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  • Collective Teacher Efficacy: What the 1.57 Effect Size Actually Means

    Collective Teacher Efficacy: What the 1.57 Effect Size Actually Means

    By Clay Shumate

    Collective teacher efficacy is the shared belief among a staff that, working together, they can move student learning — and it carries the largest effect size in John Hattie’s rankings, 1.57. That number is real, it is correlational, and it is almost certainly too large to mean what your next professional development day will tell you it means.

    Both halves of that sentence matter. Below is where 1.57 came from, why the researcher who published it alongside Hattie thinks numbers like it get misread, and what a secondary department can actually do with the idea once the slide deck is over.

    Key Takeaways

    • Collective teacher efficacy is a belief about the group, not about you. Not “I can teach this kid” — “we can teach these kids.” That distinction is the whole construct.
    • The 1.57 figure is correlational. It describes schools where staff belief and student achievement travel together. It does not establish which one moved first, and the honest answer is that success probably builds belief at least as much as belief builds success.
    • The same journal published the rebuttal. Matthew Kraft, writing with Hattie in Educational Leadership, calls effect size “a misleading term” and reports that only 13 percent of nearly 2,000 effect sizes from randomized trials reached 0.40 at all.
    • A big effect size is not a plan. Nothing about 1.57 tells you what to do Monday, which is why it shows up on so many slides and changes so few schools.
    • What the research does name is conditions — evidence that the work is landing, structures where teachers actually talk, and enough safety that a teacher can say “that lesson did not work” out loud.
    • The cheapest version of this is one conversation. Ask a colleague how they teach the thing you teach badly. That is the whole mechanism, and it does not require a framework.

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    The Effect Size Sanity Check

    Five questions to run any effect size through before it reaches a slide or a board packet — plus Hattie’s hinge point set beside Kraft’s causal benchmarks, the 1.57 figure worked all the way through, and a blank sheet for the next number somebody hands you.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    What Is Collective Teacher Efficacy?

    It is the shared belief among the teachers in a building that their combined effort can move student learning, including for the students who are hardest to move. The unit is the group. That is what separates it from ordinary teacher confidence.

    The difference sounds academic until you hear it in a hallway. “I can get through to that kid” is individual efficacy. “The kids who come to us behind, leave us less behind” is collective. The second one is a claim about what a staff can do together, and it is the kind of sentence you either hear in a building or you do not.

    You can hear the absence of it just as clearly. A department where the honest summary is “there is only so much we can do with these kids” has low collective efficacy, and everybody in it knows, and nobody says it in those words.

    Two things are worth naming before the numbers. Collective efficacy is measured by asking teachers what they believe, usually on a survey. And the outcome it is correlated with is student achievement, usually on a test. Both of those are real measurements and both have the obvious limits of a survey and a test.

    Where Does the 1.57 Effect Size Come From?

    From Donohoo, Hattie and Eells, writing in ASCD’s Educational Leadership in March 2018. They place collective teacher efficacy at an effect size of 1.57, and they compare it directly against three things schools usually treat as fixed.

    Here is the comparison as they present it:

    • Collective teacher efficacy — 1.57
    • Prior achievement — 0.65
    • Socioeconomic status — 0.52
    • Home environment — 0.52

    Their framing is that collective efficacy is “greater than three times more powerful and predictive of student achievement than socioeconomic status,” and more than double the effect of prior achievement. You can see why it travels. It is a research finding that says the thing schools control matters more than the things they do not, and every educator in the room wants that to be true. I want it to be true.

    One caution about that comparison before anyone puts it in a board packet. “Beats socioeconomic status three times over” is one short step from “poverty is not the problem, attitude is,” and that step gets taken in rooms where budgets are decided. The study does not support it. Comparing a belief measured by survey against a demographic measured by household income tells you those two numbers relate differently to test scores — not that one can be swapped for the other. A staff with tremendous collective efficacy and no counselor is still a staff with no counselor.

    That is exactly why the number deserves a harder look than it usually gets.

    Why the 1.57 Is Almost Certainly Too Big

    Because effect sizes drawn from correlational research are inflated relative to effect sizes drawn from experiments, and 1.57 is the correlational kind. The clearest statement of this problem was published by ASCD too, three years later, with Hattie himself on the byline.

    Two-column comparison of correlational and experimental research, noting that only 13 percent of nearly 2,000 randomized-trial effect sizes reached 0.40
    A correlation says two things travel together. It does not say which one moved first.

    In that 2021 piece, Brown University economist Matthew Kraft argues that “effect size is such a misleading term,” because an effect size “tells us nothing about whether the underlying relationship represents cause and effect or a simple correlation.” It is a translation of a relationship onto a common scale. It is not a measure of whether one thing caused the other.

    Kraft goes further, and this is the part that should change how you read every effect size you are shown. Looking at nearly 2,000 effect sizes from randomized controlled trials — studies built to establish cause — he found that only 13 percent reached 0.40 or larger. Hattie’s widely quoted 0.40 “hinge point,” the line above which an intervention is supposedly worth having, sits near the top of what carefully controlled education research actually produces.

    So Kraft proposes different benchmarks for causal studies: below 0.05 is small, 0.05 to 0.20 is medium, and above 0.20 is large. Against that scale, an effect size of 0.20 is not a disappointment. It is a genuine win.

    Hattie’s reply in the same article is fair and worth stating: 0.40 was always an average across all the studies in his database, offered as a starting point for a conversation rather than a universal pass mark. That is a reasonable defense of what he wrote. It is not much of a defense of how the number gets used in a faculty meeting.

    The specific problem with 1.57 is direction. Schools where teachers believe they can collectively succeed also tend to post higher achievement. Nothing in a correlation tells you which came first — and the common-sense reading runs at least partly backwards. A staff whose students have been improving for three years has excellent reasons to believe in itself. Belief is downstream of evidence, not only upstream of it.

    The honest version of the claim is smaller and still worth having: collective efficacy and achievement travel together, the relationship is strong, and the arrow probably runs both directions. That is defensible. “Believe harder as a staff and test scores follow” is not.

    This is not a new standard for this site. We ran the same check on formative assessment’s headline numbers, where a widely repeated 0.4 to 0.7 range comes from a 1998 review and a later meta-analysis landed nearer 0.20.

    Does That Mean Collective Efficacy Doesn’t Matter?

    No. It means it is a condition, not an intervention. Those are different things and schools keep buying the second when the research describes the first.

    An intervention is something you do to a class on Tuesday. A condition is the state of the building that determines whether Tuesday’s thing has a chance. Collective efficacy is the second kind. You cannot run it in fourth period. You also cannot run much of anything well without it.

    Which is why “we are going to build collective teacher efficacy this year” is a sentence that means nothing on its own. It is like announcing that the department will have good morale. The belief is the readout, not the lever.

    That has a direct purchasing consequence, and it is the one a district leader should take from this. You cannot buy a readout. A program promising to raise collective teacher efficacy is selling you the dial rather than the engine, and the survey score will move whether or not anything underneath it did. The spend that actually maps to the research is duller and harder to put in a press release: protected common time, and the data work required to show a staff whether last year’s push moved anything.

    What Actually Builds Collective Efficacy?

    Evidence that the work is landing, structures where teachers genuinely talk, and enough safety to say “that did not work” out loud. Donohoo, Hattie and Eells name a set of enabling conditions, and none of them is a belief you can adopt by deciding to.

