School Leaders Take Note: Teacher Care is a Lot More Than Self-Care

If you get burned in a fire, you first treat the wound, but you also try to put the fire out. In education, we treat the wound and then usher our teachers back into the fire. Excuse the pun but they are more than burned out, they are scorched.

Chelsea Prax, a program director at the American Federation of Teachers, sums it up succinctly.

“You can’t deep-breathe your way out of a pandemic; you cannot stretch your way out of terrible class sizes; you cannot ‘individual behavior’ your way out of structural problems,” she says.