individual because that's the whole-

Myth.

... myth here, right? That if you were just more, were just better, if you were more organized, if you used your time more wisely, if you practiced better self-care, that you'd be okay. And while there is some truth to that, we don't want to absolve individuals of responsibility here, but the systems are also beholden to creating spaces in which those individuals cannot just survive but thrive. And that goes for the children as well as the adults.

And I do think that it's an important thing to put wider context around. We are humans and understanding what we're dealing with emotionally, mentally, all of that is also oftentimes very contextual.

Yes. I mean it's very similar to what we saw during the pandemic with doctors and nurses and the compassion fatigue or the gallows humor that some people were aghast at them engaging in. It's the same thing with our schools in many cases across the nation. Right? It's inevitable that some folks are going to burn out in those types of systems. I did want to just share one quick anecdote about my personal experience because I think it's not just me talking about this, observing it in classrooms. I was a teacher for 14 years. I loved my job.

I was excellent at it. I love my students. I'm still in touch with many, many of my students from all those years and many of the teachers that I developed in my time there as well. I don't want to say I was forced to leave the space, but it isn't something that I wanted to happen and it isn't something that I would wish on any of the teachers that I'm developing now.

So it was the beginning of that 2019, 2020 school year, and there were a series of last minute changes to my role. I think that was the other thing. Those changes were made without input at the last minute. And this happens to a lot of people. And then not to be overly dramatic, but under the threat of being fired, if I did not accept them because I was out of school without a union, I quit. And that for me, I will say... You asked about what are the signs of burnout. I was likely feeling the effects of being in a system as we described, high level of need, lots of change, constantly happening, needing to be adaptive.

I was sick over this decision to leave. It took me a couple months. I tried to do the tasks that they asked me to do to go back into the classroom, more full-time, having been in more of leadership roles and being given autonomy than to have that all stripped away. I couldn't keep food down.

I really tried to stick it out. I went on medication. It was extreme and I'm a pretty resilient individual. I'm a pretty thoughtful person, but I would cry on the bus every day on my way to work. I was just speaking with a colleague at GSE today, and it's this idea of identity. When your identity gets erased and your autonomy gets taken away and you're put in situations where you can no longer persist, that's when it becomes a legitimate crisis. It isn't just a choice. That is the driving force personally behind the work that I'm trying to do through the Office of School and Community Engagement. And it's not just me and I can have countless colleagues who have gone through a similar situation.

I'll just add one thing. I think that that vision of burnout that I just painted where you are sick to your stomach, you're stressed, you don't know what to do, you feel helpless, you feel hopeless, those are very outward emotional indicators and they're easy to kind of spot. Even though if you look at someone in that state, it's kind of like, "Well, duh, this person is struggling." But I think it's really important also to note that there's another kind of version of burnout that is a little more insidious and it's more of that hardening, that kind of callousness.

So I see also the folks who don't leave the profession rather than choosing to leave because they can no longer bear the kind of emotional weight of that friction they callous over. And then those are the audience members in some of the programming that we're really desperately trying to reach because they don't quite necessarily believe that this is a genuine phenomenon or they are not absorbing the information that we're giving around the fact that it isn't just one person's responsibility.

And I think a lot of us have seen that full spectrum of the presentations of someone who ultimately is in professional crisis. So what do we do to prevent that?

So in my work in the Penn GSE Office of School and Community Engagement, essentially our mission is to connect the resources of GSE to the university and then connect the resources of GSE and the university to the community, the Philadelphia education community with that idea of, "All right, we're going to go directly to the practitioners pre while they're at GSE and in service." So a few years out working on creating and maintaining a community for those students after they've left graduate school, but they're in the thick of those first few years in the profession, which can be really intense.

And again, one thing I've learned and I think is also piece of antidote to burnout is ongoing flexibility, ongoing responsiveness. So we're going to iterate it in one way to start and we're going to see we're going to use sort an inquiry driven approach to see who's attending, how are they engaging with the space.

Why are they coming.

Why are they coming? What do they need? What needs are being expressed? And then kind of invite them in.

Is this the same thing that falls under your broader kind of thinking about how do you create a community of care?

Yes, absolutely. Because everyone who needs will be sustained and refilled by being part of the solution. There's that autonomy empoweredness that is essential in that. Again, I know it sounds incredibly cheesy, but this work has inspired me to say to my friends and family members, "I am here for you. If you need something, call me. You are not a burden."

And that's when you have the capacity. I think it's also important that teachers learn that there are moments in our career arc where we have the bandwidth to be able to ask those kinds of questions and to be available in that way. And there are other moments in that larger movement of just being a working professional where that is not within the scope of what we can manage and that's also okay.

