Subscribe now

I have about 15 years of school leadership experience in four different countries– it’s an easy pitfall for me to be overconfident. But I’ve seen the downside of overconfident too-quick action all too many times. I’ve watched as senior leaders come into a new school so sure that they know what’s broken and how to fix it, only to misdiagnose problems and create chaos instead of solutions, adding to teacher burnout.

On the other hand, too much inquiry and reflection can lead to overthinking, and never taking the steps needed to make schools better for students and for teachers. Wise leaders move fluidly between both values, depending on the context.

As I think about this polarity through the lens of regenerative mindsets, a root cause for one common mistake comes into focus. Being confident and wrong can stem from an over-reliance on complicated, rather than complex mental models about schools. I explained the difference in a recent article:

Complication is the purview of machines and factories. Think of a car: each part exists for a defined purpose, and if you act, you get an entirely predictable response. If you push on the brake, you will always slow the car down. If the car doesn’t slow, then your mechanic can figure out exactly which part to fix or replace, and the machine will work well again.

Complexity is the purview of living beings, and is not nearly so neat or predictable. In an ecosystem, community, or classroom, each part is connected in too many messy and hidden ways to be able to reliably predict outcomes. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and changes to any part of the system result in unintended consequences. (link)

If schools were complicated machines, then what worked in my school in Taiwan, in Beijing, or in Denver should work in my school in Jordan. Machines are predictable like that.

However, schools are not really like very much like machines. They are much more like complex ecosystems. What works for designing a regenerative farm in Nebraska is not the same as what works for designing a regenerative farm in Georgia. The climate, the aquifers, the local insects and birds, the microbiome, the soil composition– all of these aspects are different enough that you can’t use exactly the same mechanisms from one farm to the next. Context is key to mutual flourishing.

Ida Rose Florez, in her recent book The End of Education as We Know It, goes so far as to assert that “the root problem with schools today is their tenacious fixation on complicated, reductionist, machine-based thinking.”1

Florez’s point is important for me as a new leader to keep in mind. My new school is not a machine with easily diagnosed problems. I love efficiency, I love solving problems and moving forward. This bias toward action is part of why I became a leader. It’s tempting for me to jump too quickly to confident action based on what worked in the past, but that is reductionist, machine-based thinking, and it never works.

In fact, I’ve never seen a solution copied exactly from one context to another that works as intended. Whether it’s leaders who come into a new school fixated on a particular program they want to implement, or teachers who are handed an overly scripted curriculum that they’re supposed to deliver word-for-word, these “solutions” end up causing more problems than they solve. Like H.L. Menken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

So what is the way forward? As I suggested at the beginning, the best leaders I ever worked alongside started their tenures in schools with a whole lot of humble listening. I remember one supervisor who spent almost a full year asking questions about the history behind each program, policy, and process. When she did take action to make substantive changes in our school, she did so from a place of deep, nuanced understanding. I hope to emulate her: balancing my bias toward action with real inquiry.

Michael Watkins discusses this in his book, The First 90 Days:2

After rereading this book, I wrote myself a transition plan, delineating all the ways I’ll focus on building relationships and learning this context over the next few months. This entry plan includes:

• Walking through all classrooms multiple times in the first month to understand teaching and learning.

• One-on-one meetings with each person in my section to learn about the school through their eyes.

• Spending time in recess and lunch getting to know students.

• Planning parent meetings and “tea with the principal” during parent/teacher conferences.

Here are some phrases I’m trying to reach for to help me in my learning journey:

• “Help me understand the thinking behind this.”

• “Tell me more.”

• “What might I be missing?”

These questions have a kind of magic power, opening up vistas for understanding to emerge.

It takes a lot of intentionality and more than a little courage to come into a new school and ask these kinds of questions over and over, foregoing certainty for curiosity.

But just as ecosystems flourish when given the care and deep attention they deserve on regenerative farms, we humans flourish in interwoven communities of care and curiosity. Regenerative leadership requires nothing less.

Yes, my daughter said those words to me, just a few weeks after I left a job with a serious values mismatch. There’s nothing like living with a teenager to hold a mirror up to the parts of yourself you’d rather not see.

In those first, raw weeks after deciding to move on, I felt like I had been chewed up and spit out, but the fact that my distress had been leaking out onto my daughter was the most gut wrenching of all.

However, seen from a different angle, my daughter’s honesty was a blessing. It only confirmed for me that I had made the right decision. During the worst of burnout, I was facing migraines and sleepless nights, but just as important, my empathy, my emotional regulation, and my ability to think flexibly– all these were severely diminished. 1 I wasn’t very nice to live with.

Just like all flourishing is mutual, the opposite is just as true: one person in distress has ripple effects on others in the family and in the community, and this falls especially hard on the children.

Ragged and desperate for a change, my husband and I sat down and figured out that we could survive on his income for a year if we pulled money out of retirement. So the sabbatical was born.

It’s now been a full year since that comment, and I feel like I’m a totally different person today than I was a year ago. I’m calmer, more able to handle life’s challenges, and I’m definitely a better parent.

Here are three lessons that I’ve taken away from my experience of burning out, leaving my school, taking a sabbatical, and writing a book.

1. Burnout is not about individual resilience.

Too often, when we talk about burnout in education, we focus on what’s wrong with the individual, asking what they could do to increase their resilience. Maslach and Leiter, key burnout researchers, call this blaming the canary instead of fixing the toxic fumes in the coal mine.2 It’s true that we have individual agency in choosing our mindsets and habits, but burnout is primarily caused by structural issues rather than individual choices.

I think we focus on the individual because the structural issues are so much harder to tackle. However, this misconception can cause a lot of harm, as we blame ourselves for our distress. It can also cause us to stay too long in the wrong schools, as we try to fix our burnout ourselves. I know that was true for me.

2. Burnout is not always about workload.

As second misconception is to blame burnout always on workload. Yes, excessive workload can cause burnout for some people, but it’s only one of the six causes of burnout in the research. Other causes include values mismatch that can lead to moral injury or community breakdown such as toxic unresolved conflict.3 This research tracks with my experience: I was well able to handle the workload in my job; I just couldn’t cope with the chronic stress from the values mismatch with my supervisor.

Understanding the problem is a prerequisite to solving it.

My sabbatical year did start with a lot of rest: hiking and reading and friends. But soon, my creative juices started swirling again, and the drive to contribute returned. Because my burnout wasn’t really about workload, the answer wasn’t really about rest.

So instead, I decided to write.4 I started small, with this substack going out to just a few dozen people. As I gained confidence, I worked up to sending out book proposals. A handful of rejections and four months later, I got a book contract and buckled down to write in earnest. Soon I was putting in long hours typing at my dining room table, printing at the library, and editing on my balcony. I even rearranged the furniture in my home to open a large blank wall, which I proceeded to fill with post-it notes of all my ideas.

Contrary to what you might expect, my sabbatical year included stretches of hard work and long hours as I pushed to finish the manuscript draft before my deadline. Writing a book was a project that was much more ambitious than anything I had ever done before.

Clearly, what I needed wasn’t simply less work: I needed to work in alignment with my deepest values.

3. Self-care is great, but it’s not sufficient to heal burnout.

A third misconception about burnout is that the answer is self-care, a ubiquitous idea in the online discourse. I definitely bought into this while I was still trying to hang on to the mismatched job. I tried to to ameliorate my distress through self care: I went on daily walks, I took long baths, I disassociated with Netflix.

But no matter how much I relaxed each evening, I was still waking up each morning to walk back into a role where I felt the humiliation of being undermined and the moral injury of not being allowed to provide a safe school for teachers and students. No hike or bath or treat could change that deep values misalignment that was corroding my well-being. My habits might help me cope for a while, but in the end, I needed to get out of the coal mine before the fumes did irreparable damage.

Once I left that role, I have been doing a whole lot less self care than I used to. Yes, you read that right. My sabbatical year included fewer long walks, long baths, and little treats. And yet, I’m calmer, healthier, less irritable than I ever was while working in a mismatched role. My relationships are better, my migraines are a fraction of what they used to be, and I’m sleeping through the night again.

Self-care is great, but it’s not the answer. In my case, the answer was a role in a school where my values aligned.

The Way Forward

These three lessons were hard won. Reflecting on them, I hope that this substack and my upcoming book can play a small part in shifting our collective conversation away from these dead ends. I want to help us to see our schools more clearly, so that we can stop losing so many great educators, so that we can flourish.

Today as I type this, I’m surrounded by a massive pile of suitcases, about to finish up my writing sabbatical year and fly to my new country, new school, and new principal role. I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I’ve learned so much over the past year– I wonder what lessons the next year will hold? I can tell I’m no longer burnt out because I am curious again.

If you’re reading this and it’s feeling uncomfortably familiar, don’t keep blaming yourself, focusing only on workload, or trying to self-care your way out of burnout. Instead, play the long game, take your distress seriously, and make sure you are in a school that is aligned in values and culture. If my daughter’s comment taught me anything, it’s that the children in your life will thank you.

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons? . . . Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

I remember when, more than a decade ago, I sat on my first interview panel as we searched for our next principal. One of the questions we chose to ask was about well-being, something along the lines of How do you embody work/life balance in such a challenging role?

Candidate after candidate responded with roughly the same answer: I try to make time for family, but honestly, I don’t do very well with work/life balance. This job takes all my focus during the school year.

Later, as we met to deliberate on who was moving forward to the next round of interviews, I noted the similarities in the answers to this question. One member of the senior leadership team piped up, and I’ll never forget what she said: Maybe balance is just not possible. Maybe this job just requires someone who has the capacity to set everything else aside during the school year and totally focus.

