Rethinking School Flexibility to Fight Teacher Burnout + Boost Teacher Retention

4 Flexibility Options Schools Need NOW to Retain Great Teachers

In this week's episode, I share something deeply personal that has been on my mind since I left the classroom full-time two years ago. The truth? I never stopped loving teaching or my students - I simply needed more flexibility than traditional school structures could offer.

The Flexibility Crisis in Education

Let's be honest - teaching has become an all-or-nothing profession. You're either in the classroom full-time or completely out of education. This inflexible system is driving away talented educators who love teaching but need options that accommodate:

• Young children at home
• Aging parents requiring care
• Personal health needs
• Work-life balance

In this episode, I explore four potential solutions that could enable teachers to remain in the profession while enjoying more flexibility in their schedules.

They include:

1. Reimagined Sabbaticals
Not just unpaid leave, but structured breaks (6 months to a year) with:

• Partial pay possibilities
• Guaranteed retention of tenure
• Maintained healthcare benefits
• Return-to-position guarantees

2. Expanded Job Shares
Allow two excellent teachers to split one full-time position:

• Flexible scheduling options
• Maintained benefits (critical improvement needed)
• Reduced burnout
• Preserved institutional knowledge
• Collaborative teaching partnerships
• Less disruption for students

3. Reduced Load Contracts
Common in higher education but rarely available in K-12:

• Teach fewer classes/sections
• Perfect for experienced educators
• Opportunity to bring back retired teachers as mentors
• Reduce burnout while maintaining connections

4. Administrative Support Systems
Address the number one complaint: "I love teaching - it's all the OTHER stuff that wears me out"

• Dedicated admin support for paperwork
• Help with data entry, reporting, emails
• Grade management assistance
• Parent communication support
• Reduced mental load for teachers

Bonus Idea: Professional "Break" Bank
Create systems w

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Transcript

 Welcome back, fearless Educators. I hope all is well with you. Crazy time of year for everybody. Hopefully you're not too entrenched with spring fever with the students and state testing and all of those things, and all of the drama. Good Lord in the outside world. Hopefully you're still making some magic in your classrooms.

So this week, something different. This week I am. It's something near and dear to my heart. I'm going to be honest, I thought about this a lot, especially as you know, most of you know that I left teaching full-time in the classroom over two years now. I have really missed it and I've been looking for ways to get back in, but not in a full-time basis.

My issue was never that I didn't love teaching and I didn't love being with students. My issue was that I needed more flexibility in my schedule and teaching Absolutely. Could not offer that to me. Right. I worked for very traditional school district where your options were. Classroom teacher or leave.

That that was about it. There were no kind of flex options, so. I've given a lot of thought to this, and this week I'm going to go into four ways that school districts could really look at retaining excellent people by offering them more flexibility. And hopefully your district offers some of these, and if not, maybe it will give some.

Ideas for you, for things that you could ask for, negotiate for at least, you know, open, expand your mind into some different possibilities. So let's get into it. I think even if you are completely satisfied with teaching, I think it's still good to put some ideas in your mind. I'm gonna keep it short, but let me go into the four areas that I've thought of.

When we get past the intro, okay, see you on the inside. Welcome to the Teacher Self-Care and Life Balance podcast, where we focus all things personal development to help teachers feel empowered to thrive inside and outside of the classroom. If you are passionate about education, but tired of it taking over your whole life, you have found your new home in the podcast universe, you'll love it here.

I'm Grace Stevens, your host, and let's get going with today's show.

Okay. Well, again, this is deeply personal to me because, you know, I have been out for the classroom for two years and it was never about wanting to be away from the kids. It was about needing flexibility. Right? So what if the, the question I'm posing this week is, what if the answer to burnout wasn't to push harder, but to pause smarter?

Right. It seems like, you know, like I love teaching, but I had to step away 'cause there were no in-between options. Right. It's, it's like we've created this system where the only off-ramp is quitting entirely, and that's really just a design flaw. It doesn't need to be that way. Right. It's not. A question just of how much we're working.

It's how inflexible the system is. If you have younger children, if you have aging parents. If you have other things in your life that need you to have a little bit more flexibility in your schedule, you know that teaching just is not that way for you. I, I mean, one of the greatest gifts I remember when I, it was so crazy that it took me the longest time, you know, when I stepped out the classroom full time, I also moved.

Okay. It was one of the reasons, right, I was moving, I didn't really wanna start from scratch all over again in a new school district for just a couple of years. So when you move, what happens? You need a new doctor, you need a new dentist, right? All those things. And it took me such a long time to really understand that when I called, I would just say, Hey, when I, when would you like, when are you available?

