It’s back to school and that means lots of meetings, often including an opening slide with a breathing exercise, maybe a reminder to hydrate and get plenty of rest, and a quote about self-care with some zen-like photo of nature. Then, straight into fifteen agenda items about testing windows, hallway supervision schedules, and a new form that needs to be turned in by Friday. Wellness gets all of ninety seconds, and the rest of the hour belongs to compliance.
As schools head back into another year, this is exactly the moment those meetings start piling up again. And many well-intended wellness initiatives don’t create positive results because they are missing the one thing that actually moves people from surviving a school year to believing in it: hope.
The Numbers Behind the Exhaustion
Nationally, the exhaustion is real and well documented. Steiner and Woo's 2021 research found that teachers are nearly three times more likely to report symptoms of depression than other working adults, driven largely by school conditions marked by fear and chronic stress rather than anything happening outside the building. Gallup's 2022 Workplace Study found that 52 percent of K-12 teachers reported feeling burned out, the highest rate of any occupation Gallup surveyed that year, and the gap between teachers and other industries had widened from 8 points in 2020 to 14 points just two years later.
Locally, this isn't an abstract trend. Baltimore Magazine's reporting on the region's teacher shortage found that Towson University's College of Education, the state's oldest teacher-training program, has seen a 20 percent drop in graduates earning a teaching certificate since 2017. Dean Laurie Mullen told the magazine that the reasons go beyond pay: "If you take a young, bright, creative person and put them in a place with decreasing autonomy and more scripted environments, then this is no longer an intriguing career.” The article's own reporting adds that research from the Learning Policy Institute points to school climate, culture, and conditions (things like classroom autonomy, access to mentoring, and time for professional development) as what actually drives teachers out, more than pay alone. That research lines up closely with what my co-author and I heard when we sat down with groups of educators while writing our book, The Hope-Centered Educator.
One teacher told us, "I felt paralyzed. I had no agency to act without serious repercussions." Another described leaving mid-year, driven out by burnout after craving leadership opportunities that never came. Neither of them was describing a lack of grit. They were describing a lack of pathway, a system that left them feeling capable of caring but incapable of changing anything about their day-to-day reality. That's the gap a ninety-second wellness slide can't close; we cannot slide-deck our way out of powerlessness.
Wellness Isn't the Same Thing as Hope
Many well-intentioned initiatives treat wellness as an individual responsibility that a teacher is supposed to manage on their own time with a gratitude journal or a meditation app, while the actual structure of their workday stays untouched. It's a bit like telling someone to stay calm in a room that's on fire.
Hope is different from wellness and generic positivity. The psychological framework of Hope Theory defines hope as made up of three interconnected elements:
Goals are the outcomes that we envision in our minds; agency is a sense of energy serving as the driving force behind hopeful thinking that allows us to take action that helps us realize our intended goals; and pathways are the resources, strategies, people and road maps that support us attaining our goals.
Hope is a commitment to believing in your ability to see your way forward and it is a skill you can develop with time, care, and attention. Many educators struggle to commit to self-care practices largely because institutional demands leave them with little time and energy to invest in themselves. What builds agency and pathways is the structure of how a school makes decisions, runs its meetings, and treats the people in the room. And that is something that you can redesign.
What a Hope-Filled Meeting Actually Looks Like
In our book, we lay out a framework for restructuring the exact kind of meeting I described at the start of this piece, the one that opens with a wellness slide and then buries it under an hour of logistics. The approach is built around three questions any team leader can ask before they build an agenda.
Does this meeting connect to something bigger than the tasks on the list? Not every meeting needs a mission statement, but staff meetings that never once mention why any of this matters tend to feel like maintenance rather than purpose.
Does it give people more than one way to solve a problem? A meeting where information only flows downward, announcement after announcement, leaves no room for pathways thinking. A meeting where teachers are asked to help solve a real problem together does the opposite.
Do people leave with more confidence than they had when they walked into the meeting? This is the agency piece, and it is one of the easiest to build in and often the first one skipped. Naming a specific win, person, or piece of progress takes two minutes and changes the entire tone of a room.
Our advice to school leaders is to choose to email bureaucratic, informational items and make meetings meaningful. It's a small shift in structure that asks nothing extra of already exhausted teachers and builds trust and team morale when leaders devote the time to lean into this aspect of their roles.
We also encourage leaders to keep what we call a leadership glimmer tracker, a running, visible record of small wins and things that are going right, precisely because burned-out staff tend to stop noticing them on their own. It pairs well with a simple reflection tool for leadership itself, built around a KASAB (knowledge, attitude, skills, aspiration, and behavior) process, that asks what a leader should keep doing and what they need to let go. Together these tools give people evidence that things are working.
Bringing This Framework Into Your Classroom or PLC
This same framework also works well for a classroom or professional learning community (PLC). When planning a unit, a project, or even a single lesson, teachers can ask the same three questions on a student-focused scale:
Does this connect to something students can see mattering beyond the assignment itself?
Does it offer more than one path forward so that students have choices?
Will students leave more confident than when they started?
PLCs can use these same three questions as a planning lens before teaching a unit together, checking whether the content is covered as well as whether the plan leaves room for student goal-setting, multiple pathways to mastery, and visible, celebrated progress along the way. When teachers use the framework this way, the same structure that makes a staff meeting hope-filled can make a classroom hope-filled as well.
A Different Kind of Meeting Agenda
The great news is, none of this requires a bigger budget or a district initiative to start. It requires one meeting, this month, redesigned around those three questions instead of a task list with a breathing exercise bolted onto the front.
If you're a teacher reading this and you're not the one running the meeting, you can still ask for it. Bring the three questions to whoever leads your team and ask which of the three your meetings are missing. If you're the one running the meeting, try building your next agenda backward, starting with the win you want people to walk out believing, instead of starting with the list of logistics you need to get through. Let’s make the meaningful meetings we would all look forward to attending.
Schools are full of people who came into this work because they believed it mattered. That belief hasn't disappeared; the spark has just been buried under agendas that never made room for it. Hope isn't just an agenda item. It is the structure of the whole hour and it is worth building the meeting around it.
If this resonates, I'd love to hear from local educators directly. I'm hoping to turn this into a recurring Hope-Centered Wellness Wednesday feature here at the Torch, built around hope activities from the book, and I'd love to build it with your input and ideas. Reach out and let me know what you'd want to see and what you have tried that works well. Share your collective brilliance!
References
Lageman, S., & Bradley, K. (2026). The hope-centered educator: A guide to professional renewal and personal empowerment. Routledge.
Marken, S., & Agrawal, S. (2022, June 13). K-12 workers have highest burnout rate in U.S. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/393500/workers-highest-burnout-rate.aspx
McCausland, C. (2024, September). What's really behind Baltimore's teacher shortage? Baltimore Magazine. https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/educationfamily/baltimore-maryland-teacher-shortage-explained/
Steiner, E. D., & Woo, A. (2021). Job-related stress threatens the teacher supply: Key findings from the 2021 State of the U.S. Teacher Survey (RR-A1108-1). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-1.html
Heather Lageman is a Maryland-based author, educator and advocate for educator well-being and professional growth. “She is co-author of several books including The Hope-Centered Educator; A Guide to Professional Renewal and Personal Empowerment. Her writing has also appeared in Maryland Family Magazine, Teachers Matter Magazine and The Learning Professional. A longtime educator, administrator and certified life and engagement coach, Heather writes about education, leadership, personal growth and creating healthier, more supportive communities for educators and students.
