Burnout Is a Systemic Issue: Why Educators Need More Than Self-Care
- Nia Eubanks-Dixon
- Oct 20
- 4 min read
The term ‘burnout’ has woven itself into everyday conversations across schools and learning spaces. It echoes through staff meetings, late-night lesson planning, and the quiet exhaustion that follows endless demands. Yet, burnout is often treated as a personal shortcoming; something a few deep breaths or a mindfulness app can fix.
But here’s the thing: burnout isn’t just an individual problem. It’s a symptom of a system that asks educators to give endlessly without replenishment, to meet structural challenges with personal resilience, and to carry collective weight alone.
This blog explores how burnout emerges from systemic conditions and why addressing it requires more than self-care — it calls for community, organizational accountability, and liberation-centered change.
The Systemic Roots of Burnout
Educator burnout doesn’t appear in isolation. It’s shaped by systems that prioritize productivity over people — long hours, underfunded schools, unrealistic performance measures, and emotional labor that goes unseen.
When educators are expected to meet every need in the classroom, navigate conflict, and manage systemic inequities without institutional support, burnout becomes inevitable. This isn’t a failure of coping skills; it’s a failure of structure.
Burnout prevention must start with understanding that exhaustion isn’t just physical or emotional — it’s social. The systems educators work within often reflect the very hierarchies and inequities they strive to dismantle.
True wellness in education begins when organizations shift their lens from “how do we help teachers manage stress?” to “how do we build environments that prevent stress from becoming unmanageable in the first place?”
Beyond Self-Care: Collective Responsibility
Self-care is important, but when used as the primary solution, it places the burden back on the individual. Telling educators to take bubble baths or practice mindfulness, without addressing overwork and under-support, can feel dismissive or even harmful.
Liberation-centered wellness reframes care as a collective responsibility. It asks: What structures can we build to share emotional labor, to listen deeply, and to make rest sustainable rather than exceptional?
In this framework, administrators, policymakers, and communities play as vital a role as educators themselves. Systemic burnout prevention means creating policies that protect time for reflection, collaboration, and care. It means valuing emotional intelligence and trauma-informed practice as core competencies, not extras.
Liberation and Reimagining Care
Liberation-centered approaches to education see care as both a practice and a right. They remind us that wellness isn’t a privilege reserved for those with spare time; it’s a condition for collective thriving.
In burnout prevention, this means moving from survival to sustainability. Instead of coping through exhaustion, educators can co-create environments rooted in belonging, mutual respect, and shared healing.
Arts-based, trauma-informed, and restorative methods can play a transformative role here. Creative reflection, storytelling, and somatic awareness allow educators to reconnect with their bodies, each other, and the purpose behind their work. These practices don’t replace systemic reform, but they help sustain those doing the work of change.
Liberation means acknowledging that educators deserve care not as a reward for endurance, but as an inherent part of equitable learning environments.
A Call to Reimagine Educator Wellness
If burnout is systemic, then healing must be collective. It requires schools, organizations, and communities to examine the conditions that perpetuate fatigue and disconnection.
This might look like:
Embedding trauma-informed classroom management and education principles into professional development
Normalizing staff to take time off without guilt
Encouraging staff to maintain work/life balance and to draw boundaries where necessary
Encouraging staff participation in decisions that affect them, such as policies and workload
Offering burnout prevention workshops that address both personal and systemic factors
Building restorative spaces where educators can process, reflect, and re-engage meaningfully
Encouraging development opportunities, for example, arts-based professional development that fosters creativity and connection
When wellness becomes a shared value instead of a personal project, educators are better equipped to model resilience, compassion, and liberation for their students.
Rethinking Burnout Prevention: From Individual Resilience to Collective Care:
Educator burnout isn’t a flaw in individual endurance; it’s evidence of systems that need care themselves. Addressing it means moving beyond quick fixes toward structures that honor humanity, creativity, and interdependence.
At Creative Praxis, burnout prevention for educators is one of our most popular training topics. We offer flexible in-person and online trainings, workshops, and retreats tailored to your needs. Our workshops blend arts-based, trauma-informed, and restorative practices that invite participants to reimagine wellness as a shared commitment, not just an individual goal.
Our restorative practices training in Philadelphia allows for intentional time for all staff to co-create an aligned action plan with strategies to help create safe, calm, and courageous learning spaces for students and staff alike.
When care becomes systemic, educators can move from surviving to leading with presence, balance, and purpose. Connect with us today to organize a burnout prevention and restorative practice training for your institution.
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