And I would say, you know what? Whatever is. Convenient for you. When's your next available appointment? Because for more than 20 years, you already know this. I had to say, I need your last appointment of the day because I could not get to a doctor's office before four 30 or five. And I certainly couldn't justify taking a half day or a day off just for one hour doctor visit or a dental visit, dentist visit, unless it was an emergency.

Right? And that was really compounded during the years that I had children. Young children at home that I needed to get to, doctors and dentists, we would cram it all in during spring break, summer, winter break. You know, we don't always get sick on schedule. I, my poor dads, I. Oh gosh, I remember that he, so my dad had pancreatic cancer.

He was in London, which is a long way away from here. And he had been sick for a while and I'd been holding off, going home, holding off to go there during summer. I. And when I got there during summer, he was really, you know, not in good shape. But he was still able to, you know, enjoy my visit. We had a big family barbecue and I knew that he didn't, well, we both knew.

Everybody knew he didn't have much time left. And I'll never forget, he squeezed my hand and he whispered in my ear when Ivan's leaving and he said, I'll try and die over summer. Now, can you imagine that that is what my parent would have on their mind is that, oh my gosh, I don't wanna die. Right? When school just starts and you have to turn around and come back, and that is indeed what happened.

Schoolhood was just about to start. I was about to change grades, and he passed. And you know, in retrospect now, of course, the, the decision that I made was, Hey, too bad. You gotta start off the year with a sub because I gotta go home. And you know how stressful that is, right? But. Now I have another aging parent.

I don't know when she's gonna get sick or when she's going to need care, and she lives alone, the other side of the world. And I need to have, to have that flexibility in my schedule. I was starting to panic about that. Okay, so every, everybody has a situation. That's just mine. I also happen to have a wonderful partner who retired quite a few years ago.

And to be honest, he was fed up of always traveling over summer when it's expensive and hot and crowded and there are children around and whenever there are children around, my radar is always set on yard duty. I mean, it's beyond a joke. If I'm in an airport and I see children like, where's their grownup?

Where's the adult? When we're around a pool, if, if people aren't watching kids at the pool. You know, I got it is just second nature, right? We're, I didn't wanna be on your hot duty anymore. I didn't wanna be responsible for other people's children. So I really enjoy going on vacation when children, you know, are in school.

So anyway, all of that preamble, you know, that that's inflexibility in the schedule is one of the things that drives our burnout. We can't. Take a pause, a rest, A regroup. A reframe, unless it's on the school schedule and sometimes we don't always have like a mental health crisis perfectly aligned with spring break or or summer, right?

So, okay, so here are some alternatives. I feel like that we need more inter. More options for teachers to make the system more flexible would really enable schools to retain excellent teachers. So here are four ideas. I have one, hopefully this is available. In your district, and that would be to take a sabbatical.

A sabbatical would be like six months to a year with ideally partial pay, or at least the ability to maintain your healthcare benefits, right? And you could use it for whatever recharging, travel, caregiving, professional growth, or anything that you need, but basically you would not lose your tenure.

And your benefits. That's one of the reasons, right, that we're so tied into, oh my gosh. You know, we have this the step up pay scale is based on tenure and many things in school districts are based on tenure and we're afraid of losing it. Right. It's one of the reasons that, it's one of the reasons that people stay in districts, even when they're unhappy, 'cause they don't wanna start from scratch.

A lot of districts if you have, you know, more than 10, 12, 14, 16 years vested and you move to another school district, maybe they'll only pay you five years maximum. On the pay scale, they'll only put you at step five. Right. You know what I'm saying? If you're a teacher that basically, you know, step one, you start at this rate where every year that you work, your pay increases.

So if I have 20 years experience, but I go to a district that will only give me credit for five years, you know, I'm taking a pay cut. Okay, so we need to look at sabbaticals in a new way. Teachers can return re-energized, your attention will go up. It's a model that really promotes, you know, self-care, emotional sustainability.

Lots of people wearing a. Burning out, like have to make this choice between their health, mental, emotional, and their career. Right, and they stay in situations that they're not happy in that maybe if they just took some time off on their own schedule, not in the school schedule, they could reenergize. And regroup, but they're so afraid of doing it because they will lose tenure.

There's no guarantee. Their job will still be there. They'll lose years. And for a lot of teachers who carry the benefits for their whole family, they can't afford to lose their benefits. So even though your district may have a policy on sabbaticals, is it really that supportive? I've worked for a district that did have a policy on sabbaticals, but it didn't guarantee any of those things.

So it wasn't really all that helpful. All right, so we need to rethink sabbaticals. Okay. Number two, and I do know some people in this situation and some districts do a fantastic job of this, and that is job shares where two teachers split up one full time. Role. Now, again, that doesn't lead for long term kind of flexibility.

You're still tied to the school year. But let's say you have aging adults, younger children, you only wanna put your day, your children in daycare a couple of days a week, not the whole week. Or you need flexibility to take your parents to the hospital or to care for them. If you have a job share partner.

You do have, even like traditionally, let's say one week you work Monday, Tuesday, and the following week you work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, right? So between a two week period, you've worked five days, so that's half of your job. But the fact that you have a job share partner does give you a lot of flexibility if you need to switch those days around or.

Be sick or whatever. Instead of calling in for a sub, your job share partner ideally can cover few less disruption for the kids, less disruption for school. Okay. So it is a win-win in a lot of ways. It gives people more flexibility, kind of it preserves that institutional knowledge. There's less disruption for parents, for students.

And let's face it, more than 60% of teachers are women. And we do take on a lot of that burden of care taking, right? And I do know teachers who have very successfully done this for years and years and years, but there's a couple of caveats. One, they didn't need health insurance. Their spouse had a job that could carry them on their health insurance because if you only work half a contract in most districts, you will not qualify for benefits.

But it has allowed, like I said, a lot of time for more flexibility. And for me, I gotta be honest, teaching unless you have an aide, which now you only have them, if when I first started teaching, can you believed 20 something years ago, it was normal just to have an aide half the day, not for any particular surface, just to help you out.

Now it's only if it's a one-on-one or powerful. Professional or for a specific kid. But I always enjoyed having an aide in the room because it's great to have, you know, other adult. Interaction and sometimes teaching can get a little lonely, to be honest. So if you had a job share partner and you had somebody to talk about your shared responsibilities for the class with you know, every week, I think that that's also an extra benefit that maybe we don't think about.

So that's another area that schools could, could do a better job is they could expand. Their idea and their availability for job shares. Do you wanna lose two great teachers, or do you wanna have them share one contract? I think that should be an easy choice. All right, so that's number two, three, and four.

Let's have a look. I'm just gonna throw out some different ideas. That people may not have thought of, and I feel like moving forward would you know what? We managed to do remote teaching. We managed to come back to hybrid teaching. When we were forced to, we got really creative and found some, some ways to work around that were not traditional.

And now that we're back in the classroom full times, it seems like we'd lost that creativity again. That's just my observation, but I don't think I'm alone in that. So let's look at reduced load contracts, right? It very, popular common in higher ed, right? That you would say, Hey, I wanna teach fewer classes this year.

Why don't we have that option in middle high school? Maybe some form of that in elementary school where you take on a lower class load, or how about some kind of fellowship or incentive to bring experienced educators? Back part time in either mentorship roles or. Filling up some of those spots created by a reduced load.

I would love to do that if a school offered that I would be able to do that. You may know that if you take a state pension, there's only so many hours you can work back in a state school. So coming back in a reduced capacity. Would be perfect for a lot of teachers who maybe took early retirement, teachers who come back or administrators come back in some kind of mentorship role, but.

Some kind of job share. We just need to get more creative with that. Okay, so that's kind of number three is looking at reduced load contracts. And one of the ideas that I'm kind of pitching for that is look around at your pool of recently retired teachers maybe that can help you out. And then the last idea is looking at some kind of.

I Bri again, you know, one of the things I hear a lot of frustration around and, you know, I coach teachers. I work with teachers every day. I'm still in schools every day. I hear a lot of complaints and one of the complaints that is so valid is I love teaching. It's all. The other stuff that wears me out.

It seems like we hardly have time for teaching with all the other things we're doing, so we gotta look, how is it that we can offload some of those admin tasks, right? IEPs, data record reporting all of the things, right? If we could have some kind of admin support for teachers that. Does things for them, such as, you know, maybe not go into all the meetings, maybe there are some that teachers still need to do, but there's so much stuff entering grades reporting emails, managing parent questions.

There are just so many things that a teacher does that is really beyond the scope of teaching students that. It could be that one person, even if they just supported the whole grade part-time, part-time person, could completely change the trajectory of that whole grade, the amount of time that they could work together to work on student success, to work on lesson plans, to work on actually teaching.

If one person could take care of some administrative tasks. You know, in high school we have the, the ta, the teacher's assistant. Right? And they're usually more just sorting papers and putting in grades, but even that takes so much time. I just feel like if you did a survey on your campus, if an admin were to ask, tell me 10 things that a reasonably competent person could take off your plate.

What would they be? You would come up with 10, 15, 20 tasks and it would just free up your, not just your schedule, but kind of your mental load to be your best self when you are with the kids. Okay. So we've got, we've got to move beyond the fact that whenever there's anything extra to do, the teachers will do it.

It always gets dumped on our plate. You know, that, that's just unfortunately kind of how the situation has been. Been set up. It's not fair and it's not sustainable. Okay. I'm just gonna say that again, just because it's the way we've always done it. It is just getting ridiculous folks. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir, right?