    Numbered list of five enabling conditions for collective teacher efficacy: evidence of impact, high-trust collaborative structures, non-threatening evidence-based environments, social sensitivity and empathy, and leaders who model psychological safety
    Four of the five belong to whoever controls the schedule and the tone.

    The conditions they list:

    • Evidence of impact on student outcomes. Teachers believe the group can move learning when they have watched the group move learning. This is first for a reason, and it is the one that explains the direction problem above.
    • High-trust collaborative structures. Time to work together that is protected, regular, and not consumed by announcements.
    • Non-threatening, evidence-based environments. The conversation is about what the student work shows, not about whose class it came from.
    • Social sensitivity and empathy among team members. Teams where people read each other well outperform teams stacked with individual talent.
    • Leaders who model psychological safety. The principal who says “I got that wrong” in front of the staff has done more for this than the principal who buys the book.

    Read that list again and notice what is not on it. No slogan. No banner. No survey. Four of the five are structural and belong to whoever controls the schedule and the tone, which in most buildings is not the classroom teacher.

    None of those four is free, and a protected common period is the most expensive thing on the list — it is a master-schedule decision that costs staffing, and pretending otherwise is how this advice gets dismissed by the person who builds the schedule.

    That is not a reason for a teacher to disengage. It is a reason to be precise about the ask. If your department wants this, the request is not “more collaboration.” It is a protected common period, an agenda that is about student work, and an administrator who does not treat a failed lesson as a performance problem. Those are three specific things an administrator can say yes or no to — which is the same reason a specific, answerable ask beats a general one every time.

    The Effect Size Sanity Check

    Five questions to run any effect size through before you repeat it. None of them requires statistics training, and together they catch most of what goes wrong between a study and a slide.

    Numbered list of five questions to ask about any effect size: correlational or experimental, which direction common sense would run, who the participants were, what it was compared against, and what would have to be true for it to be wrong
    1. Correlational or experimental? If nobody was assigned to anything, the number describes a relationship, not a result. Read it as “these travel together,” never as “this causes that.”
    2. Which direction would common sense run? Ask it out loud. If the reverse story is at least as plausible — success building belief rather than belief building success — say so when you cite the number.
    3. Who were the participants? A finding from nine-year-olds is not a finding about your sophomores. This one disqualifies more education research than any other question on the list.
    4. Compared against what? An effect size is always a comparison. Against a good alternative, 0.20 is excellent. Against nothing at all, 1.00 is unremarkable.
    5. What would have to be true for this to be wrong? If you cannot answer, you have not finished reading the study — you have finished reading a summary of it.

    Run the 1.57 through those five. It fails the first, wobbles on the second, passes the third, and the fourth and fifth are rarely asked at all. That does not make it worthless. It makes it a strong correlation reported honestly, which is a perfectly respectable thing for a number to be.

    What Kills Collective Efficacy Faster Than Anything Else

    Being asked to collaborate while being evaluated on the result. Every other failure mode on this list is a version of that one.

    • Data meetings that are really accountability meetings. The moment a common assessment becomes evidence about the teacher rather than evidence about the learning, honest conversation ends and everyone brings their best class.
    • Collaboration time that gets eaten. A protected period consumed by announcements three weeks running teaches the staff exactly what the period is worth.
    • Mandated agendas. A team handed its problem of practice is a team doing compliance. The problem has to be one the teachers actually have.
    • Treating a failed lesson as a performance issue. One instance of this and nobody in the building admits to a failed lesson again. This is the single most expensive thing an administrator can do here.
    • Celebrating belief instead of evidence. Posters about believing in kids, in a building where nobody can show whether last year’s reading push worked, produce cynicism rather than efficacy.

    What This Looks Like in a Grades 6–12 Department

    Small, specific, and about a unit you are both teaching. The research operates at the level of a building. The version a teacher can start does not.

    The cheapest possible version is one conversation. Pick the thing you teach worst — everyone has one, and if you cannot name yours you have not thought about it hard enough — and ask a colleague who teaches it better how they run it. That is it. That is the mechanism the whole construct is describing, stripped of the vocabulary.

    I would not have written that sentence in my first year. I learned a review format from another teacher on my hall, and the only reason I learned it is that he noticed I was short on ways to review and offered. Keeping your ears open and your mouth closed sometimes pays off. Keeping your ears open and asking questions pays off more, and it is faster.

    The next version up is a shared artifact. Two teachers, one common assessment or one set of student work, one question: what did students do here that we did not expect? Not “how did your class do.” What did the work show. The best department-level version of this I have been part of started with an instructional coach, not an administrator, which is worth saying plainly — a coach is a partner in this, not an evaluator.

    Three things make a two-person version work where a mandated team often does not:

    • You picked the problem. Not the school improvement plan.
    • The evidence is student work, not scores. Work can be looked at together without anyone being graded — and it rarely needs a name on it. Take the name off when the name is not the point.
    • It repeats. Once is a chat. Every two weeks for a semester is a practice, and the same frequency argument runs under every structure worth building — the first run is about the structure, and only the fourth or fifth is about the content. A signal that took six weeks of holding the line before it worked is the same lesson one classroom down.

    None of this needs permission, a budget, or a framework. It needs one colleague and a recurring thirty minutes, which is also roughly what an honest reflection practice costs.

    What Do Students Experience When a Staff Has This?

    Consistency — and they notice its absence long before any adult names it. This is the part of the research that never makes the slide, and it is the part that matters most on a site about treating teenagers as developing young adults.

    A student moving through six classrooms in a day is running an experiment on whether the adults in that building talk to each other. When late work means three different things in three rooms, when one teacher’s “prepared” is another’s bare minimum, when nobody can tell them why the rule changed at the door — that is what low collective efficacy feels like from a desk. Students do not have the vocabulary for it. They describe it as the school not making sense, and they are describing it accurately.

    The reverse is just as visible. In a building where teachers genuinely work together, a student gets the same answer twice, and the second teacher already knows what the first one tried. Teenagers read that instantly, and they read it as being taken seriously. It is the difference between a set of adults and a staff.

    Worth saying plainly: none of that requires students to be told about collective efficacy, and no fourteen-year-old should sit through a presentation about it. They will judge the staff by whether the answers match.

    What to Do Next

    If you are a teacher: name the unit you teach worst, find the person who teaches it better, and ask them this week. One conversation. You do not need to call it anything — and if you are early enough in the job that asking feels like admitting something, that is exactly backwards.

    If you lead a department or a building: stop asking for belief and start supplying the two things it grows from — evidence that the work is landing, and a room where a teacher can say a lesson failed without it costing them. Protect the common period, put student work on the table instead of a spreadsheet, and go first when something does not work.

    And if somebody puts 1.57 on a slide in front of your staff, the useful question is not whether the number is right. It is the one that follows: what would we have to see in our own students’ work to believe it about us? That question has an answer, and chasing it is the actual work.

    Before you go: grab the free The Effect Size Sanity Check (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is collective teacher efficacy?

    It is the shared belief among the teachers in a school that, working together, they can move student learning — including for the students who are hardest to reach. The unit is the group, which is what separates it from individual teacher confidence. “I can get through to that student” is individual efficacy; “students who arrive behind leave us less behind” is collective.

    What is the effect size of collective teacher efficacy?

    Donohoo, Hattie and Eells put it at 1.57 in ASCD’s Educational Leadership in March 2018, compared against 0.65 for prior achievement and 0.52 for both socioeconomic status and home environment. That figure is correlational, which matters a great deal for how it should be read — it describes belief and achievement travelling together, not belief causing achievement.