Exactly. So that sort of ongoing flexibility. It's also kind of like a stance that you acquire. Sometimes the people who are in the most need cannot receive the help or be receptive to the help.

Or don't have the energy to even pursue it.

Absolutely. And I know Dr. Caroline Watts who's our director, that's one of her major mantras. It's like respond to the need, meet the moment. And that's been our office mantra. We are going to hear you. We are going to provide what we can within our capacity without overstretching our resources and then we're going to invite you in. So that's the other program that I've been working on is the Alliance for Interprofessional Education. So this is essentially just like a group of practitioners that we are collecting and having on reserve for any need that comes up in the community.

So it's the GSE community, the Penn community, or the wider Philly community. So for example, last February we called up a bunch of practitioners who had been involved in different programming and different workshops that we had organized around the idea of educator wellness. And we presented to the principals at their February PD for the school district of Philadelphia around the concept of building a community of care. So those folks were able to build up their practices as speakers, as presenters, as experts. It legitimized their work to an audience that they had by their own sort of reflection never interacted with before.

And at least not in this way around this topic.

Exactly. And so again, that's part of this kind of shift is bringing folks who are the experts in self-care into spaces where people have power and decision-making capacity because my mission is to have practitioner wellness on the list of things that we evaluate schools and practitioners on. We look at a teacher and we say, "If you give a teacher observation, how many kids have their heads up and off the desks?" How many kids are paying attention? How many kids raise their hands? We look for those things when we are gauging how effective an educator is, right? Why are we not keeping track of or thinking about or talking about with teachers in their review conversations.

Wellness.

About how often this week did you stay up past midnight? Especially for our newer teachers and counselors. They burn the midnight oil and they wear it as a badge of honor. I care so deeply. And then they get a couple years in, they have a couple kids, whatever happens, life happens. And that old playbook that they were playing by where they stayed up all night and did everything and thought they could-

It no longer works for their lives.

Exactly.

I think it'd be helpful if our listeners could even hear your insights into why we need to combat this phenomenon of burnout. Why is it worth our time and attention?

Well, besides the fact that every human deserves a space in which to earn their living and live in a way that is not right.

And be well.

So we'll set that aside because that's the primary reason. I think if we are looking at it almost as through like a market driven, what's the return on investment here? The return is that the more capacity our practitioners have to do the work that they are trained to do, then the better the outcomes are going to be. So if you are an educator and you are grounded, and you are taking good care of yourself and care about the people around you, then you are going to be more attentive to your grades. You're going to give your students better feedback. You're going to be more present when a conflict arises in your classroom.

If you're a principal who is practicing wellness in community, then you're not going to get a migraine because three teachers called out and then you're not going to grumble about them and carry a grudge because we know that happens. I'm not blaming those people in those situations because I get it. I've been in situations where I've relied on somebody to do something or be somewhere. And then they couldn't.

And then they couldn't.

I understand, but it still creates a problem. So hopefully the more we center wellness and we center care for others, the more that everyone will attune themselves to that. Again, the problem is doing it in ways that are authentic and that people aren't going to just roll their eyes at because they are a practice. They are something you have to embed. And that's why I think we're moving this year away from one-offs.

Into systems.

My hope is that my alliance and myself, my group will have a Zoom open 7:00 AM noon and 7:00 PM every day for 30 minutes.

That's a drop-in place.

Exactly. And maybe we'll do some mindful breathing. Maybe we'll do some of our somatic mindful touch practices that we did at one of our sessions and everyone was like, "Oh, do you know you can give yourself a massage?" You can. It's not quite as good as getting one, but you absolutely can relieve tension. And then maybe just what questions are coming up for folks. And it's not quite therapy, but we would have therapists involved in the process that we could potentially connect them with.

I love that you used that word practice. I think that so much about the shifts that need to happen are about how are we moving to something that feels embedded and consistent and available. That's the point of a resource is that it is consistent and available. When it comes to individual educators, do you have other strategies, resources, things that they can practice individually when they feel overwhelmed or disengaged?

There's a tool in any session we have. We always integrate it somehow because it's so useful and I'm sure folks are familiar with it. You take a piece of paper, you create three circles of increasing size. The center circle is really the thing that you should care about. That's your locus or your sphere of control. That is your breath. That is your thoughts. That is the things you say. That is literally the things that you as a human and person have control over. Then there is your locus of influence. You can influence your students, your colleagues, your partner, your home, but you can't always control it.