It is not fair and it is not sustainable. It is driving our burnout. Okay. And one more idea I have, so here's a sneak idea is how about this kind of a professional pause bank, right? Do you know that some districts. Just ridiculous. They even have to do this and donate their sick time to. Teachers, right?

You've seen, I'm sure on social media stories about teachers who got sick needed an extended leave. They were out of days, and then what happens? They have to go on disability, but maybe it doesn't pay full time. And then in a lot of districts, you get paid this differential, like the sub pay comes out of your.

Hey, and you get what's left over. It's, it's kind of like ridiculous. So there are school districts who allow people to donate to pull their extra ETO time so that it can support people who are struggling and who need extra days. Okay? What if we had some kind of system like that where people could donate it, but for burnout leave, not just.

Kind of sick leave. It would take people to be very, you know, kind and altruistic thinking that they can donate their days. But I know there are teachers because we work so many days and it's so painful to get a sub. I mean, there are teachers who have more days accrued than they could ever take off.

Okay. Certainly when your kids are young and you have to take time off to be. Home with them. That seems impossible, that you would imagine you would have so many days you could never use. But certainly people who are older and haven't had young kids at home for a long time, they have lots of, lots of days.

Maybe we could look at some kind of professional pause bank. Okay, so let's look at this then. So, flexible options, I just wanna reiterate, aren't a sign of weakness. We need to build them into the infrastructure. Wow. I struggled on that worder infrastructure for longevity to make it sustainable. And even though administrators will think, oh my goodness, like there's a lot of, that's a lot of work to get these set up.

It is surely less work than. Replacing excellent teachers who are leaving, right? When you think of the recruitment costs, the retraining costs, the burden that it puts on the teachers who are left behind to have to keep retraining new teachers year after year after year, right? We know that that's where we've been.

Okay. And I think that schools are bleeding talent because they're not being willing to think creatively. They're basically, you know what? We don't wanna set a precedent. Isn't that always what you hear when you say, listen, this is my situation. Can we look into doing this this year? Oh, we don't wanna set a precedent.

You know what? Have the courage to set the precedent. That's what I would like to say to your administrator. Be the one. Be the source. Be the one who starts the trend. All right, so those are some options and I feel that if we presented more of these and we're more open to these, we could really help retain excellent teachers.

If you are in a spot where you feel you teaching really is not sustainable for you. I am interviewing somebody, oh, later this week she reached out to me. And I really took a lot look at what she offers and I think, you know, I am not anyone trying to coach anyone out of teaching. You know, I believe teachers can have a long-term, sustainable, joyful career if that is indeed their choice and their passion.

But it is not for everybody. And the fact is that we've been sold this bill of goods that like you were just a teacher. What else are you gonna do in the world? The world doesn't value you. That's what we feel. Absolutely not true. So I'm interviewing later this week a lady called Lisa Harding, who is CEO of a company that helps teachers transition out of teaching and into new.

Careers. She's gonna open our eyes, hopefully to what skills we already have. We sh we sell ourselves short. We have so many skills that we have that we can market ourselves with in the, in the real world, shall we say, the non-academic world. And she has a lot of expertise in helping former teachers present themselves that way.

And present themselves well and open their eyes to new opportunities and easy transitions that they can make. And so she and I are gonna have a conversation at later this week, and I will air that either next week or the following week. So listen out for that. If you rolled your eyes when I kind of brought these ideas forward and you are just thinking, my district would never do that again.

I encourage you. You could be the first, somebody had the first. Somebody, somebody had to be the first person to go in their admin's office and say, listen. I don't wanna quit, but I can't keep doing this and I've already found the perfect teaching partner for me, right? You're gonna be much more successful if you've already found the person you want a job share with, and they're on board.

And you two can put together a compelling case and a proposal and go present it rather than to go in and ask this to be. Problem that your admin needs to fix. They don't listen. They're as strapped for time as you are. They do not have the bandwidth to fix another problem. And if you just go in saying, I want a job share, what do you have for me?

Their answer is gonna be nothing. If you already solve that problem and figure out how you want to do it and just go present it to them, then maybe they will be more open if that is not something that's currently done in your district, to take it to the board. To take it to the district. Okay? So.

Thinking creatively, we need to be able to move with the times. Again. We pivoted over a weekend and went to teaching out of our kitchens after, you know, the traditional school setup of teaching in a classroom has been there for hundreds. Of years and we flipped it over a weekend. Trust me, somebody in your district can figure out a job chair, a sabbatical, some kind of situation where an admin can support all the teachers as opposed to just supporting the admin.

Okay, now, for now, I wish you well. Remember, you can do it. Create your own path. Bring your own sunshine. I appreciate you checking in and listening to this podcast so much. Know that you are not alone. My heart is still with you, and I will talk to you next time.