I felt my heart drop. Though I was still a middle level leader at that point, I knew I wanted to be a principal someday. I am responsible and efficient, driven and ambitious, but I didn’t want a job that required me to sacrifice my family and my sleep for ten months of the year.

I was right to be cautious. As I wrote about in my last article, school leaders report worse well-being than almost any other working adult. More than half of us don’t make it to year three.1 I might have felt taken aback, but the leader on that interview committee was just saying the quiet part out loud. We have designed a system that chews up educators and spits them out, that expects self-erasure and overwhelm as the cost of leadership.

The Overton Window

A big part of what I’m trying to do with this substack is to shift that norm in the conversation around educator well-being. One concept that helps us talk about shifting norms is the Overton Window.

The Overton window names that there are a range of ideas that seem possible within any particular place and time. Companies and governments never make policies that are too far outside the center of the Overton window– social change always moves within a specified range. Put forward ideas that are too far outside that window, and you’re dismissed as radical, unthinkable, even crazy.

Right now, the Overton window around educator well-being sits in a place that exacerbates the burnout crisis. Too many educators think that self-erasure is just part of the job, that exhaustion is a sign of commitment, and that caring means never saying no. Though these ideas are rarely stated as explicitly as they were that day in the interview committee, they’re conveyed indirectly through comments, habits, and systems that are built on a baseline of overwhelm. If you’re an educator reading this, I’m sure you have your own story of how burnout can be worn as a badge of honor, or how school systems are set up so that exhaustion is inevitable.

Shifting the Overton Window in education would mean that we stopped treating exhaustion and overwhelm as normal, and we started treating them like a real problem to be solved.

A Diet of Weak Poisons

When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, very few people were talking about the pesticides that were decimating the birds, poisoning the wells, and causing cancer. By speaking out, confidently and persuasively, Carson shifted the Overton Window, eventually causing some (not enough!) of the worst pesticides to be banned. Regenerative farmers continue that cause, shifting the norms further by proving that there is a way to produce food for the world without chemical inputs.

Just as Carson wrote in the quote at the beginning of this article, we don’t have to accept the status quo as inevitable. Students don’t have to be taught by teachers who are barely hanging on by their fingernails. Schools don’t have to be led by principals who feel like they’re being ground under the wheels of an unforgiving system. This world is not inevitable.

Just as regenerative farms show that mutual flourishing is possible in our food system, regenerative schools can nurture an environment where students, teachers, and leaders alike can all thrive together.

Shifting the Overton window will allow us to make substantive, structural changes to our habits and systems. For instance, if I as a school leader see someone in my school putting forth heroic effort: long hours, late nights, etc, my first response should be, “thank you!” But once I recognize burnout as a looming problem, my second response should be, “What do we need to change about the system to make sure this doesn’t happen again? What do we need to prune?

Or if I find myself starting to exhibit the symptoms of burnout, shifting the Overton window means recognizing these symptoms, taking them seriously, and immediately reflecting on what is causing the harm, so I can change it.2

As Carson exhorted her readers, I exhort you: Don’t accept a diet of weak poisons. Don’t lose the will or the vision to demand what is good. Push back on martyr mindsets and systems of overwhelm.

By having the imagination to think differently about educator well-being, and the courage to act from that new understanding, we can shift the norm from toxic to thriving.

I’m wondering what the poll will find as normal, since in my experience, these kinds of burnout behaviors are ubiquitous among educators. In fact, despite spending the past nine months writing a book and a substack about burnout, I am still constantly reminding myself not to fall back into these same unhealthy mindsets and habits.

I’ve been wondering lately if the self-erasure that I’m prone to is the dark side of the servant leadership that I’ve heard about my whole life.

Subscribe now

It’s an uncomfortable question to ponder. The basic definition of servant leadership is that leaders should put others first instead of leading with ego, treat everyone with respect regardless of their rank, and lift up others’ needs instead of leading from a desire for prestige or power.

Research shows that organizations that adopt servant leadership have “stronger employee engagement, better retention, and a culture of trust.”1

Those findings track with my own experience: when I think of the most effective leaders I ever worked with, they were profoundly humble and tuned in to others’ needs. We need many more servant leaders like them in our schools and in our world. 2

All of this points to servant leadership as an unalloyed good for schools. I’d much rather work for a selfless leader than a selfish one any day. So why am I wondering if this clearly positive concept has played a role in my own burnout?

To understand my uncomfortable question, it helps to understand another concept in education: the lethal mutation.

William Jones defines lethal mutation as “an idea or a practice that is prompted by sound scientific evidence, but is implemented in a way that reduces, or even completely negates, its effectiveness.”3

I worry that servant leadership suffers from a lethal mutation: too often, being humble and other-centered can mutate into self-erasure.

Consider the following statistics:

• In one survey, school leaders reported worse well-being than almost any other working adult, with 85% reporting serious daily stress.4

• In another, more than half of school leaders report that their stress levels are so high they are considering a career change or retirement.5

• Half of all new principals leave the principalship within their first three years of service.6

Just as our profession is facing a profound crisis of teacher burnout and attrition, we’re also facing the same dual crises in our school leaders.

Now, I’m not saying that the primary cause of the educator burnout crisis is this mindset. The research on burnout is clear: it’s caused by structural mismatches between employees and their work places. 7 However, I do wonder if the servant leadership mindset can exacerbate this crisis.

Servants, by definition, can’t really say no to requests. Can’t set boundaries. When your identity as a leader is “the one who serves,” where is the space for your own needs?

Self-erasure is not sustainable for very long.

There’s a gendered element to this lethal mutation as well. Women spend their whole lives encouraged to put others’ needs first. So we women leaders often naturally tend toward this mindset, leaning into being indispensable, feeling the need to prove our worth as leaders. For us women, the concept of “servant leadership” can be just another nudge towards burnout, among many other nudges.

The research bears out my experience. Women for years have reported higher rates of burnout than men, leading experts to coin the term “the burnout gap.” Women are also less likely to share their levels of fatigue, causing their exhaustion to be underestimated by others.

The shadow side of servant leadership is particularly dark for women.

The Way Forward

So if we eschew ego-driven leadership because it hurts others, and we eschew the lethal mutation of servant leadership because it hurts ourselves, what is the path forward? How can we retain what’s beneficial from this mindset, while leaving behind what is harmful?

Regenerative farms can show us a way forward, with the ethos of mutual flourishing.

Regenerative farms ensure that their soil is healthy. They rotate years of crops and fallow years– pasture cover that rejuvenates the soil– because they know that depleted soil can’t grow thriving crops.

In the same way, regenerative leaders know that modeling unchecked service is ultimately harmful to the school culture. When we’re chronically stressed, we lose empathy and flexible thinking, the very things we need to do our jobs well.8

Also, when we model depletion for teachers, they’ll be more likely to deplete themselves. And if we all model depletion for students, they’ll grow up to be just as stressed and exhausted as we are. Is this really what we want for our children?

You might not be able to change all of the structural causes of burnout, but you can model a regenerative mindset. Sustainable habits take courage: admitting your limits, setting boundaries on your workday, choosing not to push past your capacity.

So go back to your answer to the poll at the beginning of this essay. Which of these behaviors do you want to change? What is your next right step in embodying mutual flourishing instead of depletion?

Caring for yourself is not at odds with caring for others. When you lead from a place of groundedness instead of from a place of overwhelm, your well-being impacts everyone around you. This is the vision for regenerative leadership: not ego and power, not servitude and self-erasure, but mutual thriving.

One of the great joys of being an educator is our own cyclical rhythm of the school year.

Like the cranes, we have an annual journey of hard work, of intense effort, of striving together with our community, and then the great exhale of reaching our destination.

Cycles bring with them the natural gift of contemplation. It’s natural at the end points of the year to pause and look back. To reflect and look forward.

And though I often advocate that regenerative educators prune as many tasks from your list as you can during the hectic end of year season, reflection is the one task I would never ever cut. June reflection is probably the most important gift you can give your future self.

Subscribe now

The protocol “Toss / Tweak / Treasure” from Institute For Social and Emotional Learning is a useful frame to drive reflection.

• Toss: What do I want to cut? What didn’t go well?

• Tweak: What changes do I want to make?

• Treasure: What went really well that I want to make sure and remember to do again next year?

This protocol works the best if you give yourself some examples or categories to drive the reflection. Here are some more specific prompts that can help you consider what you want to toss, what you want to tweak, and what you want to treasure.

Regenerative Leader End-of-Year Reflection:

• Pruning My Task List:

  Which tasks brought me energy? Which drained me? What could I streamline next year? What could I delegate?

• Building in Buffers for Thinking :

  How well did I model slowing down for presence and reflection instead of rushing around? What buffers could I design into my schedule to make space for deep thinking?

• Culture of Well-being:

  What processes helped me to connect with others and yet maintain my digital sunset? What got in the way? What tech boundaries could I model better next year?

• Trust-Building:

  What hard conversations did I have, and how did they go? What communication or listening skill would I like to work on to increase my capacity?

• Culture of Growth:

  How intentional was I about planning professional learning I asked teachers to attend this year? Which meetings went well? What can I learn from their success?

• Culture of Agency:

  How did I elicit feedback this year? Did anyone give me any feedback that was challenging? If not, what might be keeping them quiet? What systems for feedback could I put into place next year?

Feel free to copy and adapt these reflections for your context. With a few tweaks, these could be adapted for teachers or staff. The specific questions are not where the power lies: the power lies in the process of thinking deeply, and then recording our thoughts so we don’t forget them in the luxurious rest of summer break.