The roof is going to leak. Some kid is going to fall asleep. But those are important and they are butting right up against your locus of control. So they will seep in, they will poke in. And then there's your locus of concern. And that seems like the weather, the pandemic, the political atmosphere in America. Those are things that impact you. You do not exist separately from them. You are part of that, right? But you cannot control them. It's just a great visualizer.

Acknowledge.

Exactly. And then sometimes what you can do is you can sort of move stuff around because you might put too much in your locus of control that needs to get moved. And then what that does is help you center in and hone in. And I think the other tool that goes along with that is those basic mindful and meditative practices. Five minutes. One minute of breathing deeply. Again, I mean I was one of those people who was like, "Yeah, yeah, fine." But I have truly tried to practice what I've been preaching over the last couple of years. Each class I teach, we start with a quick mindful moment. "What's going on? How's everyone doing?"

And again, I think the other piece is that mindful presence. You're not doing it to get through it, you're not doing it to go to the next thing. You are stopping. You are looking at the people in front of you and you are accepting them for where they are and who they are, which I know is really hard. And again, easier said than done for me and everyone, but when you stop and do that and you maybe take a couple breaths together and you really listen. What that does is lets you get the temperature of the room.

And then I think that when you asked about why is this a good investment for school leaders or district leaders to make, because it has that ripple effect, right?

It changes culture.

Absolutely.

It would-

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

That's right. That's exactly right. If there was one thing that you'd really like listeners of this episode to take away, what would that one thing be?

I think it would be to find and name your community of care. Find the colleague who gets you a cup of coffee and tell them, "I appreciate the fact that you do that. It is a huge help to me in surviving what we are all here doing together. Please continue to do that and know that if you need something, I'm here." It doesn't have to be formal. It doesn't have to be another thing to do, but find your people. Tell them they're your people and just be there for them and with them. I know I keep saying, but it sounds so radically simple, but if we did all do it, I think we'd all be slightly better off.

Thank you so much, Stacey For being with us on Educator's Playbook.

Thank you so much. Yeah, it was great chatting.

Thanks again to Stacey. I'm now joined by Annie McKee, bestselling author of How to Be Happy at Work: The Power of Purpose, Hope, and Friendship. Annie has studied the importance and benefits of leaders creating a positive work environment and how that can be applied to the K through 12 workplace. Annie, thanks for agreeing to come on the Educator's Playbook podcast. Could you introduce yourself for our listening audience?

Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Annie McKee. I'm at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also an author and I work with a lot of people like you to help them enjoy their work more and be more successful.

How did you come to be an expert on this and the work on happiness, which I'm really interested in?

That's such a good question because I started my life really focusing on leadership and I studied emotional intelligence for decades with Daniel Goleman and wrote some books and did a lot of courses and that sort of thing. And during that time I was consulting to a lot of businesses and institution including education. What I was noticing was that even though we knew so much about leadership, we weren't really improving the climate, the culture, the way people felt about their jobs. I do a lot of interviews with people, executives as well as administrators, teachers, anybody you can think of. People would say, "I want to love my job but I just don't anymore."

I got really interested in that. I personally was going through a time in my life where I was feeling the same way. So I thought, "Well, let me look into this." But what I realized was that there is something about happiness at work that really matters. And we do have some maybe a lot of control over how happy at work we really are.

So you went on to write a book called How to Be Happy at Work: The Power of Purpose, Hope and Friendship. Can you share with us just how did you set out to write that specific book?

That's another good question. First of all, it is based on conversations with people all over the world, so interviews really, but they felt more like conversations. So people had an opportunity to really be open with me about what was the nature of their work? What did they enjoy about their job, dislike about their job? What was making them happy? What was making them unhappy? And I analyzed all that data. I was able to kind of come up with a slightly different definition of happiness than ones we normally hear.

Normally, you hear happiness is pleasure, it's satisfaction, it's contentment. But what my research showed me was that in order to be truly happy at work, we need a sense of purpose, which is its meaning, feeling like we're making a difference that what we do matters. Matters not only to us but to others and even to a larger purpose, a noble purpose. We also need a sense of hope. And it's not just hope for our own careers. People do need to feel that they're learning and growing and advancing and all of that. Nobody likes to stay static, but we need to be hopeful about what we're doing, why we're doing it, even to the point of I'm making the world a better place just a little bit.

And then finally we count on and absolutely need friends in the workplace. I have to tell you, when I first came up with the model and then I went to my publisher, which was Harvard, and said, "Okay, it's purpose." And they go, "Yeah, yeah." "Hope." "Yeah." "And friendship." And they're like, "Whoa."

Do we want friends at work?

Yeah, I don't know. This is a business press and friends at work?

The word friend and business don't kind of go together.

They were really hesitant, but I was able to show them and I really do believe that we need companions in the workplace. People we trust, people we like, people we whom we share some if not all values. We don't have the same backgrounds as many of the people we work with, but if we look for it, we can usually find a point of connection with most individuals. And we rely on that to have the hard conversations to weather the storms together. We need to know we have other's back and they have ours.

So you wrote that back in 2018?

Mm-hmm.

And so here we are. It's been a little bit. How do you think that your broader cultural outlook has shifted since you finished that book in 2018?

So much has changed in the last five years. I don't need to tell you that. The impact of the pandemic, not to mention other events nationally and globally. And when we were all sent home during the pandemic, there was this momentary kind of feeling for many people, not necessarily people who were laid off, but many people who had to... That famous word pivot and do things really differently. There was kind of a high that came along with it. There was some freedom. "I've got my team and we can do this online." I'm sure you experienced that as a teacher, so did I.

"We're going to change everything. We're going to move it around. We're going to do it. We're going to serve our kids." After that, we went into this slow, long decline. And at that point in time I was still working with a lot of people in the workplace, virtually of course. I started to hear people speaking out about conditions they were no longer willing to tolerate. And that has really increased.

I think about another one of those words like pivot that we hear a lot, burnout. You saw a stark increase in that phenomenon.

Stark increase in burnout.

How do you define burnout?

Burnout is not just being exhausted. It is being exhausted, but in addition to being exhausted, it's being emotionally drained to the point of cynicism. That's what burnout really is. One of my colleagues and friends, Kandi Wiens is writing a brand new book on burnout immunity. And her position is that we actually need emotional intelligence in order to avoid burnout. We need self-awareness. We need that sense of purpose. We need to be able to manage our feelings. People were telling me, and I'm sure you heard this too in your work, "The climate in my workplace is not what I need it to be. The culture is terrible. They just keep asking more and more, and more of me. I can't serve my kids, I can't serve my colleagues."

People have really said no. And we're seeing that in the United States right now with the labor movements and people standing up and saying, "We are going to participate in the high times as well as the bad times. We've been with you through the bad times, now we want to benefit in the good times."

I haven't heard that framing, and I think it's important as a way of recognizing and reconciling the ways in which people want to feel valued at work in the good times and in the bad times. I think that goes back to me to this notion of being happy at work. What does your research tell us about why it is important to experience happiness at work?

Happiness at Work has a direct relation to our output, to what we do, how we do it, and most importantly, how well we do it. There are studies after studies that show us that to the extent to which you're happy, our performance soars to the point of double digits improvements, which you just don't see in most research. Shawn Achor is another researcher of whose work I admire tremendously and he shows 30, 40% increase in our productivity as a result of being happier in the workplace. It's phenomenal. And multiple researchers have found the same thing. Retention is better, turnover goes down, relationships are on the whole better. And then the challenges that we have to face are easier. They really are easier.

At least in our perception, which is what makes them easier.

That's exactly right.

What are some tips, some advice, some suggestions, some things that you can offer that can help direct or more frequently experience happiness in the classroom, in the school setting?

The field of education sometimes makes me really sad, and the reason for that is that we haven't figured out how to pay attention to things like individual development and culture. Every single person in a school or a school district needs to be a leader. We talk about it a lot and we talk about the culture a lot. But the press of the day-to-day and the pressure of getting things right for the kids, which are both really important. They overwhelm every other instinct and desire, especially those with respect to helping each other develop and grow, and learning how to lead in that really challenging environment.

I think about what brought me happiness as a teacher. It brought me happiness to see students thinking critically. It brought me happiness to see them aspiring with eagerness, to understand my expectations, to meet my expectations, to set their own goals, to arrive at those goals. It brought me happiness to laugh with my colleagues. And I wonder, are there suggestions for administrators as to how they can cultivate more time, more space carved out to really appreciate where there are pockets of joy in the challenging work of being an educator?

Yeah. I'm going to start by talking about my own experience as a high school teacher a long time ago in an alternative school. And the joys I felt were so similar to the joys you felt as a teacher. They were all boys coming out of prison. When these boys would think critically would engage a topic, would start to articulate goals would achieve a goal, I felt so high. I felt so good. I felt like my life mattered.

It just made me want to stay there forever and work with those boys forever. It was wonderful. What I noticed in my school district at the time was that those joys that we feel in the classroom don't really get shared. I think one of the challenges for administrators is to find ways to build community, and I mean really build community in our institutions. So the joys that are so real that are part of being an educator are shared by everyone. And they're not just a private experience between a teacher and their students.