    Is the 1.57 effect size reliable?

    It is a real figure from real studies, and it is almost certainly larger than any causal effect would be. Effect sizes from correlational research run higher than those from randomized trials. Writing in the same journal in 2021, Matthew Kraft found that only 13 percent of nearly 2,000 effect sizes from randomized controlled trials reached 0.40 at all. A correlational 1.57 and an experimental 0.20 are not the same kind of number and should not be compared as though they were.

    Does collective teacher efficacy cause higher achievement, or the other way around?

    Nobody can answer that from a correlation, and the reverse story is at least as plausible. A staff whose students have improved for three running years has excellent evidence for believing in itself. That is probably why “evidence of impact on student outcomes” is the first enabling condition the researchers list — belief appears to be downstream of results as much as upstream of them. The defensible claim is that the two reinforce each other.

    What actually builds collective teacher efficacy?

    Five conditions, per Donohoo, Hattie and Eells: evidence that the work is moving student outcomes, high-trust collaborative structures, non-threatening evidence-based environments, social sensitivity among team members, and leaders who model psychological safety. Four of the five are structural, which means they belong to whoever controls the schedule and the tone rather than to an individual teacher.

    Can one teacher do anything about this, or is it an administrator’s job?

    Most of the conditions are structural, but the smallest working version needs no permission: pick the unit you teach worst, find a colleague who teaches it better, and ask them how they run it. Add a shared piece of student work and a recurring thirty minutes and you have a two-person version of the whole thing. What a teacher should not do is carry the structural part alone — that is a specific, answerable request to make of an administrator.

    Why does collective efficacy work fail in so many schools?

    Usually because staff are asked to collaborate openly while being evaluated on what the collaboration reveals. Once a common assessment becomes evidence about the teacher rather than about the learning, everyone brings their best class and the honest conversation stops. Collaboration time that gets eaten by announcements, mandated problems of practice nobody actually has, and treating a failed lesson as a performance issue all do the same damage.

    What is Hattie’s 0.40 hinge point and should I use it?

    It is the line in Hattie’s rankings above which an influence is said to be worth having, and it was calculated as an average across his whole database. Use it carefully. Kraft’s analysis suggests 0.40 sits near the top of what well-controlled education research produces, and he proposes separate benchmarks for causal studies: below 0.05 small, 0.05 to 0.20 medium, above 0.20 large. Hattie’s own reply is that 0.40 was meant as a starting point for discussion rather than a pass mark, which is a fair description of what he wrote and a poor description of how it usually gets used.

    Sources

    1. Donohoo, J., Hattie, J., & Eells, R. (2018). “The Power of Collective Efficacy.” Educational Leadership, 75(6). Source of the 1.57 effect size and the comparison figures for prior achievement (0.65), socioeconomic status (0.52) and home environment (0.52), and of the five enabling conditions. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-power-of-collective-efficacy
    2. Kraft, M. A., & Hattie, J. (2021). “Interpreting Education Research and Effect Sizes.” Educational Leadership. Kraft: effect size is “such a misleading term” and “tells us nothing about whether the underlying relationship represents cause and effect or a simple correlation”; only 13 percent of nearly 2,000 effect sizes from randomized controlled trials reached 0.40; proposed causal benchmarks of <0.05 small, 0.05–0.20 medium, >0.20 large. Hattie’s reply that 0.40 is an average and a starting point appears in the same article. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/interpreting-education-research-and-effect-sizes

    A note on what is not cited here. Learning Forward’s 2015 article on collaborative expertise is frequently recommended alongside this topic; it sits behind a membership wall and could not be read, so it is not cited. The 1.57 figure is reported as its authors report it, and the limits described in this article are the limits its own co-author published three years later — not an outside attack on it.

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Sub Plans for Middle and High School: What to Leave So the Day Actually Runs

    Sub Plans for Middle and High School: What to Leave So the Day Actually Runs

    Sub plans are the instructions you leave so someone else can run your class for a day. Good ones do three jobs: they keep students safe, they keep students doing real work, and they tell a stranger what normal looks like in a room they have never seen. Most sub plans only try to do the second job, and that is why most sub days go sideways.

    This guide covers what to put in sub plans for grades 6–12, how to write the day so a substitute can actually follow it, the difference between emergency sub plans and the ones you write for a planned absence, and what to do about the days no substitute shows up at all. If you want the other side of the door — what the person walking in can and cannot control — that is in the guide to running a room that isn’t yours.

    Key Takeaways

    • Sub plans are written for a stranger, not for you. Anything that only makes sense if you know the room has to be spelled out.
    • Write the day in minutes. Start and stop times for each task turn a vague plan into one a substitute can enforce.
    • Emergency sub plans are a different document. They stand alone, they are built at the start of the year, and anyone in the building can run them.
    • Report the absence early. In one large district’s data, substitute coverage rose sharply for every hour a job was posted ahead of time through the first day.
    • Plan for no sub at all. When an absence goes uncovered, students are often split into other rooms or a colleague gives up a planning period. The plan has to work for them too.
    • Make the work count. Students can tell a holding pattern from a real assignment, and they act accordingly.

    What Should Sub Plans Include?

    Sub plans should include the schedule written in minutes, a seating chart and roster, how the room normally runs, the exact location of every copy, answer keys, the names of people to call, the health and safety information your school requires you to share, and a sheet for the substitute to write back on. That is the binder. The lesson is only one part of it.

    Checklist of eight items for a sub plans binder: the day in minutes, seating chart and roster, how the room runs, where the work is, answer keys, who to call, health and safety notes, and a note-back sheet
    The lesson is one part of the binder. The other seven are what a stranger needs at 7:40 a.m.

    Think about what a substitute actually needs at 7:40 in the morning. Not your philosophy of teaching. They need to know where the copies are, what happens when the bell rings, and who to send for when something goes wrong. A plan that says “students will continue their reading” tells them nothing about any of that.

    The day, in minutes

    Each period gets a start time and a stop time for every task. “8:05–8:15: bell work on the board. 8:15–8:40: reading and questions 1–6. 8:40–8:50: turn in to the tray by the door.” Times give the substitute something to point at. A posted time is easier to hold students to than an adult’s opinion about when they should be done.

    Seating chart and roster

    A substitute who can use names is in a different room than one who can’t. Keep the seating chart current and mark two or three students per class who can answer a question about where things are. Pick them for reliability, not for being your favorites. A seating chart built for the room you actually have does double duty here.

    How the room runs

    Entry, materials, phones, restroom passes, dismissal. Write down how these work in your room, not how they work in the handbook. If students pick up their own folders at the door, say so. If phones go in a pocket chart, say where it is. Most of what a substitute reads as students “getting away with something” is students following a routine nobody told the sub about. Your routines and procedures are the thing being handed over.

    Where the work is, and the keys

    Copies made, labeled by period, in one place, named in the plan. Answer keys in the same folder. Keys let the substitute check work and let students who finish early check their own, which keeps the last fifteen minutes from turning into the loudest fifteen minutes of the day.

    Who to call, and the private information

    Name the teacher next door and the number for the office. Say plainly that if something is unsafe, the substitute does not need anyone’s permission to call for help. Health plans and emergency procedures belong in the binder only in the form your school requires. Do not leave copies of individual student plans loose on a desk; follow your building’s procedure for what a substitute is given and where it is kept.