Be Courageous Enough to Be Vulnerable

After you’ve written down your notes and completed your individual reflections as a leader, consider what you can share with your team. What went well as a leader? What do you want to do differently next year?

Although this kind of transparency can feel really vulnerable, regenerative leadership is courageous! We ask teachers to do vulnerable things all the time, like trying something new or being evaluated.

So take courage and share some of what you reflected on and how it is impacting your thinking about next year. Leaders who are attuned to the cycles of the year, who model hard work and rest, reflection and transparency: these are the leaders who build regenerative schools.

Every member of our community feels the strain in some way:

• Parents complain about May turning into Maycember: too many events and special requests to plan for. (Check out this song, it’s hilarious!)

• Students can feel destabilized by the lack of routine, and some respond by pushing boundaries on behavior, adding more chaos into the system.

• Teachers get frustrated at extra tasks and interruptions right when they are finalizing grades and writing report cards.

And school leaders? We feel the compression from all sides. We have report cards to check, end-of-year events to plan (and probably speak at), all while we’re also supporting every other groups’ increased stress and the resulting conflicts.

Subscribe now

Too many schools treat this May chaos as inevitable.

Too many educators limp to the finish line, frazzled and overwhelmed— then promptly get sick the first week of summer break.

The long-term results are devastating: for every teacher who retires this year, FOUR will quit and leave the profession.1 This attrition rate is terrible for students, as experience and care walk out the door, never to return.

As has been true in so many of our articles, we can learn something from regenerative farmers. As a child, I remember the rich smell of simmering apricots filling our farmhouse as they turned to jam. Our abundant harvest was not an accident: it was a result of pruning.

Farmers prune their fruit trees to ensure the best quality fruit and long-term health of their trees.

In the same way, regenerative educators must thoughtfully prune our tasks, schedules, and initiatives.

Tammy Musiosky, of The Minimalist Educator podcast, has created a resource to help. It’s a priority filter to allow teachers to identify which of your many priorities should take your focus, and which could be pruned.

Brainstorm all the tasks on your list, then ask the following five questions about each one:

What I love about these questions is how they take us back to our core values and highest impact. This is the opposite of haphazard pruning. Considering impact, values, delegation, and a long-term orientation are all deeply important. Being willing to prioritize is especially crucial for teachers in the rush of May.

5 Questions to Prune Your Task List

Musiosky’s priority filter questions are aimed at teachers, but they can easily be adapted for leaders. Here are some examples pertinent to the end of year chaos:

• Will this meeting directly impact student learning?

  • If not, can it be cancelled to give teachers time back?

• Will this end-of-year newsletter matter in 6 months?

  • Do I need to keep polishing it, or is it good enough?

• Am I the only one who can do this task?

  • Could this be delegated? Is there someone else who would like to stretch their leadership muscles by coordinating an awards ceremony, sports day, etc?

• Does this align with my core leadership values?

  • Is spending more time on this task preventing me from being present for teachers and students?

• If I could only accomplish ONE thing this week, would it be this?

  • If not, could I postpone, delegate, or cut this task?

Asking these questions can give you the confidence to say “no” or “not now” to tasks that don’t pass these filters.

Prioritizing helps prevent burnout. Saying no is hard, and it’s still worth it just for that truth alone. You’re playing the long game, and burnout could rob future students of the care you bring to this profession.

But thoughtful prioritization has another benefit: effectiveness. Leaders who prioritize are more able to be fully present, reflective, and purposeful– the very qualities that make us most effective in our roles. Your school community doesn’t always need another message, another event, another task completed. But what they always need from you is clarity and presence.

A fruit tree that has never been pruned produces worse fruit than a carefully tended one. A leader with a cluttered task list is never as effective as a purposefully minimalist one.

So take courage. Do less and do it better. Prune away the excess so that you can lead with clarity and joy.

In my last post, I shared the symptoms of burnout, and its real, long-lasting health impacts. Burnout is sometimes normalized in our culture: it might be ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean that we should just accept it.

If you recognized yourself in the burnout symptoms and that Clash song just keeps playing on repeat in your head, here are three questions to help you gain clarity on your next right step.1

1. What, exactly, is causing your burnout?

The first step to solving any problem is to define it as clearly as possible. It’s a common misconception that burnout is always caused by overwork, but this is a small fraction of the root causes.

Maslach and Leiter’s research shows that there are six key mismatches between a job and an employee that can lead to burnout:

1. Workload: Too much work, too little time or resources.

2. Control: Lack of autonomy over how to do your job.

3. Reward: Insufficient recognition or financial compensation.

4. Community: Breakdown of support and increased conflict.

5. Fairness: Absence of fairness, respect, or equity.

6. Values: Conflicts between personal values and organizational values. 2

Focusing only on workload can lead us to miss what’s actually going on. Before deciding how to move forward to addressing your chronic stress or burnout experience, start by diagnosing the source of your distress.

Subscribe now

What is actually causing the drain on your energy and joy? Is it that your leader doesn’t notice or care about the hard work you put in? Or that you’re lacking support in dealing with disruptive classroom behaviors? Or that you’re being disrespected by colleagues or parents? Maybe you simply are starting to realize that you don’t have the same values as your school, causing you constant friction and frustration.

In my own burnout experience, I could handle the workload: I couldn’t handle the chaos of being repeatedly undermined, and the moral injury of having to act against my values.

Diagnosing the problem with as much specificity as possible is always the first step toward solving it.

Once you’ve clearly defined the problem, you have laid the foundation for asking yourself the next question:

2. What is within your control?

Are the causes of your burnout something that could you possibly influence or not? Is there something that you could change that could make it tenable to stay? These are questions that will be different in every context. Here are some examples.

If it’s a workload issue, what could you do less of, let be “good enough”? I often counsel teachers on their planning and feedback practices, which can easily become unsustainable. Or is the workload imbalance such that, no matter how efficient you are, it will always be unmanageable?

If it’s a values mismatch, can you influence the policies that are causing you to feel misaligned? Can you create a bubble culture within your zone of influence by setting agreements with colleagues? Or is the values mismatch so deep that it will continue to wear you down?

If it’s a lack of support on harmful student or parent behavior, could you advocate to your administrator or some other colleague for a change in practices? Or have you tried that and been unsuccessful already?3

The answers to this question should give you one of two things: a new hope or a dawning realization that it’s untenable to stay.

Either way, delineating what you can control or not is a key step in moving from the fog of overwhelm into clarity.

3. What is your next right step?

Once you’ve analyzed your current state, its causes, and the level of control you have, it’s time to make your decision on whether to stay in your current role or not.

In her book The Magic of Knowing What you Want, writes about how to move forward if you’re feeling stuck. One of her key points is that it is easy to stay in a ruminating phase, but that can be a trap.4

Some problems simply aren’t something we can just think our way through: we need to do something to gain more clarity.

Some actions might be fairly small and low-risk. Letting go of some of your expectations, or advocating for a change in how student behavior is managed are low-risk actions that could change your experience enough to make staying possible.

Gee also recommends you move beyond the binary of “stay or go” options, and consider a third option, like a different lane. Is there a different job within your same school that might not have the same stressors?

Or is there a different school that you could move to without leaving education? Employees who feel supported by their administration are 70% less likely to burn out, so if you’re feeling unsupported, a new school with a new supervisor might be the answer.5

Don’t Be A Martyr

Burnout has a way of blurring everything. The three questions above are meant to cut through that fog: name the real source of the stress, separate what you can influence from what you can’t, and then take one step—no matter how small– that moves you out of being stuck.

This quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. always encourages me: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.” You take a step, learn something, and then the next step becomes visible.

What matters is that you don’t stay stuck in the fog out of guilt, or a belief that enduring harm is somehow part of the job. It isn’t. Our schools shouldn’t be chewing people up and spitting them out.

So be brave and take the step you can see from here. Together, we can imagine a better world.

So when, after more than a decade of school leadership, I started getting migraines, I pulled out my “responsible oldest daughter playbook”. I went to the doctor, I got medicine, and I kept on pushing.

What I didn’t do was slow down, get enough sleep, or prioritize my projects. More than once I ended up in the school’s nurse’s office when the migraines hit, trying to recover enough to make it through my next meeting.

Subscribe now

One day I could feel a migraine coming on at the end of the school day, but instead of going home to rest, I decided I needed to go ahead and make two more parent phone calls. That was a mistake, and my body let me know how it felt about my neglect.

At 5 pm that day, the CFO found me crying on the floor of the staff kitchen, leaning against the cupboards with my head in my hands, totally incapacitated with migraine symptoms. She was kind, but I was embarrassed. I knew I couldn’t keep going like this.

I had deeply internalized the message that administrators (especially women) should never show weakness. I believed that to be a great leader, I needed to outwork everyone, always be available, and never ask for anything. Too many educators– teachers and leaders alike– push ourselves in unhealthy ways because we care. This is short-term thinking.

Some will advocate for a more sustainable pace, but sustaining something that’s already degraded is not a real solution.1

Regenerative mindsets go deeper: not just rest and self-care, but rethinking your priorities, your schedule, and your mindset about what good leadership looks like. Regenerative leadership means playing the long game, not allowing yourself to get to this place of burnout.

Burnout is more than just exhaustion

Every educator has periods where we get tired– this is a deeply human profession, so of course that’s going to be the case.

But burnout is deeper and more harmful than regular periods of fatigue. Sometimes, our culture has so normalized burnout that it can be hard to recognize.

