Transcript

Lori: Hello, Katrina. Welcome to the podcast.

Katrina: Thank you so much, Lori. I appreciate being here.

Lori: Well, I’m really excited to talk with you today. It’s an important topic that we’ll be discussing, and I don’t think it’s discussed enough, and that’s teacher burnout. How prevalent is chronic stress and burnout in education, especially right now?

Katrina: Well, it’s a lot more prevalent than you think. I think the most recent statistics on burnout for K-12 teachers is at 52% in 2025, right? And I think that when I was writing the book, actually 2024, it was 44%. So it’s still rising, which I thought was remarkable. We’re just continuing to become more and more burned out as we go.

And then also what people don’t realize is it’s not just teachers. We’re talking about administrators and principals. I read a study recently that 40% had considered resigning because of stress, workload, and lack of support. Those are all factors that lead to burnout. So administrators are feeling it. I noticed school social workers had the same type of trend. Over half of them, they report various symptoms of burnout, like chronic fatigue, feeling detached from the work. Those are symptoms of burnout.

So we can honestly say that we’re looking at least half of educators, no matter their role, are suffering from burnout or at least precursors to burnout. And to be honest with you, that was higher than even I thought.

Lori: Yeah. Well, what do these statistics tell us?

Katrina: I think what it tells us is that we need some kind of solution, because what’s happening is these levels of burnout result in high absenteeism, massive turnover, the breakdown in collaboration, and a breakdown in a supportive culture. There’s so many effects of it. It tells us that we have got to address the problem. We have got to find solutions for the problem.

And I think what happens in many cases is that we realize that we can’t always control the district mandates, the state mandates. These are things that are outside of our control. But I think one way that we can address the problem directly is in controlling our response to stress, to overwhelm, to having so many multiple tasks and expectations going on at once. We can control our response to that.

That’s really my goal, is to help educators develop a core skill set that they can use so that they actually have increased job satisfaction, they have productive communication and collaboration in the school setting, and it even results in responsive leadership when you have the skills you need to mitigate burnout and stress.

That was a very long answer, Lori, so I’m not sure.

Lori: No, it wasn’t. That was perfect. I think we could even speak longer about it. So I am going to just ask you a little bit more. When we talk about the impact, you talked about the chronic fatigue, the stress, the turnover in schools, and I’m curious what that does for our students, what it does to teams and the school culture.

Katrina: Yeah. And probably one of the things I didn’t mention, which to me is the most disheartening piece of it, is that burnout leads to educators losing their passion for the work. What happens is they end up trying to endure it and pretty much counting down days until the next calendar break. I know I’ve certainly done that. Many of my colleagues still do that. And that has a direct impact on the quality of relationships. And I’m talking relationships with students, with families, with colleagues, and it impacts the classroom outcomes as well, because you’re basically just trying to get by.

You can’t do, you don’t feel you can do your best work, and when you lose your passion, you’re really just getting by. And that shows up throughout the entire system, if that makes sense.

Lori: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I’m just curious, what do you think it is right now? Why are these statistics so high? What is the cause?

Katrina: Well, I think part of it, realistically, there are several causes. There are increasing demands, whether you’re a regular education teacher, whether you’re special education. The increasing demands are really taking their toll. People have, so you’re not just teaching anymore. There are so many expectations. And I know your listeners know what they are. I don’t need to go into those, but I think that’s part of the issue there.

And you don’t have adequate time to recover in between all of the demands that you have, so that leads to burnout. And I think, honestly, educators are required to do so many things at once, right? It’s not just, especially special educators. I mean, you’re prepping for various grade levels, and not just grade levels, but also instructional levels. You’re attending sometimes litigious IEP meetings, dealing with advocates, being questioned on your work a lot. Those kinds of demands, those kinds of heavy burdens are causing people to just feel overwhelmed on a regular basis.

And I don’t know if that really answered your question because I went off on my own tangent.

Lori: No, it’s all good. And I would agree with you about these special educators, in that it’s all of that and the pressure you feel of you wanting to do your very best for the children with whom you support and sometimes feeling inadequate in your training and your practice, and that causes so much stress.

Katrina: It really does, especially when this was something that you started out passionate about, and you realize, I can’t do what I really want to do here. And so unfortunately, I think part of it is our external factors, like I said, that we can’t necessarily control, because other things like classroom sizes, the complexity of students, those are all very real, but those are things outside of our control.

I think where we’ve missed the mark is that we’re not preparing educators to deal with the stress that comes with the work. I remember early on in my teaching career, the stress was, and this was 20-something years ago, I started out as a special education teacher and went into leadership later. But even 20-something years ago, I was told, “Hey, this is the nature of the beast. This is what it’s like. This is how it is to be an educator.” And I remember thinking, okay, well where are the strategies to deal with that? If this is the nature of the beast, then do we have anything we can do to keep ourselves balanced and to foster resilience?

