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[Abstract]
Teacher burnout is a chronic phenomenon that causes high percentage of attrition in the education profession. If not handled effectively, burnout can increase absenteeism and counterproductive instruction which negatively impacts quality of learning for students. Teacher attrition cost school districts billions of dollars per year across the United States. In this quantitative research, the psychological breakdown of a teacher burnout experience was attempted to be quantified. Data was collected from 162 rural Ohio school teachers and measured teachers' sense of personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization as three identified components of burnout. Results showed that burnout experience significantly varied by gender regardless of teaching experience. The results of this study may lead to gender specific intervention techniques to normalize the burnout effect.
[Keywords] Burnout, Depersonalization, Emotional Exhaustion, Personal Accomplishment, Teacher Attrition, Veteran Teachers
Introduction
Teacher burnout is a chronic phenomenon that continues to be a main cause of teacher exodus in the 21st century. Burnout is a precursor to teacher attrition (Lavian, 2012). Teaching is an emotionally draining and physically exhausting profession that causes many teachers to look for other occupations (Riggs, 2013). In addition, teachers who fail to handle burnout effectively are likely to experience poor quality student interaction, counterproductive instruction, increased absenteeism, which eventually leads to teacher attrition (Suh, 2015). Teacher turnover (30%) is higher than for other professionals, such as pharmacist (14%), engineers (16%), nurses (19%), lawyers (19%), architects (23%), and police (28%) (Ingersoll & Perda, 2014; Riggs, 2013).
In the United States, for the 2004-2005 school year, teacher attrition for first year teachers was 12.3%. Beginning-year math teacher attrition rates increased to 14.5%; science teacher attrition was the highest with 18.2% (Ingersoll, Merrill, & May, 2012). Moreover, 24.6% of teachers with little or no traditional teaching preparation left the teaching profession. The attrition percentage rate was lowest (9.8%) for teachers who earned their degree through the traditional comprehensive pedagogy (Ingersoll et al., 2012), which could be an indicator of traditional pedagogy preparing educators for their job requirements.
Within the first five years of novice teachers starting their professional paths in education, 50% or approximately half a million educators move to another school district or leave the education profession all together (Alliance for Excellent, 2014; Neason, 2014; Phillips, 2015;...