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Teacher Well-Being: Promoting Social-

Emotional Learning to Alleviate Burnout

By Laura Isbell and Karyn Miller

Teachers’ well-being matters. At a time when teachers are leaving the profession at a growing
rate, education stakeholders need to provide support for teachers professionally and personally.
Support through social-emotional learning provides teachers with the necessary skills to
manage stressors, reduce burnout, and improve retention. The authors argue that teachers must
feel valued and encouraged by a professional envrionment that acknowledges, cares about, and
fosters teachers’ social and emotional health.

–12 teachers in the United States are burned out. According to a recent national
Ksurvey of National Education Association (NEA) members, 90% of teachers
report that burnout is a serious issue (Walker, 2022). Similarly, 59% of teachers
express personally experiencing burnout (Steiner et al., 2022). At a time when
teachers must attend to students’ unprecedented learning loss, behavioral issues, and
increased social and emotional needs (Steiner et al., 2022), the well-being of our
teachers is suffering (Robinson et al., 2022).
This is not a trivial concern. Teachers’ well-being is inversely associated with
turnover; in other words, teacher are more likely to consider exiting the profession
when their sense of well-being declines (Steiner et al., 2022). Although some
nationally representative survey data optimistically suggest that 85% of teachers
plan to stay in the classroom their entire career (Educators for Excellence, 2022),
teachers’ desire to leave the classroom is on the rise. According to the NEA study,
55% of teachers are considering leaving the profession early (Walker, 2022), while
research conducted by the RAND Corporation indicates that 30% were considering
or planned to leave teaching at the end of the 2021–2022 school year (Doan et al.,
2022). Teachers of color disproportionately report poor well-being and a desire to
exit the profession (Steiner et al., 2022; Walker, 2022).
Amid concerns of a worsening teacher shortage (Carver-Thomas et al., 2021),
new preliminary evidence suggests approximately 36,500 teacher positions are
vacant and 163,000 positions are held by underqualified teachers (Nguyen et
al., 2022). Although these numbers reflect complex issues related to the teacher
pipeline, recruitment, and retention, evidence indicates that stress, even before the
coronavirus pandemic, is a key reason why practicing teachers leave (Diliberti et
al., 2021). To recruit and retain a qualified and diverse teaching force, education
stakeholders must first acknowledge that teachers’ well-being matters. Beyond
simple acknowledgement, we argue that teachers’ social and emotional learning
(SEL) needs must be better supported throughout their professional life cycle to
help them manage stressors, reduce burnout, and improve retention.

Supporting Teachers’ Well-Being is Critical
Although the definition of well-being is often contested (Hascher & Waber,
2021), Seligman (2011) argued it is composed of five elements, including positive
emotions and relationships. SEL is concerned, in part, with identifying and regulating
emotions and improving relationships (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and

20 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators