When you spend your days in the classroom, you may find that once you leave for the day, the mental load of teaching still weighs on you. This is something that I faced when dealing with teacher workload as a primary teacher. Things got to the point that I couldn’t find enjoyment in any of the things I used to do. I wasn’t present with my family, and I ultimately suffered teacher burnout.
It wasn’t until I learned new habits to help reduce the mental load of teaching that I was able to turn things around. While teaching can be an all-encompassing job with a ton of emotional labor involved, there are ways to manage the mental load and reduce your teacher stress so you can live a full life outside of your career.
How to Reduce the Mental Load of Teaching
Mental load happens when you’re trying to remember every tiny detail and have to make the same decisions over and over. Following are several strategies that helped me work smarter as a teacher. These strategies can help manage an excessive workload and make the teaching profession more manageable.
Especially for new teachers, having the right systems and strategies can help teachers’ mental health and ensure that you’re able to have a positive impact for years to come.
Get Tasks Out of Your Head
There’s a never-ending string of tasks that come in when you’re a teacher. One of the best practices for reducing your mental load around the number of tasks is to have a clear way to get them out of your head. Then, you can reference them without having to hold onto them.
A good system will have a place to record:
- What the task is
- The deadline to complete the task
- Who is responsible for the task
- Who, if anyone, you need to report to
- Any resources associated with completing the task, such as pertinent links or references
Types of Tasks that Contribute to the Mental Load of Teaching
Make sure to differentiate between single tasks, ongoing projects, or reference materials. For instance:
Single Tasks: Require no more than one or two steps to complete. Usually a one-off item, such as “upload information about xyz to parent portal.” These should have some type of task manager or planner to help you remind you of due dates. This is essentially your to-do list.
Ongoing Projects: These are things such as administrative work that you’ll return to throughout the week, term, or school year. These can be things like marking, lesson planning, and reporting student behaviors. These are best handled with time blocks throughout your week or day. Each time block should have a list of specific items that you would like to accomplish during that time.
For instance, from 3:30 to 4:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you will do behavior reporting, and you’ll have a list of specific items to do for a specific time block. Having designated time to do certain types of tasks, and knowing exactly what needs to be done when you sit down during that designated time, keeps you from working long hours when you don’t really need to. This is also critical to teacher well-being.
Reference Materials: These are things that you may need to refer to throughout the school year. Have a designated folder or document on your computer where you keep pertinent links or files. Additionally, have a specific file or drawer for physical materials, so you always have a central place to look.
It’s important to make sure to always protect student privacy when making your systems.
Reduce Repeated Decisions with Templates and Routines
Making the same decisions repeatedly is not only indicative of poor organization and time management, but also a good way to end up with emotional exhaustion.
And the best way to address repeated decisions is with templates and routines. These give you the opportunity to reduce cognitive effort while using good professional judgment.
One great example is having resources for things like report card comments, lesson planning, and more. Check out the Teacher Toolbox for these resources and more.
Prioritise by Impact, Deadline and Available Time
An Eisenhower Matrix can help you sort tasks and make decisions about what needs addressing and how quickly.
Sort tasks into four categories:
- Urgent + Important: especially student safety, wellbeing concerns, and fixed deadlines.
- Not Urgent + Important: Needs attention this week, such as planned follow-up or assessment work.
- Urgent + Not Important: Schedule later, even if it remains visible.
- Not Urgent + Not Important: Can be delegated, shared or removed.
When you break tasks down like this, it’s easy to see where your focus needs to be. It may be challenging at first to set some of the tasks aside, but your future self will thank you for focusing on the most urgent and important tasks.
Part of your workload management as a teacher is to always leave room for surprises. Make sure you’re leaving space for the unexpected. Classroom teaching is incredibly dynamic, and that needs to be accounted for in every planning and organizing system.
Reduce the Mental Load of Teaching by Planning Lessons at a Sustainable Level of Detail
Start lesson planning around your goals for student learning. Then, consider the student experience you’re trying to create. From there, record keeping is going to be incredibly important to being able to reuse lesson plans. Also, keep a record of what worked, along with master copies or organized digital files, so you can reuse your lesson plans over and over.
Work to find balance between mapping every tiny detail out and making brand new lessons each term. This gives you the flexibility to meet the needs of diverse learners each year while also having a framework to start from.
