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Coping with Burnout

Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA. (2004). An introductory packet on understanding and minimizing staff burnout. Los Angeles, CA: Author. http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu

Included in this extensive package of information are articles about strategies for coping with burnout. A brief summary is in the following table. Click on the link to the website to find the complete document.

Domain	Sample information
*Enhancing school culture*
Towards a caring school culture	Schools often have no formal mechanisms for caring for staff. As schools move toward local control, they have a real opportunity to establish formal mechanisms and programs that foster mutual caring.
Reculturing schools	A school culture influences the way people think, feel and act. A positive school culture includes meaningful staff development, successful curricular reform, and effective use of student performance data.
Personal strategies
Stress busters	Stress builder: 'I'll never get this project finished in time.' Stress buster: 'If I stay focused and take it one step at a time, I'll make steady progress.'
Personal coping techniques	Cognitive restructuring: learning to recognise faulty, irrational, and self-defeating thinking patterns and self-statements and replacing them with rational thoughts, self-statements and behaviours.
Preventing burnout
A few strategies for burnout prevention and recovery	Avoid isolation: Don't do everything alone - develop or renew intimacies with friends and loved ones.
Preventing parent burnout	Teach effective coping strategies to parents of children with learning disabilities.
Tips for teachers
Avoiding burnout and staying healthy	Learn to plan: disorganisation breeds stress.
Coping with stress in the special education classroom	Increase your own sense of efficacy by implementing best practices in your classroom.
Survival guide for new teachers	Working with veteran teachers, parents and principals.
Violence in communities and schools	Build and maintain partnerships with outside organisations.
Bouncing back from burnout	Try not to wrap up your identity with your job.

This resource also provides an extensive annotated bibliography and library of links to useful sites about burnout and mental health.