    Write Sub Plans to the Minute

    My own rule for running a room is short: “Taking control of a classroom is done by organization to the minute and then you pause. Be confident.” The posted times are the setup. The pause is the enforcement. You lay out the plan, stop talking, and let the silence do its job.

    A substitute cannot borrow your confidence, and they do not have your history with the class. What they can borrow is your organization. If the plan is written to the minute, the substitute does not have to invent authority. They read the time, point at the board, and wait. The plan carries the weight a stranger’s voice cannot.

    That is also why vague plans fail even with a strong substitute. “Work on the project” leaves the adult in the room arguing about what counts as working. “Draft paragraph two, due in the tray at 9:20” does not. If you have never written the room down this way, a written classroom management plan is the document to start from.

    Emergency Sub Plans vs. Planned-Absence Sub Plans

    Emergency sub plans are the ones you build before you need them. They stand alone, they do not depend on yesterday’s lesson, and anyone in the building can run them cold. Planned-absence sub plans are written the week you know you’ll be out and continue the unit students are already in.

    Two-column comparison: emergency sub plans are written in advance, stand alone, can be run by anyone and are filed where the office can find them; planned-absence sub plans are written the week before, continue the current unit, and are replaced each time
    Emergency sub plans are the ones you can’t write when you need them.

    The emergency folder is the one that matters most, because it is the one you can’t write when you need it. You wake up sick at 5:30. Your kid has a fever. There is a family emergency two hours away. Nobody is writing a lesson plan in those moments, and nobody should have to.

    Three rules make emergency sub plans work:

    • Standalone. No reference to “where we left off.” The work makes sense on any day of the year.
    • Keyed and copied. A full class set for each day, with an answer key, already in the folder.
    • Findable. The office knows where the folder is. So does the teacher next door. Tell them both.

    Three days is the right number for most secondary teachers. One day runs out the first time you’re out twice in a month, and five days is a lot to build before the year has started.

    I write these for my own room and put them on TPT. The Any-Day Emergency Sub Plan Card is free: one page any adult can run, in any subject. If you teach social studies, Emergency Sub Plans World History is five strange-but-true readings with questions and answer keys, written so a substitute can hand them out without knowing the content. The same format covers Civics Sub Plans Vol. 1 for government classes and Renaissance Sub Plans. For a full ancient-to-medieval sequence, the Ancient & Medieval Sub Plans Bundle covers Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages in one folder.

    Out the week of Halloween? Halloween Sub Plans are five spooky history readings a substitute can run cold, so the sub day isn’t a word search.

    Subject-Neutral Sub Plans That Still Count

    Not every emergency day can be a content day. Sometimes the substitute is covering three different preps, or the class is being split into other rooms. That is when subject-neutral work earns its place. The test is simple: would a reasonable student see it as real work, and would you actually look at it when you got back?

    Work that passes that test:

    What fails the test: a movie with no task, a word search, or a packet nobody collects. Students read those as a day off, and the substitute pays for it.

    Behavior and Logistics: What the Substitute Needs to Know

    Tell the substitute what normal looks like, so they can tell when something isn’t. If partner talk is how your room works, say so, or a quiet-room substitute will spend the day fighting your design. If one class needs a seating change after lunch, write it down. If a student has a plan for stepping out when they need to, put it in the binder the way your school requires.

    Then give them something to say when a student pushes back. Most substitutes have a few phrases they lean on; it helps to leave a few that match how your room already talks. The free 5 De-escalation Scripts You Can Use Today fit on one page in the binder. If you want the full set for yourself, De-escalation Strategies for Teachers has 100 scripts for middle and high school.

    Finally, leave clear limits. Name the two or three things a substitute should write down and leave for you, rather than handle on the spot. That protects students from a stranger making a big call on a single day, and it protects the substitute from having to.

    When to Write Sub Plans, and When to Report the Absence

    Five-step timeline for sub plans: build the emergency folder in the first two weeks, report the absence right away, write the day in minutes before you leave, let the plan do the work, and grade the work when you return
    Report the absence early. Coverage drops for jobs posted at the last minute.

    Build the emergency folder in the first two weeks of school, while you still have the energy and before you need it. Look at it again at the start of each grading period and swap anything that has gone stale.

    When you know you’ll be out, report it right away. In a study of a large West Coast district, Brookings researcher Jing Liu and colleagues found that how early a substitute job was posted was one of the strongest predictors of whether it got filled. Coverage climbed quickly for each hour of notice through the first 24 hours, and jobs posted at the last minute were the least likely to be covered. A plan that never gets a substitute to read it is a plan for whoever ends up in your room instead.

    Plan for the Day No Substitute Comes

    Uncovered absences are not rare. In the same district data, teachers were out about 11.8 days a year, and roughly one of those days went without a substitute. When that happened, students were split into other classrooms about 37 percent of the time, a teacher gave up a planning period about 35 percent of the time, and an administrator covered about 12 percent of the time.

    The same study found that schools serving more disadvantaged students had systematically lower substitute coverage, and that substitutes often cited student behavior when they named the schools they avoided. Reporting from 2024 citing federal survey data put the share of public schools that had difficulty finding substitutes at 35 percent in 2023–24. Read honestly, that is not a reason to blame anyone. It is a reason to write plans that a colleague can run in another room, with your students sitting in the back of a class that isn’t theirs.

    That means one more rule for emergency sub plans: they have to work for 25 minutes in someone else’s room. A one-page reading with questions does. A lab, a discussion, or anything that needs your projector does not.

    What Students Should Be Doing, and Why It Matters

    Students behave differently on a sub day for reasons that make sense. The adult is new, the routine is off, and the day looks like it might not count. Responding to that isn’t a character flaw. It’s a reasonable read of what they’ve been handed.

    The fix is on our end. Leave work that is clearly real, collect it, and tell them in the plan that you will read it. Then do. If the work is graded, grade it the way you would on any other day. Don’t punish a whole class for what the substitute’s note says a few students did; deal with those students individually, the way you would if you had been there.

    Families notice this too. If a sub day turns into a grade, a student should be able to explain to a parent what the assignment was and why it counted. If you get questions, clear parent-teacher communication is easier when the work was clearly worth doing.

    Review Sub Plans Like the Person Reading Them

    Before you file it, read the plan as a stranger would. Could someone who has never been in your building find the copies? Could they start class without asking anyone? Could a colleague run the same pages in their room? Could a student tell what they are being graded on? If any answer is no, that is the line to fix.

    Build Sub Plans Once

    The point of all this is that the hard thinking happens once. A good emergency folder is built in August and keeps paying for itself every time life gets in the way. A good binder template means the planned-absence day takes twenty minutes to write instead of an evening.

    If you would rather start with everything already built, The Teacher Emergency Kit Ultimate Bundle puts 64 resources for grades 6–12 in one download. If you’re buying during a sitewide sale, the TPT sale guide explains how the discounts stack. Free printables for the rest of the classroom are in the free resource library.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What should be included in sub plans?

    A minute-by-minute schedule for each period, a seating chart and roster, how routines like entry, phones, and dismissal work, where the copies and answer keys are, who to call for help, the health and safety information your school requires, and a sheet for the substitute to leave notes on. The lesson itself is only one part.

    What are emergency sub plans?

    Emergency sub plans are standalone lessons you prepare before you need them, usually at the start of the year. They don’t depend on where the class left off, they come copied with answer keys, and they are kept where the office and a neighboring teacher can find them. Three days is a practical number for most secondary teachers.