Because I love the work. I loved the students, of course. I loved the colleagues, some of the most incredible people in the world, but it wasn’t enough to sustain me and keep me from getting depleted and having those precursors to burnout.

Lori: Yeah, I would agree. There’s so much that needs to happen in teacher programs. I guess they’re teaching programs, to get, you know, like, I think about my first day of teaching, I was like, what? Oh, kids are misbehaving. What do I do?

Katrina: They’re not doing what I tell them to do.

Lori: Right, exactly. Oh, I have a grade book. I mean, this is close to 30 years ago. I have a grade book. How am I supposed to fill this out? What do I do with it? Right? So there’s so much. But when you think about just dealing with the stress and overwhelm and how do you work with parents and how do you work with administration and so many complex relationships that happen.

Katrina: Yeah. And every one of them matter immensely. And I think that’s where we’ve kind of missed the mark. We’re not equipping these teachers or principals, all of the school staff, aren’t taught how to stay centered, balanced. They are taught basics, but certainly not to the point where you can literally navigate your school day from a place of composure.

And then also some of those external emotional intelligence skills like empathy and social skills, you have to consciously cultivate those, because the more stressed out you become, the more detached you become. And then it’s much harder to access empathy, much harder to access probably what you’ve been taught on social skills or social awareness. It’s tough to read nonverbal cues and to show empathy when you are dealing with so much stress and fatigue. You really access.

So the idea is to start from within. And a lot of people think emotional intelligence sort of revolves around self-help or wellness. And I’m not saying that it doesn’t. I guess it certainly does. But there are programs out there and there is research out there that shows when you develop emotional intelligence skills as a core competency, then you change the game really, because now you have the internal competencies to mitigate your own stress, and that just has a ripple effect throughout the school, throughout the community.

And when a whole school takes this on, the results, I mean, the research is very clear. There’s a lot of research through the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence Development and also through CASEL and other programs out there that are showing all the things we just talked about change once you start integrating this systemwide.

I mean, it can definitely help on an individual level, but when you’re bringing it into the system, well now you’re looking at increased job satisfaction, better collaboration, a sense of well-being, overall resilience is higher, staff turnover decreases, so staff retention increases. I mean, it really changes the game. And then burnout symptoms are significantly reduced. That’s because now you have the core competencies and the skills to mitigate all of that within yourself, because again, you really don’t have a lot of control.

I mean, I still believe in advocating for changes to mandates that are overwhelming and different things on the outside. Absolutely keep advocating for that. But in the meantime, work on yourself first and learn how to navigate through all of that, because that’s really the key, I think, to long-term happiness in your career and long-term success too. I mean, you want to thrive in your work, right? You don’t want to just hang on or endure. You want to be able to thrive.

Lori: Absolutely. Well, do you think most schools and districts are truly addressing this problem, or what do you see out there?

Katrina: Gosh, I don’t think, I don’t want to say they do nothing, because I think they’re trying. I think they are aware, is the thing. They know it’s an issue and they know how much it contributes to attrition and staff turnover and things of that nature. And I also know that all of that affects their students. It affects the whole system.

So I think they know about it, and I think that’s one of the reasons that they’ve brought in a lot of initiatives or trainings on compassion fatigue, trauma-informed care. There’s a lot of different individual sessions. So I think they’re trying to address it and they’re certainly acknowledging that it’s there. But as far as what they’re doing at a larger district or state level, I just don’t think they’re looking at the research.

Because if you include this work either in the universities, before teachers actually graduate and go out into the field, teach them what they need to learn in order to manage their own stress so that they stop burnout before it ever starts. Then the same in the school systems. Let’s do professional development on this. Let’s make this a core competency development requirement, or at least exposure to it. And there are schools that are doing that, and those are the schools that are giving us the data that shows the effectiveness of it.

Lori: Okay, so how can school leaders create these conditions where staff feel supported without adding one more initiative to everyone’s plate, which adds to burnout, right?

Katrina: Oh my gosh, yes. Yes. And I think that’s where the kind of work that I’m trying to do, when I wrote Transformational Tools, I wanted the tools to be something you could integrate within five or ten minutes. Let’s not just add a lot of different activities to a person’s workload. Just something you can do in five minutes, maybe ten minutes at the most.

And so a lot of these emotional intelligence skills can be integrated in that way. So if schools and districts start supporting the development of these competencies, then you’ll find that practicing them throughout the day, it’s very easy to integrate and it doesn’t feel overwhelming. And in fact, you kind of start looking forward to, okay, it’s one o’clock and this is the time where I do five minutes of breath work, and you do your five minutes of breath work, and then you keep moving. And so it’s not something that has to overwhelm, if that.

Lori: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This sounds like a solution, which I was just going to ask you. When you think about real solutions, what actually helps educators build long-term professional sustainability?