Here are some questions to help you recognize if you’re edging toward burnout:

• Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started?

• Do you feel removed from your work and the people you work with?

• Have you lost patience with co-workers, [students, or parents]?

• Is it hard to focus on your job?

• Are you using food, drugs or alcohol [or scrolling] to feel better or to numb how you feel?

• Have your sleep habits changed?

• Do you have headaches, stomach problems, or other physical complaints with no known cause?2

If you answer yes to more than one of these questions, then you might be beyond the normal “it’s spring and I work in a school” tiredness. Christina Maslach’s research helps to further define burnout so that you can recognize it.

Three components of burnout:

1. Exhaustion: Feeling overwhelmed, drained, and unable to cope.

2. Cynicism (Resentment): A negative, detached, or callous attitude toward work and colleagues.

3. Inefficacy (Reduced Accomplishment): Feeling incompetent, unproductive, or lacking achievement.3

And if the social and emotional toll wasn’t enough, people experiencing burnout are paying physical health costs as well. According to the Mayo clinic, burnout can wear on your body so much that you can start to develop life-threatening illnesses, such as heart disease, high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes.4 Not to mention migraines.

Don’t wait until your CFO finds you on the floor of the staff kitchen. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others better.

Leadership Can Be Isolating

As I reflect back on what would have helped prevent my burnout experience, one of my key challenges was that I felt I had no one I could talk to.

Leadership can be isolating, and a trusted thinking partner can be hard to come by. If you’re feeling the symptoms of burnout, make sure to reach out to someone—anyone— and ask for support. Maybe that’s an online leadership coach, a therapist, or a trusted colleague. Don’t suffer in silence for too long, assuming that burnout is normal.

Thriving leaders foster thriving schools.

So play the long game, take your own health seriously, and be the leader who models flourishing, not burnout.

It was great to sit down with on his podcast The Broken Copier and talk about how to build a culture of care in schools.1 You can listen to it by clicking above.

During the course of the conversation, I loved how Marcus really probed for specificity: what are the practical steps that school leaders should take in order to prevent burnout and foster regenerative schools? So we unpacked systems that often burn people out, like schedules and lack of technology boundaries.

Then I shared something I haven’t shared publicly before:

I’m writing a book!

It’s very exciting but also very daunting. Taking on a project of this magnitude has been a steep learning curve, requiring a whole lot of the growth mindset and emotional regulation that I often reference in this blog. Maybe I’ll write a post in the future about what I’ve learned from this year of writing, but meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy a glimpse into my process:

The book will be titled Regenerative Schools, and my editor and I are still playing around with subtitles. The tentative release date is January 2027. I’m currently working on chapter 9, all about more regenerative ways to structure teachers’ professional growth than the classic infrequent, high-stakes, formal teacher evaluations and disconnected, “drive-by” professional development.

Meanwhile, thank you to everyone who comments on these newsletters. Writing can be a solitary affair, but your feedback, experiences, and questions all hone my thinking in ways that can’t be replicated through individual thought alone.

In this newsletter, I often refer to Robin Kimmerer’s idea that all flourishing is mutual: we thrive when we’re in community.2 My experience writing this year has led me to believe that the best thinking is communal, too. Reading your feedback and having conversations like the one above ultimately make the ideas so much better. So thank you to Marcus for having me on your podcast, and to everyone who has taken the time to jot a comment: it means a lot.

Subscribe now

As a school leader, there is always another event to organize, another meeting to plan, another call to make. As a teacher, that lesson could always be just a little bit better, that report card comment a little longer. Our care for our students, for our community can so easily lead us to push past the healthy human rhythms of work and rest into burnout territory.

And not only our care, but also our technology nudges us toward an infinite workday.1 It feels good to have a cleared inbox, feels great to check something off our to-do list. Worried that we might let someone down, it’s very easy to be constantly on email, constantly responding, even when we know we should adhere to a digital sunset.

Subscribe now

Regenerative Leaders Say No

In past essays, I’ve focused on the power of modeling tech boundaries, task prioritization, and limiting initiatives in order to prevent burnout.2 These are all variations on a major theme of this substack:

Regenerative leaders say no.

Even to good projects. Even to colleagues we care about.

We set boundaries in order to foster clarity of purpose and space for rest. Without saying no, we’re back on the hamster wheel of churning activity, frenzied and frazzled. When we set boundaries, we foster a school culture of calm and focus. When we’re calm, we can bring our very best selves to the deeply human work of leading and teaching.

But We Also Say Yes

Saying no is key to preventing burnout, but lately I’ve also been thinking about preventing burnout by saying yes.

Say yes to the things that bring us joy outside of our job: activities and relationships that nourish us.

“But wait,” I hear you say. “I have no energy for all that. I come home totally exhausted and overstimulated. I can’t do anything but collapse on the couch!”

I’ve been there. It’s easy to be subsumed into our jobs, not only relinquishing too much of our time, but also too much of our identity. Our culture pushes us to make work our primary identity. Our exhaustion dulls us, encouraging passive consumption of media in our evenings and weekends, instead of more effortful activities that nourish our bodies and minds.

Unfortunately, too much scrolling, a form of disassociation, can actually exacerbate our stress.3

It can be a vicious cycle: you’re exhausted, so all you have energy for is consuming media. But scrolling doesn’t really provide rest or nourishment, so you become even more tired, rather than less. Soon, you find you never do anything but work and scroll. It becomes even harder to set boundaries on work because it has become your only meaningful activity, your core identity.

Being an educator is an identity to be proud of. But any identity that is formed too much by only one thing is brittle, a poor substitute for an identity formed of multiple deep relationships and activities that spark joy.

Like soil is healthier when the regenerative farmer nurtures a diverse microbiome, you will be healthier if you have people and activities to look forward to outside of work. Yes, even now, in April, with the exhaustion building. 4

So what might it look like to say yes to things that bring you joy outside of work?

Strong Relationships

Nurturing strong relationships is the most important buffer against burnout. In fact, the world’s longest study on happiness found that the number one predictor of happiness is good relationships: from family connections to casual friendships.5

It’s easy when you’re exhausted to just cocoon in your home, to say no to invitations and focus on rest. But making the effort to reach out to people that you care about, saying yes to connection, will have a deep and positive impact on your well-being. So schedule a standing dinner with friends, call your mother, or just text someone that you miss.

Exercise

Exercise is a second powerful buffer that can prevent burnout. Not only does exercise help you feel better, it deeply impacts the body systems that are harmed by the stress you’re feeling. John Ratey, in his book Spark, sums it up this way: “At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them.”6

It might feel counterintuitive that getting off the couch is just what you need, but study after study shows that this is true. So plan a golf game or a hike, a yoga retreat or time in your garden. Your body and mind will thank you.

Creative Fun

Having creative hobbies that you love can be a third buffer against burnout. Fellow substacker once told me that writing his newsletter helps him stay balanced. Yes, writing every weekend is more effort than simply relaxing. But he looks forward to it, so it helps him not take work home with him.

My art teacher husband is the same: he is slowly writing a graphic novel, sharing one page a week on instagram. (You can check it out here.) Having a creative outlet outside of work is a powerful antidote to burnout.

So pull out your crafting supplies, fire up the oven, or sign up for a D and D campaign. Whatever brings back a little creative fun into your life.7

The Students Are Watching

In the end, what do we want to model for our students? A life where all the adults around them are dragging themselves through the day because they graded papers all weekend? Or a world where we come in Monday morning energized from our lives outside of work, ready to be fully present?

Just like the world needs people who have come alive, our students need adults who are healthy, present, and joyful, not ones who are irritable and burnt out, limping to the finish line.

So say no to the infinite workday. Say no to your identity being totally subsumed in your job.

Say yes to things that have the power to pull you away from work: move your body, spend time with people who fill your cup, take up a hobby just for the fun of it. A diverse identity is a powerful buffer against burnout. Make sure you’re building that buffer today.

Subscribe now

I was wrong. Listen to Gabe Brown, a regenerative farmer, describe his soil:

“Step out into the backyard, push your thumb and index finger into the root zone of a patch of grass, and bring up a pinch of earth. You will likely be holding close to one billion individual living organisms, perhaps ten thousand distinct species of microbes, most of them not yet named, cataloged, or understood. . . In a handful of typically healthy soil there are more creatures than there are humans on the entire planet. . .”2

A billion organisms? Ten thousand distinct species? More complexity than most of us had ever imagined.

Subscribe now

Brown understands this complexity because he is paying close attention to something that the rest of us walk over without a second thought. And his patient observation pays off: the complex microbiome of the regenerated soil that Brown has protected not only grows more nutritious crops, but also has proven to be economically profitable. In fact, microbiologists assert that soil health is the cornerstone of human and animal health.

By paying close attention, Brown is playing the long game: preserving the soil’s health for the next generation.

In contrast, industrial farmers don’t take time to reflect on the complex microbial life under their feet. Their surface-level thinking, treating something complex as if it’s simple, means that they regularly harm the microbiome by tillage, fertilizers, or pesticides– quick “solutions” that denude their soil’s microbiome, causing long-term damage to the health of their communities.

The difference is attention.

Almost anything that you look at carefully–including a mere handful of soil– will continue to unfold in complexity the more deeply you observe it.3

The more you learn about anything, the more you realize there is to learn.

If a single clod of dirt contains more complexity than we can fathom, how much more a single student? A class of students? A team of teachers? A school’s systems?

The Pressure on School Leaders

Just like conventional farming, so much of conventional schooling operates from an industrial paradigm that glosses over complexity and pushes speed and quick fixes over patient attention and long-term thinking.