I think that's such great concrete advice for how that can become a temperature set for what to expect in conversation versus the commiseration, which I think that there's a place for but can very easily, the balance can get wacky.

The balance is wacky.

Yeah.

There was a movement for a few years that's still going on of creating what they call communities of practice where people would come together, either principals or other administrators or teachers and share practices.

Reflective practitioner.

Unfortunately many of them devolve into misery sessions, sharing all the bads, all the difficulties, all the challenges. And that can be beneficial, because you can get ideas from other people.

There's a time for that.

There's Aa time for that. But the balance was way off. We can learn as much from our strengths as we can from our deficiencies. And that's another thing I think administrators and teachers can do, start focusing on their own and others' strengths, and help oneself and others to utilize those strengths, to leverage those strengths, to ensure that we have an opportunity to develop those strengths will get better a lot faster.

Yeah. I think about the misconceptions about workplace happiness, like how it was defined, how it was experienced. Are there others that in your research you've thought of that maybe sometimes we miss about what it means to have a happy workplace and what it doesn't?

Yeah. I think another factor that's really important is the culture and what is culture anyway? It is the manifestation of what we believe, our values, the, air quotes, way we do things around here. It's the deeply held basic assumptions about life. For example, people are innately good. We don't really examine culture all that much, and if we do, we think it's just too hard to change. What is it other than a manifestation of us? Of course we can change it. So what I'm recommending to people a lot these days is to not think about culture as this huge monolithic thing, but start thinking about the culture and the climate that we create around us. What do I do? How do I do things around here and how is that making other people feel? What are my values and how am I manifesting those values in my day-to-day life?

How am I supporting others to bring their values into the workplace in a productive way? If we were all creating positive microcultures, guess what? The overall culture would change for the better. How do we get in our own way when it comes to happiness at work? I found there are some traps that a lot of us fall into.

What are those traps?

One of them is what I call the should trap. Doing what others expect me to do, what I think I should do, even if I know it's wrong.

That has worn me. That will wear you out.

It wears you out. You want to get burned out? Try living like that.

I think sometimes educators are led to feel really guilty when they're unhappy, and I wish we could find a way to cultivate a sense of compassion around the reality that even in all the work that we do to try to guide our own mission, our own journey towards work fulfillment, that there will be tough days, that there will be days when it feels like the conditions just aren't set up to make achieving your mission easy. What is some words of advice that you can give to the educators who are experiencing the guilt of a bad day or the reality of a bad day about how to persevere?

We all have bad days. And sometimes we have a few bad days in a row. The problems arise when we have weeks and months and even years of bad days. When we are in that state, we are going to get burned out. It's just inevitable. My recommendation to myself because I can fall prey to this too and to others is to really watch our emotional state, really keep that self-awareness turned on because the slide into burnout is slow and it's insidious. It can happen without us even knowing it. So having a bad day, try to look at that day and ask the question, was there anything here that wasn't so horrible?

There usually was. There's usually something. And try as hard as we can to keep a balanced perspective when we're looking at our lives and at our work, and at our impact. Some days it's not going to be easy. Some days it may even be impossible, and that's when we need to reach out to our friends. We need people who love us and will hold us up in the bad times. We can't do it by ourselves.

Yeah, I think about those people as having seeing eyes. They're the people who, because of their distance and their proximity, are able to help us to stand in fuller recognition of all the complexities and of all the promise that can help to cultivate some of the happiness, some of the purpose, some of the hope that you write about and that you've dedicated your life to helping us all to better understand. Thank you so much, Annie, for joining us on the Educator's Playbook today.

Thank you, Kimberly. It's been great.

Thank you, Annie, for taking the time to sit down with me. The biggest and most important takeaway from this episode is that being an educator is hard work and the demands placed over time on K through 12 schools have made it harder. It seems daunting, but systemic change can happen. And if you find yourself burning out in your current role, it's okay to look at other ways you can still make an impact as an educator. Thank you so much for listening today.

Please remember to subscribe to the Educator's Playbook podcast wherever you listen and leave a five star review if you find these conversations helpful. In addition to the podcast, we have articles and a newsletter. You can find both at educatorsplaybook.com. Educator's Playbook is produced in Philadelphia by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education in partnership with RADIOKISMET.

This podcast is produced by Amy Carson. Our mixed engineer is Justin Berger, Christopher Plant is RADIOKISMET's head of operations, and Ben Geise is our project manager. Matthew Vlahos is our executive producer and I'm your host, Kimberly McGlonn. Thanks so much for listening. This has been Educator's Playbook.