    How detailed should sub plans be?

    Detailed enough that someone who has never been in your building could run the day without asking anyone. Use start and stop times for each task, name exactly where materials are, and spell out routines that students already know but a substitute doesn’t.

    Should sub plan work be graded?

    If you want students to take it seriously, yes. Collect it, read it, and grade it the way you would on any other day. Work that is never collected teaches students that sub days don’t count.

    What if no substitute is available?

    Plan for it. When an absence goes uncovered, students are often split into other classrooms or a colleague covers on a planning period. Emergency sub plans should work in 25 minutes in someone else’s room, which means short readings with questions rather than labs or discussions.

    Can a substitute show a movie?

    Only with a task attached and only if your school allows it. A video with a set of questions that gets collected is work. A movie with nothing attached tells students the day doesn’t count, and the substitute usually pays for that.

    How early should I report an absence?

    As early as you can. In one large district’s data, coverage rose sharply with each hour of notice through the first 24 hours, and last-minute postings were the least likely to be filled.

    Sources

    • Liu, J. (2020). America faces a substitute teacher shortage—and disadvantaged schools are hit hardest. Brookings Institution, Brown Center Chalkboard. Read the analysis — source for the 11.8 days of average absence, the share of uncovered absences and how they were covered, the effect of posting time on coverage, and the lower coverage rates in disadvantaged schools. Data from one large urban district on the West Coast, 2011–12 to 2017–18; it describes associations in that district, not a national rate.
    • DiFurio, D. (2024). Substitute teachers keep schools running. Here are the best ways schools can attract more amid the shortage. Stacker, with HeyTutor. Read the article — source for the 35% of public schools reporting difficulty finding substitutes in 2023–24 (attributed there to NCES School Pulse Panel data) and for the finding that substitutes rank solid lesson plans highest when choosing an assignment (from Red Rover’s 2023 survey of about 4,000 substitutes). This is a secondary summary; the NCES and Red Rover figures are cited as reported there.

    About Clay Shumate

    By Clay Shumate — Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full.

  • TeachersPayTeachers 2026 Sale: Dates, Promo Codes, and a Strategy That Actually Saves Money

    TeachersPayTeachers 2026 Sale: Dates, Promo Codes, and a Strategy That Actually Saves Money

    By Clay Shumate

    What Is the TeachersPayTeachers Sitewide Sale?

    If you teach grades 6–12, you have probably dropped money on TeachersPayTeachers at least once. Maybe it was a set of sub plans at 11 p.m. the night before a dentist appointment. Maybe it was a project rubric you needed faster than you could build one. Either way, you paid full price — and that is the part worth fixing.

    TeachersPayTeachers runs sitewide sales several times a year. During a TPT sale, the platform adds a 5 percent discount at checkout when you enter a promo code, and most sellers stack their own 20 percent store discount on top. That means up to 25 percent off nearly everything on the site — including resources you have been eyeing for weeks.

    The catch is that the sales only last about two days. If you do not know when they happen, you miss them. This article lays out the TPT sale schedule for 2026, explains exactly how the discounts work, and walks through a practical strategy so you spend less without impulse-buying a cart full of things you will never open.

    Free Download · PDF

    The Teacher Resource Sale Planning Sheet

    A budget line you fill in before you browse, a wishlist worksheet, the 25-percent arithmetic worked out, a four-check list for before you hit checkout, a worth-it / skip-it sorting table, and the purchase-order question most teachers never ask.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    TPT Sale Dates for 2026: The Full Schedule

    TeachersPayTeachers does not publish its sale calendar a year in advance. Dates get announced a week or two before each event through TPT’s homepage, email newsletter, and social media. But the pattern is consistent enough that you can plan around it.

    Here are the major TPT sale windows teachers can expect in a typical year, based on the platform’s established schedule:

    • Winter or Valentine’s Sale (February): A mid-year refresh sale, usually two days in early-to-mid February. Good timing if you need second-semester materials or a curriculum reset.
    • Teacher Appreciation Sale (May): Typically falls during Teacher Appreciation Week in early May. This is one of the biggest sales of the year — many sellers run their deepest discounts here.
    • Back-to-School Sale (August): The flagship event. Usually the first or second week of August — early enough that you can still plan before contracts start. Two days, heavy traffic, and most sellers participate.
    • Back-to-School Bonus Sale (Late August/Early September): A follow-up for teachers who missed the main BTS sale or realized they needed more once the year started. Not every year, but frequent enough to watch for.
    • Cyber Monday / Holiday Sale (Late November/Early December): Often tied to Cyber Monday weekend. Good for stocking up on semester-two materials, review packets, and project templates before winter break planning hits.

    The exact dates shift year to year. The most reliable way to catch the announcement is to follow TPT on social media or sign up for their email list. But if you are reading this in September or October 2026, the next major sale to watch for is the Cyber Monday / Holiday sale in late November.

    How the TPT Sale Discount Actually Works

    The discount structure on a TPT sale is not a single flat percentage. It stacks two separate discounts:

    TPT sale discount stacking breakdown showing 25 percent savings
    How the TPT sale discount stacks to save you 25 percent
    1. Seller discount (up to 20 percent): Individual sellers opt in and set their own store-wide sale. Most participating sellers offer the full 20 percent. If a seller does not opt in, their resources are not discounted — you will see which stores are running a sale when you browse.
    2. TPT promo code (5 percent): The platform itself offers an additional 5 percent off at checkout, but only if you enter the promo code. The code is announced on the TPT homepage and in sale emails. Past codes have followed patterns like BTS26 for Back-to-School or THANKYOU26 for Teacher Appreciation — but always check the official announcement because they change.

    Here is what that looks like on a real purchase. Say you are buying a $10.00 resource from a seller running the 20 percent sale:

    • Original price: $10.00
    • After 20% seller discount: $8.00
    • After 5% TPT promo code: $7.50
    • Total savings: $2.50 (25 percent off)

    That matters more than it sounds. If you are buying a bundle of project-based learning tools or a year-long set of sub plans, 25 percent off a $30–$50 purchase is real money — especially on a teacher salary.

    What to Buy During a TPT Sale (and What to Skip)

    A sale is not a reason to buy things you do not need. I have watched colleagues fill a cart with 40 items during a TPT sale and then never download half of them. The discount does not help if the resource sits in your purchases tab until June.

    Here is what is actually worth buying during a sale:

    What to buy versus what to skip during a TPT sale
    A quick guide to what is worth buying during a TPT sale and what to skip

    Worth It

    • Year-long bundles and curriculum sets. These have the highest sticker price, so the 25 percent discount saves the most. If you already know you are teaching the same course next year, this is the time.
    • Emergency sub plans. You will need them. You never know when. Buy a set that matches your grade level and subject now so you are not scrambling at 10 p.m. on a Sunday. The Teacher Emergency Toolkit store has ready-to-go options that do not require a sub to be a content expert.
    • Project templates and rubrics. If you are running project-based learning in your classroom, a solid rubric or project planning template saves hours. Buy the template, then adapt it to your standards.
    • Assessment and review materials. Spiral review packets, formative assessment tools, and exam review sets are worth grabbing at a discount if you know you will use them.