As school leaders, we constantly feel the pressure to go faster, to pack in another event, another program, another initiative. Education, like everything in our volatile and distracted world, is prone to fads, to the seduction of the next shiny thing.

We’re nudged by external recognition: we’re lauded for bringing in a new program, while we’re rarely noticed for the patient, daily work of sustaining relationships and systems that are already working.

We’re tempted by quick fixes, wanting to solve the challenging problems we face. So we go to a conference where an expert tells us that this one thing will make everything better. And it’s always something new: new behavior system, a new curriculum, a new instructional method.4

Unfortunately, when we’re jumping from initiative to initiative, adding more programs, these “solutions” inevitably backfire.

We find ourselves working longer hours, answering emails later in the evening, learning another new tech system, compounding paperwork by adding this year’s new thing on top of last year’s new thing– until we’re frazzled and jittery, overwhelmed by the constant churn.

Taking on too many faddish new initiatives results in surface-level productivity at the cost of burnt-out educators.

Responding to a Rapidly Changing World

Yet some readers will challenge this view by pointing to the pace of change outside of school. The world is ever more volatile: each new day brings a new technology, a new headline. Shouldn’t schools be changing quickly, too, keeping up with the context outside our doors? Maybe burnt out educators are inevitable, part of being in this field.

I concur that our changing world requires schools to respond. We can’t pretend that infinite scrolling hasn’t changed our students’ attention, or that we can keep assigning the same homework now that AI can do it for them with a single click.

However, our responses to changing contexts cannot be to pile more initiatives, more programs, and more change onto the backs of our teachers, expecting them to be the buffer that absorbs this pace of change and creates something meaningful for students.

Like soil, educators are not a resource that can be endlessly mined: eventually, they buckle under the strain, and not only they, but their students suffer their loss.

Constant Change Prevents Close Attention

The hamster wheel of initiatives burns out educators, but ironically, it also prevents the very skills that are most needed in the face of deep complexity: close attention and thoughtful reflection.

Constant change keeps us on the surface of things, rarely giving us time or space to observe closely and reflect deeply.

And if the adults are churning through initiatives, always reaching for the next shiny thing, what does this model for students? As Andrew Cantarutti writes: “young people are trained not to develop deep expertise or stable identities, but to be perpetually reactive, always adapting and never rooted.”5 This is the opposite of what our students need from us.

Perpetual reactivity might look like efficiency on the surface, but it’s efficiency without effectiveness, busyness without meaning.

Regenerative, not Reactive

In the face of inexhaustible complexity–a billion microbes in a clod of dirt, a universe in a single child– it’s imperative that we stop chasing initiatives. Real leadership and real teaching require deep attention, and deep attention requires slowing down. Instead of being reactive, we can be regenerative.

A regenerative pace might include:

• Pruning our list of school initiatives.

• Saying no, even to good projects, to preserve our margins.

• Designing schedules, calendars, and curriculum with buffers built in.

• Blocking time on our weekly calendars for reflection.

• Setting a “digital sunset” to honor our human rhythms.

In these ways, we can preserve focus, fostering purpose, belonging, and deep expertise.

These habits might be counter-cultural at your school, and some of these choices might be outside your control. But wherever your sphere of influence, you can find ways to push back against our deeply unhealthy culture of superficial busyness to preserve your attention, presence, and focus.

Slow down to honor complexity: this is how we foster regenerative schools.

As he bent down, his heart sank: ragged bites taken out of leaves. Some plants eaten all the way to the dirt. He slid his hand beneath a plant and shook the stems. Small black larvae tumbled onto his palm, wriggling in the sunlight.

Army worms.

This might not mean anything to you or me, but farmers know how quickly they can spread. Under the right conditions, an infestation can sweep through a field in days, devouring acres of crops.

Subscribe now

The industrial answer is simple: pesticides. Wipe out all the insects in the field, including the beneficial pollinators. Sterilize the soil’s microbiome, endanger your workers’ health, pollute the ground water, and save the crop.

But this was a regenerative, organic farm, and this farmer was playing the long game. He knew that the healthy soil, healthy insect population, and clean water were more important than one season’s crop, so pesticides were off the table.

Still, he was worried– just beyond the infested pasture stood a soybean field, and if the army worms reached it, they could wipe out his already-thin profit margins for the year.

Fortunately, the farm had been designed with moments like this in mind. While conventional farms often plant crops as close to the edge of a field as possible, squeezing productivity out of every available foot, the regenerative farmer had intentionally done something different. Between fields he had left twenty-foot strips of native grasses to grow undisturbed, as a habitat for beneficial insects and wildlife. These buffer zones didn’t produce crops, but they created diversity in the landscape and played a critical role in the organic management of the farm.

When the army worms reached the edge of the new pasture, they encountered tough grasses that weren’t their preferred food. The infestation stalled instead of spreading.

Soon, a flock of blackbirds arrived, found the army worm infestation, and settled in to feast. A few days later, the worms were gone, and the soybean crop was saved.1

What could have been a disaster was prevented— not by pesticides, but by intentional preparation, thinking outside the industrial box, and working with nature, not against it.

Systems, not Heroics

What lesson does this story have for regenerative school leaders?

Crises will inevitably come. The world is ever more volatile, and if it’s not your city in turmoil today, it very well could be tomorrow. At some point, you’ll be required to lead through your school’s version of an army worm attack.2

Just like conventional farms have normalized responding to infestations with pesticides, schools have normalized responding to crisis with heroics— late nights, extraordinary efforts. But heroics are unsustainable. And just as pesticides have all sorts of long term detrimental effects, heroics eventually result in burnt-out educators.

The work of regenerative leadership is to build resilient systems before a crisis erupts. It’s the everyday, unglamorous work of fostering trusting relationships and building functioning systems.

In my last essay, “Leading Your School When Crisis Looms Large,” I wrote about living through the covid outbreak in China. I recalled how impactful it was that our head of school was steady, consistent, and caring, and how he served as a buffer that helped all of us to be resilient through the crisis. But to be honest, the reason his presence was so impactful started much earlier. Years of everyday trust-building in small, ordinary moments— that is what made the difference when the turmoil hit.

Fostering Resilience

One useful lens for thinking about resilience in schools comes from the research of Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, who identified six common causes of burnout. 3 If you can proactively address these six areas, your school will become more resilient:

1. Workload: Which tasks would you immediately remove if a crisis hit tomorrow? If they’re expendable then, could they be streamlined now?4

2. Control: Where do teachers have meaningful input into the decisions that affect their classrooms?5

3. Reward: To what extent do teachers feel that you know what’s happening in their classrooms and show appreciation for their effort?

4. Community: Do teachers have time and structures that allow them to collaborate and support one another? When tensions arise, do people feel safe addressing them openly?

5. Fairness: Are behavior expectations applied consistently across staff and students?6

6. Values: Are teachers able to spend most of their energy on meaningful work with students?
   

If you want a more resilient school, gather feedback from colleagues and teachers who will be able to help you answer these questions. People want workplaces where they feel alignment in these six areas, so reflecting on these questions is how you can honor nature—human nature.

Just as a regenerative farm builds resilience into the landscape with long-term planning and natural systems, a regenerative school builds resilience into the culture, with small everyday moments and regenerative systems thinking.

Because when the army worms arrive—and they will, sooner or later—the everyday health of your school will determine what happens next.

Subscribe now

I’ve lived through international headlines more than a few times in my life. When I was a high school senior in Jerusalem, half my classmates were evacuated as the second intifada raged around us. When I worked in China, colleagues and students were evacuated as borders closed and covid lockdowns began. Now scenes of chaos fill our screens again, and I find myself thinking a lot about the school leaders caught in the middle of the headlines.

When situations of ongoing crisis impact a school community, the role of the school leader – hard at the best of times – becomes even more harrowing.

Not only are you an operational leader, tasked with making on-the-fly decisions in volatile contexts, but you also become a symbolic leader: someone whose words and actions carry a heightened weight. It can feel like every eye is on you, and that any misstep will ripple out through your community.

The recent article “Teaching When the World Delivers Fear” offers a great summary of the challenges of leading through an ongoing crisis, whether an armed conflict or an ICE surge:

Here’s the leadership task: Protect students’ nervous systems without denying their reality—and protect teachers so they aren’t carrying this alone. 1

Brackett is arguing here that every action you take during a crisis needs to balance values that can feel like they’re in conflict: like offering students comfort and also acknowledging their reality.

Besides comfort vs. realism, there are many other competing values, or polarities, that you’ll need to contend with during a crisis. Unlike problems to be solved, polarities require ongoing adjustment as the context changes rapidly.2 Your ability to be flexible and hold complex “both/and” perspectives will help your school be resilient.

Here are three key polarities to consider during a prolonged crisis:

1. Staff Well-Being vs. Operational Continuity

In times of crisis, teachers become emotional first responders. They absorb student fear while managing their own reactions. Centering staff well-being is a crucial task for a regenerative leader. Yet operational continuity requires instruction to continue and systems to function. If operations stall, things start to fall apart, and students suffer.

Concrete Practices

1. Temporarily reduce non-essential demands.

During times of crisis, pause initiatives, shorten meetings, and protect planning time. These actions signal that you understand the increased load that your staff is carrying, and that you value their well-being more than performative productivity.

2. Offer clear, simple operational guidelines.

Offer teachers clarity on what learning should look like: what to keep, and what can be cut. Provide concrete guidelines on how to answer student questions, even scripts on what to say in common scenarios. Clarity and simplicity go a long way in supporting staff during the fog of crisis.