Set and Communicate Boundaries Around Communication
It’s easy to want to jump every time you see a parent or caregiver message pop up. But this sort of pace is unsustainable and will lead to emotional stress over time.
The first step to keeping communication from becoming overwhelming is to ensure that you’ve created and communicated your communication policy. List out planned times that you’ll be available to answer messages, and stick to them. Make sure to use templates wherever possible so you don’t have to spend so much time composing responses.
Your mental wellbeing needs to be taken into consideration, and when you’re at the constant whim of parents and guardians, it’s easy for it to take an emotional toll.
Lean On Support That Exists
Having a support system as a teacher is essential for reducing the emotional load of teaching. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have school administrators who understand the demands of teaching and can support you. Even if you don’t have great administrative support, many school districts have teachers’ unions and other supports built into leadership teams that you can lean on, such as an employee assistance program.
For new teachers especially, find a seasoned teacher who is willing to offer some mentoring. This helps with classroom management, but also work-life balance, and overall professional growth.
Practical Systems to Reduce the Mental Load of Teaching
One of the best ways to reduce the mental load of teaching is in the systems you put in place. Over time, they become habitual, and give you the peace of mind that you’re prioritizing the things that make the biggest difference, both for your life and for your students’ lives and education.
A Five-Minute Morning Reset
When you arrive to school, know where your biggest impact will come from in the morning.
- Do you need to gather materials for the first lesson of the day?
- Check your schedule for any additional duties for the day, such as lunchroom or playground duties?
- Do you need to just take a moment to be present, check in on your physical health, and take a moment to center?
Taking just 5 minutes to get your brain into the present moment is one of the most powerful ways to start your day off on the right foot without taking up a lot of time.
A Weekly Workload Review
Your weekly workload shouldn’t just include work. When taking a look at your upcoming week, make sure you’re leaving room for personal appointments, family obligations, and all of the things that happen outside the school day. Yes, it can always feel like there’s too much work to fit into a week, but this is where it’s important to go back to prioritizing.
Make sure to sit down with your calendar each week. This is essential to feeling like you still have a personal life outside of school. Make sure that you’re leaving room for REST in your week. If you don’t want to succumb to compassion fatigue, you need time to recharge.
A Parking List for Non-Urgent Thoughts
Keep a place, whether a document on your computer or a notebook you jot things in between lessons, for you to jot notes and ideas as they come to you. Get enough of it out of your brain that you can come back to it later. Then, you can teach without being distracted or trying to remember a heap of ideas.
When you do your weekly review, go through the notes you’ve made throughout the week so you can decide what’s essential to act on, and what can be discarded.
A Classroom Routine Audit
Do normal, everyday classroom moments sometimes turn to chaos? If so, you may need to review your classroom procedures. Make sure you have routine processes documented in an age-appropriate way and displayed prominently. Review them and adjust as necessary.
Protecting Your Home Life
It’s crucial to protect your home life from all of the things that come with working in a school environment. Whether you’re a middle school teacher dealing with the emotional distress of adolescents or a primary teacher concerned about the development of your littles, having a way to unplug from the school day is an essential part of the job.
Figure out what absolutely must be completed before you leave school, and then come up with a wind-down routine to help you leave everything behind when you finish your work hours and walk out the door for the day.
Yes, there are seasons of the school year that will require expectations, but for the most part, you’ll have far more job satisfaction if you can take simple steps to protect your home life.
When to Seek Professional Support
Sometimes, when you’ve been dealing with the stress that is often found in school systems and don’t know how to handle it, you may be at risk for mental health challenges.
If you notice things like trouble sleeping, having a low mood, anxiety, or physical symptoms, it’s time to speak with a GP. Especially if you’re noticing a difference in your ability to function normally on a daily basis. Your own feelings and physical symptoms are not things that should be overlooked or seen as a normal part of teaching.
The Mental Load of Teaching Can Be Managed
Regardless of your class size or grade level, teaching doesn’t have to equate to chronic stress. By creating some simple systems and using practical strategies to meet your emotional support needs, you’ll be able to help foster a supportive culture of teaching that helps both you and other teachers you work with.
The education system can be challenging for a number of reasons, but bearing the mental load of dozens of students doesn’t have to be one of them. Take the time to create habits and systems that support you in the classroom and outside of it.