    Skip It

    • Resources for courses you might teach someday. “Might” is not a plan. If you are not assigned the course, do not buy the materials.
    • Anything you could make in 20 minutes. A generic bell ringer slide deck is not worth $4.00 even at 25 percent off if you can build one in Google Slides before your coffee gets cold.
    • Conference-season paperwork. Fall conference sheets sell hard during the October sale, and a student self-assessment is a one-page form. The prep sequence, the five fields that belong on the sheet and the rule about never grading the rating are all in the free guide to the fifteen minutes around that meeting.
    • Cute but contentless items. Decorative posters without instructional value, themed clip art, or holiday-specific busy work. If it does not help a student learn something, the sale price is still too high.

    How to Prepare Before the Sale Starts

    The teachers who get the most out of a TPT sale are the ones who do their browsing before the sale starts and their buying during the sale. Here is the practical version of that:

    Four step preparation checklist for TPT sitewide sale
    Four steps to prepare before a TPT sale starts

    1. Build Your Wishlist Now

    TPT has a wishlist feature. Use it. Browse on a weekend when you are not under pressure, add resources that actually solve a problem you have right now, and then walk away. When the sale drops, you open your wishlist and check out — no browsing, no impulse buys, no spending an hour comparing four versions of the same worksheet.

    2. Check the Seller’s Sale Status

    Not every seller participates in every sale. Before you assume something will be discounted, check whether the seller’s store shows the sale badge. If they are not running a sale, the TPT promo code alone only gets you 5 percent — still worth it on expensive items, but do not expect 25 percent off everything.

    3. Use Your Feedback Credits

    TPT gives you credits when you leave feedback on purchases. Every dollar you spend earns one credit, and 20 credits equal $1.00 in store credit. Those credits stack with sale discounts and the promo code. If you have been buying from TPT all year and have not left feedback, go back and rate your past purchases before the sale — you are leaving money on the table.

    4. Set a Budget

    Decide what you are willing to spend before the sale starts. Write it down. A TPT sale is designed to make you feel like you are saving money, but you are still spending money. If you need sub plans and a project rubric, budget for those two things and stop.

    A Note About “Coupon” Sites

    If you search for TPT promo codes, you will find third-party coupon sites promising 40, 50, or 60 percent off. Those codes do not work. TPT’s maximum sitewide discount is 25 percent (20 percent seller + 5 percent platform code). Any site claiming higher is either outdated, fabricated, or trying to get your email address. The only legitimate promo code comes from TPT itself, announced on their homepage and official channels during the sale window.

    Why This Matters for Teachers Who Buy Their Own Supplies

    The average American teacher spends hundreds of dollars out of pocket on classroom materials every year. The federal National Teacher and Principal Survey put it at $445 on average for public school teachers, with 94.8 percent spending at least something of their own — and that reference year was 2019–20, the year cut short by school closures, so it is more likely an undercount than an exaggeration. If you are going to spend your own money on curriculum resources — and most of us do — spending 25 percent less on the same materials is not a life hack. It is basic financial planning.

    I am not going to pretend that a TPT sale fixes the structural problem of teachers funding their own classrooms. It does not. But if you are already buying resources to run classroom routines, plan projects, or keep your sub folder ready, you might as well do it when the price is lowest.

    The next time a TPT sale rolls around, have your wishlist ready, enter the promo code at checkout, and buy what you actually need. Then close the tab and go do something that is not work.

    Before you go: grab the free The Teacher Resource Sale Planning Sheet (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    When is the next TPT sale in 2026?

    TPT does not announce exact dates far in advance, but based on their consistent annual pattern, the next major sale to watch for after September 2026 is the Cyber Monday / Holiday sale in late November or early December. Sign up for TPT’s email newsletter or follow their social media for the official announcement, which usually comes one to two weeks before the sale.

    How do I get the TPT promo code?

    The official promo code is posted on the TeachersPayTeachers homepage and sent through their email newsletter when a sitewide sale begins. Past codes have included patterns like BTS26 or THANKYOU26. You enter it at checkout to receive the additional 5 percent platform discount on top of any seller discounts. Third-party coupon sites claiming higher discounts are not legitimate.

    Do all sellers participate in the TPT sale?

    No. Seller participation is optional. Each teacher-author decides whether to run a sale in their store and what discount to offer (up to 20 percent). During a sitewide sale, you can see which stores are participating by looking for the sale badge when you browse. If a seller is not running a sale, you still get the 5 percent TPT promo code discount, but not the full 25 percent.

    Can I combine TPT sale discounts with feedback credits?

    Yes. TPT feedback credits stack with both the seller’s sale discount and the platform promo code. You earn one credit for every dollar spent, and 20 credits equal $1.00 in store credit. Leave reviews on past purchases before the sale to build up your credit balance, then apply them at checkout for additional savings.

    Is it worth waiting for a TPT sale to buy resources I need now?

    It depends on how urgent the need is. If you need sub plans for Monday, buy them now — 25 percent off a resource you did not have when you needed it is not a savings. But if you are planning ahead for next semester, building a project library, or stocking up on review materials, waiting for the next sale window can save meaningful money, especially on bundles and year-long resources.

    How many TPT sales happen per year?

    TPT typically runs four to six sitewide sales per year, including the major Back-to-School sale in August, Teacher Appreciation sale in May, a winter sale in February, and a Cyber Monday / Holiday sale in late November. Occasional bonus sales fill in between these anchor events, but the exact count and timing vary year to year.

    Can my school pay for these resources instead of me?

    Sometimes, and most teachers never ask. Purchase orders are a real payment method on the platform: you build a cart, choose Purchase Order at checkout, generate a quote, and submit it with a purchase order signed by an administrator. There is a $100 order minimum and a $2.99 processing fee, and the invoice goes to your school’s billing contact with payment due in thirty days. One honest limit — the platform’s own help documentation does not say whether sale discounts and promo codes apply to a purchase-order order, so ask their purchase-order team before a sale rather than during one.

    Are the resources classroom-ready, or will I be rebuilding them anyway?

    Assume you will adapt anything you buy. A rubric written for someone else’s standards, someone else’s grade band and someone else’s pacing is a starting point, not a drop-in. That is an argument for buying templates and bundles you intend to rework rather than finished single lessons — the rework is the part that makes it yours, and it is much faster from a good template than from a blank page. It is also the reason a cheap single-worksheet purchase is usually the worst value on the site even at 25 percent off.

    Sources

    Sale dates, promo codes and discount percentages in this article describe the platform’s established pattern rather than a published calendar. TeachersPayTeachers announces each sale one to two weeks ahead on its own homepage and email list; confirm the dates and the code there before you plan a purchase around them.

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Teacher Reflection Journal: What to Write, How Often, and What to Skip

    Teacher Reflection Journal: What to Write, How Often, and What to Skip

    By Clay Shumate

    A teacher reflection journal is a running written record of what you tried in the classroom, what happened, and what you decided to do differently. It is not a diary and it is not a feelings log. Its value is not in any single entry — it is in what twenty entries show you about your own teaching that no single lesson ever could.

    That is the whole case for keeping one, and it is a narrower case than most professional development sells you. The evidence that reflective writing changes teaching is thinner than the enthusiasm for it. What follows is the honest version: what a teacher reflection journal is good for, what it is not, and a ten-minute routine that survives past October.

