Teacher burnout has reached crisis levels, and proposed solutions often miss the mark. Another professional development session on self-care. Another webinar on stress management. Another reminder to practice gratitude. These well-meaning interventions place the burden on individual teachers to cope with systemic problems: inadequate funding, unrealistic mandates and stretched resources.
But what if the conversation shifted from what teachers should do differently to what conditions actually allow teaching to be sustainable? According to Dr. Damian Vaughn, chief programs officer at BetterUp, the answer isn’t about individual resilience. It’s about how we design the environments where teaching happens. “We’re asking schools to do near impossible things with shrinking resources,” Vaughn says.
Vaughn is a former NFL player turned organizational psychologist who has spent years studying high-performing teams in sports, military and educational settings. He spoke with EdSurge about what gets in the way of sustainable teaching and what becomes possible when the right conditions exist.
EdSurge: What can education learn from sports and the military about sustained performance?
Vaughn: Sports teams and military units understand something essential: Sustained performance is a function of rhythm, recovery, clarity, trust and shared purpose, not grinding people into compliance. High-performing teams obsess over what I call “the four Cs”: communication, cohesion, clarity and collective accountability.
The best athletic programs periodize training. They alternate between high-intensity work and active recovery because they understand adaptation happens in the rest period, not just in the training itself. Schools operate the opposite way: constant demands, no recovery, relentless urgency — and then we’re shocked when people burn out.
Here’s what I’d love to see: schools that design their calendars, their professional development, their expectations around the actual neurobiology of sustained performance rather than industrial-era assumptions about productivity. Build in recovery periods. Create genuine team cohesion. Celebrate collective wins, not just individual achievements. That’s not about importing military culture into schools — it’s about respecting how human systems stay healthy and effective over time.
What does it look like when a school leader leads from presence rather than pressure?
When a leader leads from presence, the whole system exhales — and I mean this physiologically, not metaphorically. It’s a leader who walks into a meeting and actually sees people, not as resources to deploy or problems to solve, but as human beings with their own nervous systems, histories and capacities. They respond with what’s needed rather than with what the constant-urgency culture demands.
Pressure narrows attention: It activates threat responses, collapses creativity and makes everyone smaller. Presence expands attention: It activates what polyvagal theory calls the ventral vagal system, the state where collaboration, creativity and higher-order thinking become possible.
A leader’s nervous system is the tuning fork for the entire building. When they regulate themselves, everyone else stabilizes. When they operate from chronic activation and urgency, everyone inherits that panic. I’ve worked with leaders who’ve transformed entire school cultures not by implementing a new program, but by doing their own contemplative practice consistently and showing up more regulated. The ripple effects are measurable: teacher retention improves, student behavior incidents decrease, creative problem-solving increases. This isn’t soft skills; this is the hardest leadership work there is, because it requires you to work on yourself first.
How can leaders protect attention and energy in schools where demands never stop?
Attention is the rarest resource in modern education — rarer than money, rarer than time, definitely rarer than new initiatives. Protecting it requires boundaries: fewer goals, clearer priorities, shorter meetings, strategic “no’s” to things that don’t serve the core mission, and explicit breaks where people can actually recover.
Energy protection is cultural more than tactical. It requires leaders to celebrate recovery, not just effort, to normalize stepping back to reset, to model boundaries themselves, to resist the toxic productivity culture that treats burnout as a badge of honor. The best school leaders I work with understand that sustainable high performance requires what organizational psychologists call “strategic renewal” — built-in cycles of exertion and recovery. You can’t sprint a marathon, and you can’t ask humans to operate at full capacity without recovery periods and expect anything other than eventual system collapse.
Schools that treat attention as sacred perform better across every metric that matters. Not because people are working less, but because when they work, they’re actually present, focused and capable of the kind of thinking that education requires.
When schools provide those conditions, what becomes possible in classrooms?
When the right conditions exist, you feel it before you can measure it. There’s this quiet hum of shared attention where everyone is leaning in because something real is happening. Students move from following directions to generating insights. The teacher’s energy shifts from managing to catalyzing: Their nervous system settles, their creativity expands and suddenly they’re responding to the room with more flexibility.
The lesson becomes a dialogue rather than a monologue. Humor and connection show up naturally, improvisation becomes possible, and they stop fighting for attention because attention is willingly given. Both teachers and students lose track of time in the best possible way — because they’re so absorbed in collaborative thinking. That’s the difference between surviving the year and remembering why you signed up for this impossible, beautiful profession in the first place.
What would you say to an educator experiencing burnout?
I’d say this gently, without an ounce of judgment: Burnout isn’t a personal failure; it’s a message from your nervous system asking for different conditions. You didn’t get here because you’re weak or uncommitted. You got here because you’ve been operating in a system that demands more than any human nervous system can sustainably provide without adequate recovery and support.
The path back often starts through micro-moments, not grand transformations. Two minutes of genuine curiosity about a student’s question instead of rushing to the next thing. A spark of unexpected connection when someone shares something real. One lesson in which you follow your own interests instead of strictly adhering to the pacing guide.
Start by reclaiming even small pockets of autonomy. Reconnect with what originally drew you to this work, not the romantic fantasy, but the real moments of aliveness. Notice what lights you up, even a little bit. Protect that. Build around that.
You may find that a boundary is needed — not as a personal shortcoming, but as a realistic response to unsustainable conditions. You might need to say no to something that everyone expects you to say yes to. You might need to lower the bar on perfection and raise the bar on presence. I’m not asking you to fix the system or become a superhero. I’m inviting you to tend to your own nervous system with the same compassion you show your students. Teaching can still be a source of meaning and vitality instead of just exhaustion, but the path there isn’t through doing more — it’s through creating the spaciousness for aliveness to return.