Katrina: And that seems, for me, really it’s all about integrating emotional intelligence skills as a core competency. I really think that when we start looking at that as something that you need in the work and something you must develop in the work, I think that changes, that just changes everything. It changes your relationships. They become more meaningful. It changes how you feel on the inside. I mean, really, the ripple effect and of course classroom outcomes.

I think I mentioned the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. When the schools that they worked with through their program, it’s called RULER, all of those schools talked about the student outcomes, the classroom management that became easier, the test scores that improved.

Think about it. We talked a minute ago about how when you get stressed, you’re not necessarily giving your best self. Well, when you’ve mitigated that stress, now the teacher in the classroom is showing up as his or her best self. So that’s a huge difference, and it impacts students in a very positive way.

Lori: Yeah. Well, tell me a little bit more about what might happen to schools when educators do lose that passion that you were talking about earlier for the work or when they begin to leave this field entirely.

Katrina: Yeah. And that’s one of the saddest things. I mean, the most glaring and obvious one is teacher vacancies, right? I mean, when people start to become overwhelmed to the point where they’re calling in sick more than they’re coming to work, or they just can’t take it anymore and they leave the field. I mean, there are many districts where staff vacancies just remain unfilled. And of course, we know how this impacts kiddos, and we know how this impacts the school.

So that’s one thing. But then also, if you have a team working together and one or two members are dealing with high levels of burnout, well then naturally what happens is they stop engaging as much, right? They’re not putting forth the effort because they’re trying to protect themselves. I mean, it’s not that they’re being lazy. They’re just trying to protect what little energy they have left.

Well, the task gets reassigned to other team members and someone else has to pick up the slack, and then there’s a cascading effect where you’ve got a team, but there are several people in the team that aren’t really functioning. So you’ve got everybody else trying to carry the weight, and now that person’s becoming overwhelmed and that person’s becoming burned out. So it really is a cascading effect, even if you just have a couple of people. But I think what we’re finding is you don’t just have a couple of people. You may have 30% or more of the people in your building suffering from burnout or the precursors of burnout.

And now you’re talking about a complete system breakdown, right? And it’s really hard to educate our kids and to thrive and excel in your work when that’s going on within your system.

Lori: You know, I’m thinking about the tools. You mentioned earlier to me that you’d be happy to share a couple of your tools during our session. And before I ask you to introduce some of those for me, I’m wondering if some of these tools can be done with the students. I’m thinking about the breath work that you just mentioned. It seems like that would be something that you could easily build into the school day.

Katrina: You’re absolutely right, Lori. That’s one of the beautiful things about it. I think when educators start doing it for themselves, it’s sort of natural that they, you know how we as educators, when we’re doing something interesting, we just naturally want to share that with our students. I think most everyone I know has done that, including myself. So we like, “Oh, and by the way, I’m using this technique and it really works. Let’s all try it.”

So absolutely. I mean, there are some curriculums that focus on SEL and social-emotional learning for kids, but again, we never focus on social-emotional competence for the adults. And that’s the thing. You’re teaching this to children when you may not have the skills yourself. So that’s one of the things that Yale University kind of uncovered. Is it reasonable to be teaching these skills when you have deficits and you need to be balanced yourself?

So yes, I think that is one of the reasons why student outcomes start to get better. I think some of these tools get shared with the kids. Absolutely.

Lori: Nice. Thanks. All right, so can you introduce one or two of your tools and explain how they help?

Katrina: Yes, I’ll introduce one today. So the tools in Transformational Tools, there’s 22 of them, and they span across the five emotional intelligence domains. So it’s kind of hard to select one because it depends on what kind of tool you’re looking for. But certainly the internal tools, self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, those are kind of the foundation. And then you get into the external, which is empathy and social skills.

So I’m going to go with self-awareness because that’s one of the first domains that people usually try to develop. And let me ask you a question. So have you ever, you seem like a really calm and balanced person, so this may not apply to you, but have you ever had an incident that caused you stress or upset, and then all of a sudden you reacted without thinking and you reacted in a very intense manner, and then afterward you ask yourself, where did that come from? Has that ever happened to you?

Lori: Yes, that does happen to me. Well, I can answer that. I think that it’s because instead of acting with my executive functioning skills, I go straight into my fight-flight reflex.

Katrina: Yes, yes, absolutely. And we all do it, right? I mean, trust me when I say, you know, my hair’s got a tinge of red in it, so you can imagine I can get a little feisty. That’s definitely happened to me on more than one occasion.

So that’s something that a self-awareness tool can really help with. And what happens for educators is throughout their day, they’re getting more and more on them, they’re getting more and more stressed. And so to be honest, it’s more and more likely that they may have a reaction like that because by 2:30 or 3:00 o’clock, I don’t know, they’ve done a million things, they’re trying to solve a million problems. I mean, at that point, when someone says or does something that’s off-putting, it’s not unusual to just react.