    Key Takeaways

    • The pattern is the product. One entry tells you about one lesson. Fifteen entries tell you that third period falls apart every time you open with silent reading, which is a thing you would never have noticed on a Tuesday.
    • Most reflective writing never gets past description. In a 2024 study of 198 reflective texts, exactly one reached a critical level. Writing it down is not the same as thinking about it.
    • The evidence is real but modest, and mostly indirect. Nobody has shown that journaling by itself raises student achievement. What the research supports is feedback and reflection as one ingredient inside sustained, content-focused professional learning.
    • Ten minutes a week beats forty minutes in August. Teachers already work about 49 hours a week. A journal that costs more than ten minutes will be the first thing you drop.
    • Write for the version of you that reads it in March. Not for an evaluator, not for a supervisor, and not for posterity.

    What Is a Teacher Reflection Journal?

    A teacher reflection journal is a dated, ongoing record in which a teacher writes down a specific thing that happened in their classroom, what they think caused it, and what they intend to change. Three parts. Take away the specific event and you have a mood ring. Take away the intended change and you have a diary.

    The word “journal” does a lot of damage here, because it imports the wrong picture — leather cover, evening, a cup of tea, long paragraphs about your calling. A teacher reflection journal is closer to a maintenance log. A mechanic writes down the noise, the suspected cause, and the part they replaced. You are doing the same thing with a fourth-period lesson.

    It is also worth separating the journal from two neighbors. It is not an individual reflection, though it is made of them — a reflection is one unit of thinking, a journal is the container that keeps them next to each other. And it is not an evaluation artifact, even though entries can feed one. The moment a journal exists to be read by an administrator, it stops being a place where you can write “I lost the room and I know exactly why.”

    What Does a Journal Give You That a One-Off Reflection Doesn’t?

    Patterns. That is the short answer, and it is the only thing a journal does that a good conversation in the hallway cannot.

    Any teacher can tell you what went wrong in the lesson they just taught. That is not hard, and it does not need writing down. What is genuinely hard — what memory is actively bad at — is noticing that the same thing has gone wrong eleven times since September, always on the same day of the week, always with the same kind of task. Human memory reconstructs. It keeps the vivid and drops the routine, which means the slow, boring, recurring failure is precisely the one you will never recall unprompted.

    A dated record does not have this problem. In February you can read October. Three things tend to show up when teachers actually do this:

    • Recurring conditions. The same period, the same day, the same task structure, the same twenty minutes of the block.
    • Your own repeated fixes. You will find that you have written “I need to model this first” six times and modeled it twice. That gap is more useful than any single entry.
    • What actually stuck. A change you made in September and forgot you made, still running in January because it worked.

    None of that requires deep insight in the moment. It requires the entries to exist and to be dated. That is a lower bar than “reflect critically,” and it is the bar most teachers can actually clear in a working week.

    Does Keeping a Teacher Reflection Journal Actually Work?

    The honest answer: the evidence supports reflection as part of a larger structure, and it does not support journaling on its own as a lever on student achievement. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling a notebook.

    Start with the most uncomfortable finding. A 2024 mixed-methods study by Michaela Gläser-Zikuda and colleagues analyzed 198 reflective texts written by 100 pre-service teachers, coded against Hatton and Smith’s four levels of reflection. Thirty-seven were purely descriptive. One hundred twenty-nine were descriptive-reflective. Thirty-one reached a dialogic level. One reached critical reflection.1 Those were novices writing for a course, which is not the same population as a working secondary teacher writing for themselves — but the direction is clear enough. Left alone, reflective writing defaults to retelling.

    Elizabeth Jaeger reviewed the field and reached a similar place from a different angle. Journal writing, she notes, is “the most frequently used means of professional reflection in teacher education,” and yet “gaps in the research make it difficult to claim that reflection is a transferrable skill… and that it will produce the desired result of improved student learning.” Her specific complaint about journals is that they run “too confessional in tone” rather than staying on teaching behavior and decisions.2 That is a fixable problem, and most of the practical advice below is aimed at it.

    There is a harsher version in the literature too. Pariwat Suphasri and Sumalee Chinokul, reviewing reflective practice in teacher education, describe journals that become “recipe-following” compliance — teachers who “focus on the quantity of the written journals rather than the quality,” writing “long, simple descriptions of classroom routines,” and some who “fake their reflection in order to get approval from their supervisors.”3 If your district has ever mandated reflection logs, you have seen this happen in real time.

    So where is the support? It is structural rather than direct. The Learning Policy Institute’s review of 35 methodologically rigorous professional development studies — studies with experimental or comparison-group designs — found seven shared features of PD that moved student outcomes. One of them is “offers feedback and reflection.” The others are content focus, active learning, collaboration, models of effective practice, coaching and expert support, and sustained duration.4 The authors are careful to say what that does and does not mean: because these studies evaluate whole programs, the review “cannot assess individual component effectiveness.” Reflection is in the recipe. Nobody has weighed it separately.

    The nearest thing to a clean number comes from coaching, which is reflection with another adult in the room. Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan’s meta-analysis of 60 causal studies found pooled effects of 0.49 standard deviations on instructional practice and 0.18 on student achievement — and, importantly, those effects shrank badly at scale, to 0.34 and 0.10 in programs with 100 or more teachers.5 That is worth holding onto for two reasons. It shows structured reflection with feedback does move practice. And it shows the effect is fragile enough that a district rollout can wring most of it out.

    A journal is the cheapest, weakest version of that structure. It is one person, no feedback, no expert. Expect it to do proportionally less, and it will still be worth ten minutes.

    What Goes In a Single Entry?

    Four lines: the event, the evidence, the likely cause, and the one change. If an entry has all four, it is doing its job. If it has three, it is probably missing the change, and an entry with no decision in it is a paragraph about your day.

    Numbered graphic showing the four parts of a teacher reflection journal entry: the event, the evidence, the likely cause, and the one change, each with a short explanation
    Four lines. An entry missing the last one is a paragraph about your day.

    Here is what each line is actually asking for.

    The event is one specific thing, not a summary of the week. “Fourth period, the document analysis in groups of four” is an event. So is “the lab write-up, second block, the twelve minutes after I handed back the rubric.” “This week was rough” is not. Narrow it until you could point at it on a seating chart or a clock.

    The evidence is what you actually saw or collected, stated without interpretation. Eleven of twenty-six exit tickets missed the same step. Four students never picked up a pen. The room went quiet at minute six and never came back. This is the line teachers skip most often, and skipping it is how a journal turns into a mood log. Interpretation without evidence is just how you felt at 2:40.

    The likely cause is your best current guess, written as a guess. “Probably because I gave the directions once, orally, while they were still unpacking” is honest. So is “I don’t know yet.” Writing down that you do not know is genuinely useful — it is the entry you come back to when the same thing happens again and the cause becomes obvious.

    The one change is a single, concrete, next-time action. One. Not a plan to overhaul the unit. “Next time, written directions on the board and one student restates them before anyone moves” is a change. “Be clearer” is a wish.

    That is the whole format. Four lines, and the last one is the only one that is non-negotiable, because a journal full of observations with no decisions attached is the exact confessional drift Jaeger warns about.2 If you want a longer worked set of entries written out in full, the companion guide collects seven of them, including the awkward ones.

    How Often Should You Write In It?

    Once a week, at a fixed time, for about ten minutes. Daily is a trap and monthly is not a journal.

    The argument for weekly is arithmetic, not philosophy. RAND’s 2025 State of the American Teacher survey found teachers reporting an average of 49 hours of work per week — about ten hours beyond what they are contracted for — while remaining more likely than comparable working adults to report poor well-being on every indicator measured.6 Any professional habit that assumes you have spare capacity is a habit that will not survive a bad October.

