When it comes to improving teacher morale, consistent teamwork—and a little bit of grace—matters more than performative support.
Education Week’s 2026 State of Teaching survey found that teacher morale nationwide had fallen slightly since the previous year. Practitioners at an Education Week symposium on teacher morale here on Tuesday said leaders who want to keep happy teachers need to address work-life balance and classroom climate.
“Teachers are telling us that their job is unmanageable; they have been saying that for the last few years,” said Shawn Bird, the deputy superintendent of the San Antonio Independent school district.
A 2025 study by the Rand Corp. think tank concluded that the education profession has become less flexible, and teachers face more job intrusions into their personal lives, than do similarly educated workers in other professions.
Younger teachers, particularly those with children of their own, “have just got to a point in their life where they need more flexibility,” Bird said, “and we have to respond to that, because I think the days of the 30-year career educator are gone.”
Teachers today experience a lot more “role creep,” being asked to do additional, often unpaid, jobs that take time away from planning and instruction and eat up free time, too, according to Hallie Gelabert, a teacher and instructional facilitator at the CAST Teach High School in the Northside Independent school district in Leon Valley, Texas.
“Now more than ever, teachers and administrators rely on each other to run our campus,” Gelabert said. “Creating that partnership where we can help each other is the most positive thing that you can do.”
Small courtesies and flexibilities go a long way to making the workload easier for teachers to bear, the teachers here said. A principal who covers a teacher’s class for an hour so that the teacher can get to a medical appointment without taking a half-day of leave, for example, is more likely to have a teacher willing to tutor on a Saturday, Gelabert noted.
“It’s those really tangible deposits that an administrator can make so that teachers would be willing to make those back,” she said.
Ongoing professional support
Teachers and leaders alike agreed that novice educators need more ongoing professional development than basic mentoring programs.
Bird said he’s seen two compounding challenges: more students who have experienced academic, social, and developmental disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, who are now taught bynew teachers entering through alternative-preparation programs with less student-teaching practice.
Both teacher mental health stresses and student-behavior problems have been exacerbated by teachers “coming into the classroom without the skills to handle the students they have,” he said.
Teachers and students alike seem less confident, Gelabert said. “Teachers, we’re told to make really engaging lessons, and sometimes [doing so] an feel like an act,” she said.
Teachers and leaders at the symposium said they see more students with shorter attention spans and less stamina for long or self-directed assignments, which puts pressure on teachers to structure tasks for every minute of the day.
“Maybe teachers are second-guessing themselves—and you know, [students] can smell fear,” said Elizabeth Sanchez, an executive master teacher at theof Somerset Independent school district southwest of San Antonio. Sanchez, who co-teaches in 3rd and 4th grades, said more collaborative instruction can ease stress, particularly for new teachers. “Wherever the need is, our structure of support allows our positions to be flexible and to go help,” Sanchez said.
She urged stressed teachers to fight the itch to micromanage and encourage more student ownership of learning.
“We have to push to the students: ‘OK, here’s your task, you’re the leader. Go,’” she said. “That way we prevent the exhaustion from the teachers happening, because I don’t have to keep going 100% of the time. I just have to know what I’m doing and monitor.”
School leaders can also help teachers regain ownership of their instruction, in the face of changing curricula or standardized testing, said Joaquin Hernandez, the principal of MacArthur High School in the city’s North East Independent school district .
“Some of the creativity that happens in classrooms has really been squashed so that we can reach that rating that we are all pressured to get,” Hernandez said. “That is a big thing that a lot of people don’t really say out loud, but we’ve really given it a floor at my school, to understand what is it we need to do so we can be successful.”