2. Transparency vs. Containment

The second polarity comes up as you manage communication during an ongoing crisis. Transparency supports trust. Families and staff need accurate information to feel respected and included. Being as transparent as possible about facts we know can help prevent misinformation. On the other hand, rumors and speculation can be destructive and need to be contained. Containment is also an important value to lean on when interacting with children. Too much detail about scary situations escalates students’ anxiety and overwhelms them. The leader’s challenge is to calibrate disclosure by audience, honoring both values when each is most appropriate.

Concrete Practices

1. Differentiate communication by audience.

Provide fuller context to staff, and ensure that any decisions are shared with them first before they are pushed out to families. Offer clear, plain-language updates to families.

Give students brief, reassuring explanations. Leila Holmyard, safeguarding consultant, suggests that we answer students’ questions in age appropriate ways, but avoid volunteering information, so students don’t get overwhelmed. As much as possible, limit students’ exposure to violent images within school. 3

2. Establish timely, brief, structured communications.

Consider opening up more frequent lines of regular communication with staff and families so that questions don’t get lost in the noise of the crisis. These could be increasing your regular schedule of emails, “town hall” style zoom meetings, or gathering for ten-minute staff check-ins at the end of the day.

Increasing the frequency of communication builds trust, even if you don’t have a lot of new facts to share. Keep new meetings or emails brief and structured, focusing on FAQs, to help them feel clarifying, not burdensome.

3. Emotional Processing vs. the Stability of Routine

The third polarity is about balancing how you use time. Giving time for community members to process their emotions will help people feel seen and cared for. Ignoring fear and grief is a tone-deaf mistake. However, turning information-sharing meetings into emotion-sharing experiences can actually exacerbate the feelings. Sticking to routines offers stability when little else is stable. In balancing these competing needs, the goal is for your community to feel that their distress matters while still experiencing as much normalcy as possible.

Concrete Practices

1. Protect routines.
For students, routines such as morning meetings, class routines, and predictable transitions are not peripheral; they are crucial in helping them feel like the whole world hasn’t gone to pieces. Routines preserve students’ fragile sense of normalcy.

Similarly, in faculty meetings, keep routines as steady as you can. For instance, in your regular faculty check-ins, you could consistently include:

• Brief inclusion

• What we know, what guidance we have been given

• What we do not yet know

• Question and answer time

• Expression of care, reminder of resources available

Wherever possible, maximize predictability. This acts as a psychological buffer against the volatility of the unfolding situation.

2. Adopt a tiered approach to supporting emotional distress.

Different people will be affected differently by any ongoing crisis. When I was a teenager in a conflict zone, I didn’t want to process my feelings at school: I just wanted a break from talking about it sometimes. Just as we create a tiered approach to academic achievement and behavior in our schools, we can also apply this logic to ensuring that different people have their social and emotional needs met during times of crisis.

Tier 1: Build community-wide resilience through routine, clarity, and compassion. Offer information to everyone about the Tier 2 and 3 supports available for emotional distress.

Tier 2: Students or staff who are particularly impacted by the situation might need support from administration or school counselors.

Tier 3: Students or staff who are in immediate crisis will need urgent support from school leaders, as well as referrals to outside professionals such as licensed psychologists or others.

When building your tiered approach, make sure that the layers of support are clear and easily accessible to all.

Building Trust in Times of Crisis

Throughout your responses to these three polarities, your own emotional stability as a leader has a deep impact on your school. Simple actions of steadiness– like pausing before speaking, slowing down your pace of speech, and giving thoughtful responses to tough questions– these will have a ripple effect on those around you. You can lend others your calm.

So how do you keep yourself calm when the fear and uncertainty drag on and on?

First, don’t try to carry the weight of a whole community’s fear alone. Seek out support for yourself, whether you lean on your leadership team, your partner, or a therapist.

Second, don’t let all self-care drop off when you’re in an ongoing crisis. Instead, keep prioritizing the habits that help to regulate your nervous system:

• Protect your sleep. (link)

• Complete the stress cycle. (link)

• Practice breathing exercises. (link)

These crucial practices will give your nervous system the space it needs to settle, even when the stakes are high and fears run rampant. When you lean on your community and take care of yourself, you’ll have the internal resources to support others.

Let me end with a memory from 2020. Looking back, I remember how uncertain it felt to be in China when the borders closed. Most of my colleagues were stuck outside the country. Some families were separated. No one knew what was coming next. Throughout the crisis, our head of school opened up extra zoom town-hall meetings, took every question, and consistently communicated with compassion and a steady calm.

Maya Angelou was right. I can’t remember what he said. I can’t really remember the decisions that he made. But I remember how he made us feel: supported and cared for. With courage and commitment, you can be a leader like that– remembered with gratitude long after the crisis is over.

Subscribe now

It was an average Tuesday as a school administrator. I was walking the large cafeteria in my pencil skirt and sensible shoes, surrounded by the noisy, happy racket of hundreds of middle schoolers. I stopped to chat with some students, when suddenly, across the room, I heard raised voices above the ambient din. My admin “spidey-senses” activated: this wasn’t happy yelling, it was angry yelling.

I made a beeline toward the clamor, then dodged as a chair suddenly flew toward me. A boy I knew very well from past incidents had leapt out of it, throwing the chair as he jumped to his feet. His fists were clenched, his body quivering, his face inches from the face of the boy in front of him. Both were screaming at the top of their lungs.

I dashed between them– two teenagers yelling obscenities and shaking with anger.

“Calm Down.” I said forcefully.

One boy raised his fist at me, screamed to leave them alone.

My heart was beating in my ears, my face red, and I knew that the next moment was crucial. If I couldn’t deescalate, the fists would fly, and someone could get hurt.

Luckily, I also knew that they didn’t really want to hurt me, despite the raised fist. They actually weren’t mad at me at all; I was just in the way. And they didn’t want to get suspended.

So I didn’t say anything.

Instead, I locked the boy with my most serious “watch out” look, and breathed deeply, holding my ground in the middle of the fight.

The look worked. The tension broke. Soon, both boys could breathe too, and we could all walk to my office. There, we started the process of calming down, parent phone calls, boundary-setting consequences, and restorative conversations about anger and how to manage it.

Know Your Capacity, Grow Your Capacity

That was a tough lunch, but it was hardly unique. I’ve lost count of the number of times that students and parents have yelled at or threatened me. Like 92% of school administrators, this is a normal part of the job. 1

I talk a lot in this newsletter about self awareness, about how crucial it is to know your capacity, and set boundaries so you don’t burn yourself out.2

But today I want to ask the next question. How can you grow your capacity to handle these tough moments?3

Even now, looking back at that day from a lot of distance, I can feel my heart start to beat a little harder with the memory of getting in the middle of that screaming match.

Marc Brackett explains what I was going through:

The sympathetic nervous system takes over whenever we feel threatened. It releases neurotransmitter chemicals like cortisol and epinephrine that initiate the ancient fight, flight, or freeze response: heart rate increases; blood vessels constrict, breathing becomes rapid and shallow, focus narrows on the threat before us and blocks out everything else. . . 4

So what I was feeling was a biological response to two very activated young men.

My sympathetic nervous system was effective at narrowing my focus so that I could dash into the middle of the situation– but these same hormones were counter-productive to my larger goal of staying calm during the student screaming match.

So what can you do in the moment when faced with dysregulated kids– or worse, dysregulated adults?

Techniques for Emotional Regulation

Here are three strategies for how to manage your sympathetic nervous system during a charged moment, even one where the volume of teenage anger is turned up to eleven:

1. Breathe

Breath work may be ubiquitous, but we’re still talking about it for a reason. Nothing helps us regulate our emotions better than this simple practice.

As Brackett writes,

“Breath work is likely the oldest emotion regulation strategy in the book. . . [Taking a deep breath] triggers several physiological changes in your body, all of which help you better navigate the challenging moment. . . . It slows down the heart rate . . . and restores the mind and body to homeostasis. “

Just remembering to take a deep breath when you feel activated will make a huge difference to your biology, helping to trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, the counter balance to your flight or flight response.

Deep breaths help to slow your heart rate and give you more control over your reactions, allowing you to stay calmer in the face of a triggering situation.

2. Access Your Balcony View

But what should we do after breathing? The problem is still right there. The teenagers are still screaming.

A second strategy Brackett recommends to manage your feelings is to mentally place yourself at a spacial distance from the situation. This helps your brain see the difference between an activated teenager and a real threat.

For instance, imagine that you’re looking down on the situation from a high balcony. Or imagine it’s all happening on a tv show. Or if someone is saying something triggering, imagine holding a catcher’s mitt for the hurtful words: you can catch them and hold them away from your body, not allowing them to enter your heart.

Any of these three visualizations can help you to gain some mental distance from the situation.

These tell your brain that you are not in physical danger, and help calm those fight or flight hormones down, allowing your prefrontal cortex to re-engage. Once your “thinking brain” is back online, it allows you to work to solve the problem instead of freezing or lashing out in the moment.

3. Name what you’re feeling

A third strategy that helps in a situation like this is to name for yourself what you’re feeling. When you notice your chest getting tight, your face getting hot, or your heart beating, name those sensations to yourself, and then apply the word that best describes the emotion you’re experiencing. As Beckett says,

“Simply saying the words “I feel_________” helps you bring your reactions under control and move on, instead of spiraling into distress, studies have shown.

Acknowledging feelings–rather than dismissing them– is crucial to lowering emotional reactivity and improving your overall mental well-being.”

