Dr. Ameila Wheeler, Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Instruction
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A few years ago, Public Schools First North Carolina invited me to participate in a Teacher Appreciation Week webinar about what it would mean to really appreciate teachers. That question has stayed with me.
Celebrations, kind notes, and snacks in the faculty lounge can be genuinely meaningful. But appreciation cannot stop there. Truly appreciating teachers means creating schools, policies, and communities that make it possible for educators to remain whole human beings while doing work that asks so much of their attention, energy, and care.
The question of what really appreciating teachers feels personal to me because I taught high school social studies for six years. Teaching brought tremendous joy and purpose into my life. It was also physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding. Like so many teachers, I carried my students’ stories home with me. I worried about whether they were safe, whether they had food to eat, and whether I was doing enough. There was always another lesson to improve, family to contact, paper to grade, or student who needed care.
Now, as a teacher educator and researcher studying teacher labor and retention, I continue to see how deeply educators care, and how often our educational systems depend upon that care without adequately replenishing it.
That is why I created Teachers Taking Time, a four-session online mindfulness series for current and aspiring educators. The course will meet Tuesday evening on Zoom this September and will offer educators a place to pause, practice mindfulness and self-compassion, and experience the support of a community that understands the particular pressures of teaching. No previous meditation experience is needed.
Most importantly, I do not want this to feel like one more thing teachers must accomplish. I want it to be a place where teachers can be cared for.
When “self-care” becomes another responsibility
I am also cautious about how conversations about teacher wellness are sometimes used.
Too often, educators are encouraged to practice self-care while their planning periods disappear, their responsibilities multiply, their classrooms remain understaffed, and their professional judgment is disregarded. Under those conditions, even a well-intentioned wellness workshop can communicate an unintended message: The system does not need to change. You simply need to become better at coping with it. Leading scholars of teacher wellbeing, Luis Javier Pentón Herrera, Gilda Martínez Alba, and Ethan Trinh, describe this as a kind of “weaponizing” of self-care (2022, p.4). When teachers are told that they just need to practice self care to endure increasingly difficult conditions, then self-care is being weaponized.
The same authors continue that instead of encouraging teachers to perform self-care, we need to be building educational systems based on responsible wellbeing. Responsible wellbeing is a term the scholars created to make the case that teacher well-being cannot be treated solely as an individual duty. It is also the responsibility of schools, communities, policymakers, and the larger social systems in which teachers live and work.
This idea is one of the guiding inspirations for Teachers Taking Time. Responsible well-being to me means giving teachers access to practices and community that may help them meet difficult moments with greater steadiness and self-compassion. But it also means telling the truth about why those moments are so difficult. It does not ask breathing exercises to compensate for low salaries, inadequate staffing, lost planning time, oversized classes, or a lack of professional respect.It asks all of us to take responsibility for the conditions in which teachers are being asked to work, and to provide support to those teachers “in the trenches” as we work together that better future.
Competition is not care
To create that better future for teachers, students, and schools, we need to prioritize care, not competition as the basis of our educational reform agenda.
While stronger teacher well-being has been linked to lower intentions to leave the profession (Wang & Hall, 2021) and higher student academic achievement (Granziera et al., 2023), the current educational reform agenda tells us the path to bettering our schools is not caring for teachers, but increasing competition.
Voucher proponents frequently argue that public schools will improve when they are forced to compete with private schools. The premise is that withdrawing resources and introducing pressure will make public schools more efficient or innovative.But schools are not businesses competing for customers. They are public institutions charged with educating every child who comes through their doors.
But competition does not care for a first-year teacher who is trying to plan strong lessons late into the evening. It does not provide an experienced teacher with protected planning time. It does not place another counselor, nurse, teaching assistant, or substitute in a school. And it does not repair the exhaustion created when educators are continually asked to do more with less.
A more financially responsible and humane strategy would begin by investing in the wellbeing of public-school educators we already have.
Public Schools First NC’s 2026 teacher-pipeline report found that North Carolina’s teacher attrition rate reached 10.11% in 2024–25. More than 9,000 teachers who had been employed in traditional public schools were no longer working in them the following year. The report identifies professional salaries, job stability, ongoing development, classroom resources, and supportive working conditions as essential to recruitment and retention.
Thus, investing in teacher wellbeing is not an extra expense disconnected from student achievement. Teachers are the people through whom nearly every educational investment reaches children. When experienced educators leave, schools lose hard-earned knowledge, trusted relationships, and years of professional development. Districts must then recruit, prepare, and support replacements within an already strained teacher pipeline.
In short, investing in teachers’ wellbeing is both an act of care and a sound public investment.
Well-being must exist at every level
In closing, Teachers Taking Time is not a substitute for better salaries, adequate staffing, protected planning time, affordable health care, or respectful leadership. I would never want mindfulness to be used to help teachers quietly endure conditions that should be changed.
Instead, I see this offering as one small part of a much larger commitment to responsible well-being. At the individual level, educators deserve practices that help them respond to stress and inner struggle with kindness rather than shame.At the relational level, they deserve communities where they can be honest, supported, and reminded that they are not struggling alone.At the institutional level, schools and districts must protect teachers’ time, respond to workload concerns, provide meaningful support, and treat educators as knowledgeable professionals. And at the policy level, North Carolina must stop withdrawing resources from public schools and begin making sustained investments in the people who hold those schools together.
Imagine what would be possible if even a portion of the money, energy, and political attention devoted to privatization were directed toward mentoring new teachers, expanding access to counselors and support staff, protecting planning time, improving compensation, reducing unnecessary demands, and offering educators meaningful opportunities for rest, reflection, and renewal. That would not be indulgent. It would be responsible stewardship of our public schools.
Teachers deserve more than strategies for surviving an unsustainable system. They deserve a public commitment to creating conditions in which they, and their students, can flourish.
Teachers Taking Time is one small expression of that commitment: a place for educators to pause, breathe, reconnect with themselves, and receive some of the care they offer others every day.
Educators and those who care about them can learn more and register at TeachersTakingTime.com.
Granziera, H., Martin, A. J., & Collie, R. J. (2023). Teacher well-being and student achievement: A multilevel analysis. Social Psychology of Education, 26(2), 279–291. doi: 10.1007/s11218-022-09751-1. The study found that schools with greater average teacher emotional exhaustion also had lower average literacy and numeracy achievement.
Herrera, L. J. P., Martínez-Alba, G., & Trinh, E. (2022). Introduction: Teacher Well-Being in English Language Teaching: An Ecological Introduction. In Teacher well-being in English Language teaching (pp. 1-9). Routledge.
Wang, H., & Hall, N. C. (2021). Exploring relations between teacher emotions, coping strategies, and intentions to quit: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of School Psychology, 86, 64–77. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2021.03.005. This longitudinal study of 1,086 teachers found that teachers’ emotions and coping strategies were connected to their intentions to leave teaching.