So one of the tools that helps with that is called affect labeling. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of that before, but it’s where you basically take time throughout your day. I think three times a day is a great place to start, but you basically stop and think about, okay, what am I feeling right now? And the key is to name it as precisely as possible. So you don’t want to say, “I feel good.” What you want to say is, and you just mentioned executive functioning, you want to engage your cognition, right? So you want to say, “I feel content. I feel ecstatic. I feel excited.” You want to get very specific about definitions.

And weirdly enough, just naming the emotion, as you just said, pulls you right out of your reactivity that’s going on and brings you into your cognition, and that brings a place of clarity immediately. I mean, that only takes a minute or two. And if you want to, you can even rate, okay, so I feel frustrated. How can I rate that from one to four? So you can even get into more detail if you want to. But just labeling it alone is amazing.

And one of the things that I always recommend to people, and I have no affiliation with this app at all, I just think it’s amazing, and it comes out of Yale and there’s no ads, it’s completely free. It’s called How We Feel. And you can download that, pull it up, and it will give you four big categories to choose from so you can label your emotion, right? And when you click it, then it gives you all these different descriptors to go with that emotion so you can pinpoint all the way down to a T what you’re feeling.

And of course that too engages cognition, and then it gives you suggestions, and it’s just a really great way to. And they’ve used that in the schools as well. The schools that are integrating this kind of thing, they’re using that. So I think affect labeling is easy, it’s quick, you can use an app, and on the app you can actually schedule check-ins so you can make sure to do it two or three times a day.

And then what that does is it makes you self-aware. It makes you aware of what’s going on. It also makes you aware of your triggers, right? Because when you get frustrated, then you can ask yourself, well, what caused that? Because sometimes we’re not even aware. We just let things go, right? And then when you check in at noon, let’s say I’m feeling really irritated and you really don’t know why, well then you start asking, I wonder why I feel irritated. You know what I’m saying? So there’s cognitive processing and you can start to identify your triggers. And of course, forewarned is forearmed. You can make sure that, okay, that usually triggers me. I need to go ahead and prepare for some emotions and I’m going to mitigate that because I’m aware of it. That’s self-awareness. It’s very powerful.

Lori: Yeah. Well, I’m thinking back to when I was in the classroom full time, and I found that what I noticed through time is that when I was feeling the most frustrated with my students, it was actually a reflection of how I was feeling inside.

Katrina: So true.

Lori: Yeah, it wasn’t the students so much. They were doing the same thing probably that they always did, but it was how I was feeling throughout the day which led to my reactions.

Katrina: So true. Same.

Lori: That would have been a really helpful tool to use, to label how I’m feeling.

Katrina: Yeah. And the other thing is when you do these kinds of activities throughout your school day, and I do have a whole chapter in the book on neuroplasticity, because the reason I named it Transformative is because when you use this on a regular basis, right, then identifying your emotions is your default over time. And that’s because of neuroplasticity. The more you practice this type of thing, the more your brain, excuse me, the more your brain will change so that becomes your default instead of the reaction.

And that’s what’s powerful to me, is when you start to use these tools, these strategies, these techniques, the more consistently you do it, the more it becomes a way of being for you. So that’s not to say you’ll never have a reaction again, but the chances of it happening are certainly lowered considerably.

Lori: Nice. Well, tell us about your book. You’ve alluded to it, so share, please.

Katrina: Okay. So, well, the book is really, you know, I wrote it for special educators, but honestly, these tools are appropriate for anyone, including regular education teachers or just people in general. But they cover the five domains of emotional intelligence, and there are tools and strategies for each of the five domains, right?

So then it also goes into apps that you can use, because I’m all about, you know, if you want to use technology, great. If you don’t, you can just try the strategy without it. But you’re really just trying to develop the five core emotional intelligence domains, and that’s what the book is about. There’s also a workbook that comes with that really gets you hands-on into practicing the strategies because some of them are a little more complex and need a little more time before you can start actually utilizing them day to day.

So it’s really to help educators thrive and excel in their work. I’m trying to give them tools that can empower them so that their passion is restored, their connection to purpose is restored. There are tools in there to reconnect with your purpose. I mean, like I said, for me, it’s about having educators stay in the field and truly enjoy what they’re doing again.

Lori: Yeah. Perfect. Well, I’m excited to read it.

Katrina: Oh, thank you.

Lori: Well, Katrina, I think that’s all we have time for today. Thank you so much for giving us all this wonderful advice. And I’ve learned so much just from this short time with you. So I hope everyone will go and pick up your book. And also I’m going to put the app that you mentioned in our show notes so people can access it. So thank you.

Katrina: Thank you so much, Lori. I appreciate you. Thank you.