It’s a common misconception that emotional regulation is about feeling less or having more control over your feelings. That’s not exactly true. Instead, the goal is to hear what your feelings are telling you, without minimizing them, and still be able to act in accordance with your deepest values. You can’t do that if you’re feeling without being self-aware.

In this case, a long-term habit of mindfulness helped me notice my own elevated state. Silently naming my feelings of frustration helped me to keep in mind the kind of principal I wanted to be: one who never yells back at kids, but stays calm in the midst of screaming.

As I look back on that day, I am proud of the way it turned out.

Though they did have consequences, neither of the boys had to be suspended, and both boys took another step in their ongoing journey of social and emotional growth. Our restorative practices ultimately helped them build self-awareness and conflict resolution, so they also could start to learn to react differently the next time they got angry. When adults can model emotional regulation, it ripples out to the kids.

Practices for the moment, Habits for the long term

Leaders often juggle many crucial moments like this in a single day, buffering dysregulated students, parents, and even, occasionally staff. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

In the moment, these three simple, embodied practices—breathing, naming feelings, and mental distance—help a lot.

In the long term, the core tenants of the Regenerative Schools philosophy also work to buffer us from these storms:

• Our systems matter: when we aren’t rushing around trying to do too many things at once, we are able to address these charged moments from a more grounded foundation.

• Our well being matters: when we are intentionally living a rhythm of work and rest, regularly completing the stress cycle, we are better equipped to face these crisis points.

• Our mindsets matter: when we see each student, each parent, and each staff member as an important piece of our overall community, each hard situation becomes an opportunity for growth and connection.

Both in-the-moment and ongoing practices are crucial to help us to grow our capacity to handle charged moments with courage, professionalism, and kindness. Because let me tell you— there will probably be more screaming teenagers tomorrow.

In the end, I leave you with this. Rest when you are tired and breathe when you start to feel angry. Keep coming back to these simple, human habits. You can make a difference in your school without burning yourself out.

Subscribe now

Logistics Note from Ruth:

I recently learned that the Substack algorithm prioritizes sharing the writing of newsletters that have paid subscribers. I’m not interested in putting my writing behind paywalls, but I do want to share the ideas of Regenerative Schools as widely as possible!

So, I am enabling voluntary paid subscriptions. All my writing, past and present, will continue to be free, so moving to the paid tier will be purely an act of support. I kept the subscription fee as low as the platform allows: $5 per month, or $30 per year. If you have found value in my writing, upgrading will not only buy me a coffee, but will help me get this newsletter in front of others who could benefit from it.

And if that’s not in the cards for you, no pressure! I hope you keep reading and commenting for free, since your feedback matters to me a lot.

I still remember the look on my daughter’s face as the smoke curled upward.

It was the last day of the school year. In our backyard fire pit, she fed the flames page by page from her math workbook, grinning as the paper blackened and disappeared. This wasn’t a one-time ritual. Every June, the math book went into the bonfire.

Math had been a source of shame for her since first grade, when she came home in tears and admitted she’d been caught cheating on a timed math facts quiz. She had been dishonest because she was trying to survive. Despite years of effort and support, her anxiety around math only deepened.

By the time she reached middle school, she had firmly decided: I’m just not a math person.

Then we moved to a new country. Her new school approached math very differently. Her seventh-grade teacher didn’t center memorization or speed. Instead, he focused on thinking—on understanding why an algorithm worked, not just how to execute it. He used pre-assessments to identify missing prerequisite skills and pulled small groups of students for targeted support.

One afternoon, my daughter came home nearly bouncing through the door.

“He told us we’re not stupid for not getting fractions yet,” she said. “We just hadn’t been taught in a way our brains could understand. I think I get it now, Mom.”

With several excellent teachers in a row, math slowly transformed from a source of dread into her favorite subject. She went on to excel at higher-level IB math, earn a computer science degree, and land an internship at a biomedical company doing software development she genuinely loves. Her entire STEM-focused career path hinged on one pivotal shift: developing a growth mindset about math.

A few teachers drastically changed the trajectory of my daughter’s life.

The teachers who helped her move from math anxiety to calm determination shared a few essential mindsets:

• High expectations, enthusiasm for their subject

• Deep care, including empathy for math anxiety and intentionality around identity

• A growth mindset, grounded in the belief that everyone can learn

• Specific, actionable feedback, focused on next steps rather than deficits

These mindsets are not mechanical. They are relational, cognitive, and emotional. And they are extraordinarily difficult to sustain under chronic stress.

This is why I argue that a teacher who is burning out cannot foster a truly flourishing classroom. Teaching requires sustained attention, empathy, flexibility, and intentionality: the very capacities that are eroded by burnout.

Just as industrial farming depletes the soil that crops depend on, chronic stress depletes the internal resources teachers rely on to support deep learning.

And just as food grown through regenerative agriculture contains higher nutritional value1, learning cultivated by flourishing teachers is deeper, richer, and more durable.

There is solid science behind this analogy. Chronic stress impairs working memory and cognitive flexibility—the very functions teachers need in order to hold high expectations, respond to student thinking, and offer precise, useful feedback. 2 The research shows that empathy depletion is a second distinguishing feature of burnout.3 Empathy, of course, is exactly what my daughter’s teachers needed to recognize her math anxiety and help her rebuild her identity as a capable learner.

When we invest in educator wellbeing, we aren’t indulging in a “nice-to-have.” We are protecting the conditions that make deep learning possible. 4

A recent report from the University of Oxford put it bluntly:

“It could be argued that the impact of teacher wellbeing is so important to the functioning of a school that it should be one of the first factors that is considered when looking at improving wellbeing across the school community.” 5

Part of why I am so passionate about teacher wellbeing is that I’ve seen its impact from every angle: as a teacher, as a school leader, and as a parent.

I will always be grateful to the math teachers who helped my daughter rewrite her story. Teachers’ impact stretches across generations. They deserve regenerative schools.

Subscribe now

Newsletter update:

After six months of trying—and many rejections—I’ve gotten the chance to spend the next few months of my sabbatical year doing a big project that I’m super excited about! I’m trying to practice what I preach about saying no and clarifying my priorities: so I’m going to reduce the frequency of this newsletter to once every few weeks.

Thank you to everyone who reads, comments, and engages. These conversations are both encouraging and illuminating!

The mission of Teachers on Fire is to warm your heart, spark your thinking, and ignite your professional practice. In this podcast episode, we’ll address questions like:

• How can principals do better than superficial gestures of teacher appreciation?

• How can we address teaching colleagues who seem caught in a martyr mindset?

• How can school leaders work efficiently without building a toxic culture of rushing?

If you join us live, we’ll have a chat feature where you can share your thoughts and questions as we speak— or the podcast will also be available to watch or listen to later, including on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Click here to watch live or later!

Subscribe now

I’m looking forward to speaking to another educator who is deeply invested in imagining a better world for educators and students alike.

Teacher burnout is not a teacher problem, it’s a systems problem.

It’s not going to be solved with a wellness day. Or a coffee cart. Or even by cancelling a meeting to let people go home early. In a previous essay, I called those quick fixes “putting frosting on a salty cake.”

One reason that frosting fixes don’t work is that teacher burnout is not a complicated problem, it’s a complex problem.

I used to think that the words complicated and complex were synonyms, but understanding the difference can be illuminating.

Complication is the purview of machines and factories. Think of a car: each part exists for a defined purpose, and if you act, you get an entirely predictable response. If you push on the brake, you will always slow the car down. If the car doesn’t slow, then your mechanic can figure out exactly which part to fix or replace, and the machine will work well again.

Complexity is the purview of living beings, and is not nearly so neat or predictable. In an ecosystem, community, or classroom, each part is connected in too many messy and hidden ways to be able to reliably predict outcomes. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and changes to any part of the system result in unintended consequences. 1

As we saw in my last essay, complicated thinking applied to complex systems has negative downstream effects: in the case of cattle feed lots, these include ground water pollution, pediatric cancer, and more.

In the case of schools, educator burnout is a downstream effect of schools being run like machines. And when educators are in distress, their students inevitably start to be affected.

There are many examples of how complicated, rather than complex, thinking shows up in schools, but let’s dive into just one: initiative overload.

You Probably Have Too Many Initiatives

It seems that every educator I meet has their own experience of schools with too many initiatives, plans that are rolled out with enthusiasm and abandoned too soon for the next shiny thing.

In one school I joined, I was stunned to find that the master schedule, grading scale, report cards, math curriculum, AND reading curriculum had all changed within a period of two years. For the elementary teachers, this meant that nearly every aspect of their professional lives had been upended within that brief time.

In another school, I suggested to the leadership team that we only focus on one curricular priority that year. I was overridden, and our focus was splintered in many directions.

In a third school, I was handed a massive strategic plan that included fifteen priorities– only counting the ones that I personally was in charge of implementing with teachers in a single year. Fifteen. Despite the qualms I voiced, the strategic plan went ahead as written.

You can see the pattern. In school after school, leaders try to take on too many initiatives at once, in the name of urgency, in the name of making school better for kids.

This is complicated thinking. If you’re redesigning a car, you can change fifteen things at once. However, teachers are not machines, and teaching is immensely complex. If you ask teachers to change too many aspects of their practice at once, you’ll likely get surface-level compliance and under-the-surface resistance or apathy. You certainly won’t see deep commitment to new practices.

So in the end, having fifteen simultaneous priorities essentially means that you won’t change anything very deeply. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. You’ll look very busy, the boxes on the spreadsheet might get ticked off, but you won’t actually be effective.

