Why educator wellness requires shared responsibility
If I walk into a room of educators and tell them to “make time for self-care,” I deserve the savage eye-rolling I’m about to receive. More likely than not, teachers are expecting dozens of slides sharing tired, familiar advice such as, “Get more rest,” “It’s ok to set boundaries,” and “Have you tried mindfulness?”
-by Dr. Tim Grivois, Executive Director
I’ve been in those types of sessions, and I’ve been both grateful for new ideas and confused at how out of touch these suggestions seemed to me. People are trying, but the exhaustion persists. As it turns out, no amount of herbal tea or cross fit will change the structural and systemic reasons that people who work in schools are experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress.
Self-care is often framed as a professional responsibility. And while no one can care for a ‘self’ as well as our own selves, when self-care is framed as an individual responsibility, somehow, no one is left to examine the conditions causing the strain in the first place.
If the kind of self-care you’re seeing on Instagram or at a typical teacher in-service hasn’t worked for you, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong.
The Cost of a Narrow View of Self-Care
When school districts tell teachers to make time for self-care, they tacitly ask individuals to internalize systemic strain. Self-care becomes another thing to manage, and often, another area to fall short. Wellness gets mistaken for motivation, resilience, or a matter of personal discipline.
From what I see in my work with teachers, school social workers, counselors, and school and district leaders, the result of an entire staff internalizing systemic strain tends to be a mixture of quiet self-blame, disengagement, or burnout disguised as a personal failing. The truth, however, is that the issue isn’t personal effort. It’s scope.
Wellness Is Shaped By More Than Individual Effort
In schools and districts, wellness is shaped less by individual coping strategies and more by the conditions educators work within each day. Four of the most influential are access, predictability, belonging, and meaning.
Access shows up in whether support is actually usable. Planning time, coverage, mental health resources, and administrative support may exist on paper, but when accessing them feels complicated, inconsistent, or quietly discouraged, educators learn to push through instead. Over time, self-care becomes endurance rather than care.
Predictability affects whether educators can settle into their work. Clear expectations, consistent schedules, and reliable follow-through reduce the constant vigilance that drains energy. When priorities shift without explanation or decisions feel reactive, stress accumulates long before burnout is visible.
Belonging reflects whether educators feel safe being honest. In schools where asking for help is seen as weakness or mistakes carry professional risk, people protect themselves through compliance or withdrawal. What looks like professionalism is often self-protection.
Meaning connects daily effort to purpose. Educators can and will carry a significant workload when their work aligns with shared values and students’ needs. However, when initiatives feel disconnected or imposed, even manageable demands feel heavy.
When these conditions are missing, most wellness initiatives ask individuals to compensate for problems they can’t solve alone. Honestly, when I slow this down with staff, this is often where the room gets quieter. I see teachers shed some of the self-blame they have for their struggles with their own wellness, and I also see something that approaches “peaceful outrage mixed with activism” to live-out-loud a collective approach to wellness at school.
From Naming Strain to Seeing It Clearly
If wellness is shaped by access, predictability, belonging, and meaning, then the next question is not “How do we fix ourselves?” but “How do we see what’s actually under strain?”
This is where most self-care conversations break down. We move too quickly from naming exhaustion to prescribing strategies. We skip the part where people are helped to understand why they feel the way they do and what is contributing to it.
Without a shared way to name strain, wellness stays vague. Support becomes reactive. And people are left trying to solve the wrong problem.
What’s needed first is not another habit, boundary, or mindset shift, but language.
Why I Use a Framework at All
I use the Eight Dimensions of Wellness because complex strain requires structure, not slogans.
A framework does not tell people what to do. It helps them see where pressure is coming from and where support is missing. It creates shared language for experiences that often feel personal, isolating, or hard to articulate.
In schools, this matters because educators are rarely dealing with stress in just one area of their lives. Emotional exhaustion is often tied to occupational strain. Physical fatigue is shaped by schedules and workload. Social withdrawal can be a response to environments that feel unsafe or unpredictable. Financial stress, environmental conditions, and questions of purpose quietly compound what people are already carrying.
Without a framework, these experiences blur together and get labeled as “burnout” or “not coping well.” With a framework, they become visible and discussable.
The Eight Dimensions as a Lens, Not a Checklist
When I use the Eight Dimensions of Wellness, I am not asking educators or leaders to improve all eight areas of their lives. I am not asking for balance. And I am certainly not asking for more effort.
I use the framework as a diagnostic lens.
It allows individuals, teams, and leadership groups to pause and ask:
- Which dimensions are under the most strain right now?
- Which ones are being asked to compensate for others?
- Where are we expecting personal resilience to make up for structural gaps?
Seen this way, the framework reduces self-blame rather than adding responsibility. It helps people separate what is within their control from what is shaped by policy, culture, workload, and systems design.
For leaders, it also surfaces patterns that are easy to miss when wellness is treated as a personal issue rather than an organizational one.
What This Shifts in Schools and Districts
Instead of asking why educators are burned out, teams begin asking what conditions are making recovery difficult.
Planning periods are routinely lost to coverage, emails arrive late at night, and initiatives stack without older ones being retired. Burnout stops looking like a personal issue and starts looking like a predictable response to sustained overload.
Instead of encouraging more self-care, leaders begin examining predictability, workload, and access to support.
This shows up in whether schedules stay stable, whether expectations are clearly prioritized, and whether mental health days can be used without guilt. At the district level, it also means noticing how often guidance shifts midyear, how quickly new initiatives are introduced, and whether schools are given the time and clarity needed to implement them well.
Instead of interpreting disengagement as a lack of commitment, schools begin recognizing it as a signal that belonging or meaning is under strain.
A teacher who stops speaking up in meetings or quietly withdraws from collaboration may not care less. They may no longer feel safe being honest, or may be struggling to see how their effort connects to students in the way it once did.
These patterns are why I use the Eight Dimensions of Wellness. The framework helps schools and districts name where strain is showing up, understand how different pressures interact, and move conversations about wellness away from individual coping and toward shared responsibility.
A More Honest Approach to Educator Wellness
Wellness should not feel like another performance, expectation, or area of evaluation. It should create clarity, reduce pressure, and make it easier to speak honestly about capacity.
The Eight Dimensions of Wellness give us a way to do that. Not by offering answers, but by helping us ask better questions.
When people are given language to describe what they are carrying, they are no longer left trying to carry it alone or explain it away as personal failure.
Wellness, at its best, should make systems more humane and remind people they do not have to carry their work alone.
Author’s note: I wrote this after years of facilitating educator wellness conversations in schools and districts and noticing how often educators blamed themselves for conditions they did not create. The Eight Dimensions of Wellness became a way to slow those conversations down, name strain more honestly, and shift responsibility back toward shared systems rather than individual endurance.