Regenerative Change is not Mechanical

There’s another way forward, and it requires a significant mindset shift from school leaders:

Regenerative change is adaptive: slow at first, with lots of reflection, questioning underlying assumptions.

Regenerative change is collaborative, incorporating feedback from diverse stakeholders to inform the journey.

Regenerative change is holistic: considering how the parts of the system relate to each other and to the whole.

What might this kind of change look like? Just like regenerative farms look different in Georgia than they do in Nebraska, regenerative schools cannot use a simple “one size fits all” template. Regenerative change will likely look very different in every school context.

However, a set of common tools can help make inspiring ideas more actionable, so here’s one useful tool: the iceberg model of problem analysis.

This set of reflective questions is a great tool when considering which initiatives to prioritize, and how to address the systems and mindsets that might be standing in the way of the kinds of learning and well-being that you hope to see in your school.

Note that real change requires us to go deep beneath the surface of the iceberg, reflecting together on our systems and mindsets. This is not quick or mechanical work. This does not fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and will take a significant amount of time.2

The implications of such deep work are clear. If you want to foster a regenerative school, do less and do it better. Don’t try to implement fifteen initiatives at once. Don’t jump from one initiative to the next just because you went to an interesting conference.

What you cut is just as important as what you create. 3

So, take a look at your initiatives, and then ruthlessly prioritize them. Not only will you be less likely to burn out your teachers, but you’ll also be more successful in making deep, substantive changes that allow both teachers and students to flourish.

Cow manure can be a gift.

On my father’s regenerative farm, the nine year cycle of crop rotation includes four years of pasture crops and cattle grazing, rejuvenating the soil as they spread their manure. 1

But manure can also be a poison.

Most conventional ranchers send their cattle for “finishing” on what’s called a feed lot. Will Harris writes about this practice in his book A Bold Return to Giving a Damn:

“[My cattle] would be confined to a high-density feedlot, where pharmaceuticals would be relied on to keep them alive (and keep the feedlot profitable), their legs sunk almost to their bellies into manure and mulch when it was wet– their lungs filling with inhaled fecal dust when it was dry. . .

So I decided to stop sending my cows off the farm to feedlots. . .” 2

Feed lots, while very efficient, are a prime example of industrial agriculture.

In this system, cows, land, and water are treated as resources to be managed and ultimately extracted for profit, whether or not those resources—and the community at large— are harmed along the way.

Who wins?

Mostly big agricultural companies.

Who pays?

The cattle themselves pay, as they live in cruel conditions that we consumers would rather turn away from than look too closely at. 3

The soil and water surrounding the feedlots pay. Because the cattle are so crammed together, their manure is piled in huge piles. Over time, it leeches into the soil and pollutes the ground water. 4

The community’s health pays. Scientists have found that small Nebraska towns close to feedlots have higher rates of childhood cancer. 5 And not only the towns nearby, but all of us are careening toward a future where our antibiotics stop working, in large part because of the feedlots overuse of antibiotics, necessary in crowded conditions. 6

Industrial thinking is efficient if you zoom in and only look at the bottom line, disastrous if you start to zoom out.

In the industrial system, it’s the community and the environment who ultimately pay. And it’s always the vulnerable who pay most. 7

A Radically Different Approach

That same manure in a different system tells a very different story. The difference is whether the farmers work with the natural world or work against it.

Regenerative farms look to nature to ask: what do cows actually need? What are their instinctual behaviors? What does the soil need? What do the pollinators need? Instead of zooming in to only look at the bottom line, they zoom out to think holistically about the whole system.

And–surprise–the answers to these questions work together beautifully. Respecting nature means building a system where cows get to be their most cow-like selves, grazing instead of being fed corn, moving about fields instead of being confined. And this stance is not only good for the cows, but is good for the soil, for the ground water, for the nutrition of the meat they produce, the people of the community, even for the climate. 8

Reverence, reciprocity, and mutual thriving: these are the frames of a regenerative system. 9 These only come about when we stop trying to fit living things into industrial systems, and instead think holistically.

Regenerative Schools Think Holistically

So how does understanding regenerative systems help illuminate the problem of educator burnout?

The same industrial logic that reshaped farming is also embedded in our school systems. Too many schools are laser focused on test scores, or the bottom line, and miss the harm that their systems are doing to the real people working within them.

Educator burnout is not an individual failure. Burnout is a symptom of schools operating within the industrial paradigm. It’s a symptom of systems that treat educators like resources to be extracted. We can do better.

We can think holistically. We can honor both students’ and teachers’ humanity. We can design our systems around the ways that humans actually thrive, instead of fitting ourselves into systems where are constantly operating at a low-grade distress.

There is no one magic bullet that will “solve” the educator burnout crisis. Instead, what is needed is a new kind of imagination, tied to regular feedback and reflection. For instance, when I suggest that we work with our natural rhythms of rest, eschew rushing, hold boundaries, and complete the stress cycle– I am asserting that we should think holistically instead of mechanically, and that we should honor our human nature, our needs as people.

And guess what? Just like regenerative farms end up having positive ripple effects throughout their communities, regenerative schools’ impact will reach far beyond the teachers. Schools that think holistically and act adaptively can create the conditions for student well-being, student learning, and ultimately, the health of entire communities.

When we start by honoring humanity and commit to thinking holistically, then we can reimagine schools. Instead of burnout factories, we can create centers of flourishing. We can imagine a better world.

Subscribe now

I’ve learned so much about social and emotional learning in schools from Nick Haisman-Smith and his organization, Institute for Social and Emotional Learning (IFSEL). So when he invited me to be on their podcast, I jumped at the chance.

Podcasts are a new thing for me… and as we all know, the first pancake always comes out a little lumpy. But I hope you all enjoy anyway!

In this podcast episode, we explore what he calls Adult SEL, and what a true culture of care looks like in the everyday reality of schools.

As student needs rise, educators are being stretched thin by systems that deplete rather than restore. Drawing on the idea of regenerative cultures, we discuss how schools can move beyond the “give, give, give” model to support educator wellbeing without sacrificing excellence. We challenge the martyr mindset, examine why rest can feel uncomfortable, and reflect on the idea that we never heal in isolation.

The conversation also highlights why leaders must be regulated themselves to create healthy, sustainable school cultures. You’ll leave with practical ideas for setting boundaries, creating supportive norms, and building care within your zone of influence.

Download this episode’s ShowNotes: link

Learn more about IFSEL here.

The tractors stood silent. The soil slept under snow. And at the kitchen table, with a mug of tea and a stack of battered notebooks, he would reflect. His spidery handwriting filled the pages as he made plans for the coming year: which crops would rotate onto which fields, which seeds needed ordering, which ancient tractors needed one more round of tinkering before spring. On a regenerative farm, winter reflection is how he prepared for spring growth.

The new year offers a similar invitation—for farmers and educators alike.

In Bold Moves for Schools, Dr. Marie Alcock and Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs argue that designing learning in a changing world begins with three deceptively simple questions:

• What should we keep?

• What should we cut?

• What should we create?

These questions are useful as a school, but they’re also useful as an individual starting a new semester. I love these questions instead of the classic New Year’s resolutions because so many of us ended the fall semester feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. The last thing we need is to pile more onto already exhausted lives.

Instead, these questions invite simplification, subtraction, and intentional creation as acts of leadership.

“What to Keep” Reflection Questions:

• What is essential to my role? What are my core “big rocks” that I want to make sure I make time for every single week?

• What relationships are important to me, and how will I be intentional about nurturing them?

• What in the past month has brought me energy? How can I incorporate more of that task into my life?

“What to Cut” Reflection Questions:

• What in the past month has drained my energy? Maybe I can’t cut that task altogether, but could I set a boundary on it in some way? (For instance, could I take my email app off of my phone so that I only check it in the office?)

• Where might there be initiatives, paperwork, or processes that could be simplified, delegated, or even cut to allow focus on my “big rocks”?

• What habits might be depleting me? (For instance: eating alone at my desk, skipping workouts, or checking email right before bed.) What is one habit I could cut that could help me feel more centered?

“What to Create” Reflection Questions:

• What relationships bring me the most joy? How could I spend more time or energy with those people on a regular basis? (For instance, setting a reminder to call my sister, or asking a trusted colleague to meet for a regular walking meeting.)

• What is my nightly “shut down” routine to complete the stress cycle? Do I need to add a regular ritual to help myself transition from work life to home life?

• What kinds of rest do I need more of? How can I be more intentional about incorporating multiple types of rest into my life?

7 Types of Rest

If you’re going to add anything into your already hectic life, make it something life-giving. Like the carefully chosen mixture of pasture cover planted on a regenerative farm, intentional rest will be a mixture of activities and states that replenish you where you need it most. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s concept of the seven types of rest has illuminated for me the complexity of regeneration.

Intentionally choosing to keep things that bring you energy, cut things that drain your energy, and create habits that add joy and peace to your life will allow you to embody purposeful leadership.

No classroom will flourish if its teacher is burning out. No school culture will flourish if its leader is burning out. Regeneration is always mutual since the nervous systems of the adults shape the nervous systems of the students. Your well-being is part of the larger story of the well-being of those whose lives you touch.

Like a farmer quietly planning in the dark of winter, the choices you make now—often unseen, often uncelebrated—are laying the groundwork for what will grow in the months ahead. When leaders design their own lives with care, schools become places where both adults and children can move beyond survival and into flourishing.

That, too, is regenerative work.

Citations:

Dalton-Smith, Saundra. “The Real Reason We Are Tired and What to Do About It.” Ted Talk, April 9, 2019. Link.

Heyes Jacobs, Heidi, & Alcock, Marie. Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2017.