    Weekly also happens to be the right grain for the thing a journal is actually for. Daily entries produce volume, and volume is the documented failure mode — long descriptions of routine, written to prove the log was kept.3 Weekly forces selection. You have to pick the one thing from five days that was worth writing about, and the picking is itself a piece of thinking.

    Two practical notes. Put it on the calendar at a specific time, not “Fridays.” Last twelve minutes of your planning period on Friday, or the ten minutes before you leave the building. And write in the building, not at home. An entry written from your couch four hours later has already lost the evidence line.

    One exception is worth making. When something big happens — a lesson that genuinely failed, a conflict with a student you handled badly, an assessment whose results blindsided you — write it that day, while you still have the details. Those entries are the ones you will reread.

    Paper, Document, or Phone — What Format Actually Survives?

    The one you will still be using in March. That is not a dodge; the format question is almost entirely a friction question, and the trade-offs are real.

    Comparison graphic of three teacher reflection journal formats - a paper notebook, a single searchable document, and a phone notes app - listing the trade-offs of each
    Searchability is the whole argument. A pattern you cannot find is a pattern you do not have.

    A few things worth knowing before you pick.

    Searchability matters more than it sounds like it does. The entire payoff of a journal is finding the pattern, and finding a pattern in a paper notebook means rereading it. Realistically, you will not. A document you can search for “fourth period” or “directions” turns a stack of entries into something you can actually interrogate.

    Student names change what the document legally is. Under federal law, a teacher’s private notes fall outside the definition of an “education record” only if they meet all three conditions in 34 CFR 99.3: records “kept in the sole possession of the maker, are used only as a personal memory aid, and are not accessible or revealed to any other person except a temporary substitute for the maker of the record.”7 Share one entry with a colleague, a coach or an administrator and that entry has arguably left the exception. This is not a reason to panic, and it is not legal advice — check your district’s records policy, because districts routinely set stricter rules than the federal floor. It is a reason to do the simple thing: keep student names out. “A student in third period” carries every bit of the meaning you need, and a journal written that way can be shared, quoted in a coaching conversation, or left open on your desk without a second thought.

    Decide up front who can read it. If the answer is “only me,” the journal can be honest. If the answer is “me and my evaluator,” it will quietly become a performance document, and the research on that is not ambiguous.3 There is nothing wrong with keeping a second, shorter record for evaluation purposes. There is a lot wrong with pretending one file can be both.

    A Ten-Minute Weekly Routine That Survives October

    Five steps, in order, once a week. The order matters more than the timing: evidence before interpretation, and one decision at the end.

    Five-step graphic of a ten-minute weekly teacher reflection journal routine, running from picking one thing through writing evidence, guessing the cause, naming one change, and looking back four entries
    Ten minutes, once a week, in the building. Step five is the one people skip.
    1. Minute 1 — Pick one thing. Scan the week and choose a single lesson, moment or result. Prefer the one you have been avoiding thinking about.
    2. Minutes 2–4 — Write the evidence first. What you saw, counted, or collected. No causes yet. Numbers if you have them: how many exit tickets, how many students, what minute it turned.
    3. Minutes 5–7 — Guess at the cause, in writing. Then ask one follow-up of your own guess: what would I expect to see if that were true? This single question is what moves an entry off the description level.
    4. Minutes 8–9 — Write one change. Concrete enough that a substitute could execute it. If you cannot make it that concrete, the change is really a question, so write it as one.
    5. Minute 10 — Look back four entries. Not the whole journal. Four. Ask whether this week’s entry rhymes with any of them, and if it does, note that at the top.

    Step five is the one people skip, and it is the step that converts a pile of entries into a journal. Four entries back is roughly a month. A month is long enough for a pattern to show and short enough to reread in ninety seconds.

    If you would rather work from a prepared format than build your own, the site’s free teacher reflection journal and template pack is a printable version of this same structure — no email required, no form to fill in.

    What Do You Do With a Term’s Worth of Entries?

    Read them in one sitting, twice a year, with a pen. December and May are the natural windows. The reading is the point of the writing.

    Give it forty minutes and do three passes.

    First pass — circle repeats. Any condition that shows up three or more times. A period, a day, a task type, a transition, a time of the block. Do not interpret yet, just mark.

    Second pass — find the promises you did not keep. Read only the “one change” lines. Which ones did you actually do? The gap between what you decided and what you implemented is usually the single most useful thing in the whole document, and it is invisible week to week.

    Third pass — write one page forward. Not a reflection on the term. A short list of what you are carrying into the next one: two changes that worked and are now permanent, one recurring problem you have decided to actually solve, one thing you are going to ask someone for help with.

    If you are the coach or the administrator rather than the teacher, the useful move here is narrow: ask to hear about one entry the teacher chooses, and ask the follow-up question rather than the evaluative one — what would you expect to see if that guess were right? What does not work is asking to read the journal. A journal you can be asked to produce is a journal nobody writes honestly in, and the fastest way to kill the practice across a building is to require it.

    That last item is where a journal stops being a solitary exercise, which is the thing Jaeger flags as a core weakness of reflective practice — reflection that stays isolated tends not to go anywhere.2 The coaching evidence points the same direction: the versions of reflection with the strongest causal support are the ones with another adult involved.5 Bring one entry to a colleague. Bring one to your instructional coach if you have one. A journal is a good place to think and a bad place to stay.

    Three Ways a Teacher Reflection Journal Goes Wrong

    It turns confessional. Entries drift from teaching decisions to how you felt about the day, and eventually to how you feel about the job. This is the documented failure — Jaeger names the confessional tone directly as the problem with journals in practice.2 There is a second version of this drift that is worse, and it is worth naming: the journal quietly becomes a file of complaints about teenagers. If your entries are mostly a record of what students did to you, the document has inverted — a reflection journal is a record of your decisions, and the students in it are conditions you are responding to, not defendants. The fix for both versions is mechanical: if an entry has no evidence line and no change line, it is not an entry. Feeling terrible about fourth period is real and worth taking seriously; it is just not what this document is for. If the journal keeps pulling that direction week after week, that is information about workload and burnout, not about the lesson.

    It becomes compliance. Someone requires it, so it gets written for them. The reviewed literature is blunt about what happens next — volume over quality, descriptions of routine, and in some cases reflection written to secure approval rather than to figure anything out.3 If your journal is mandated, keep a private one anyway. The mandated one is a work product. The private one is the one that is any use to you.

    It never gets reread. This is the quiet one, and it is the most common. The entries are fine, the cadence holds, and nobody ever opens the file again. A journal that is only ever written is a very slow way of doing nothing. If you are going to skip something, skip an entry — never skip the December reading.

    Where to Start This Week

    Open one document. Title it with the school year. Put next Friday on your calendar with twelve minutes blocked and the word journal on it.

    Then write one entry, four lines, about something that already happened this week: the event, what you actually saw, your best guess at why, and one thing you will do differently. Do not try to make it good. The first twenty entries are not the product — they are the raw material for the forty minutes in December that will actually tell you something about your teaching.

    That is a modest promise, and it is the one the evidence will support. A journal will not raise your test scores. It will make you harder to fool about your own classroom, which is worth more over a career than most of what gets called professional development. The closest student-side analogue is student self assessment — criteria, evidence, gap, action — and it works for the same unglamorous reason: you cannot fix what you have not looked at squarely.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Can my principal require me to hand over my reflection journal?

    Check your district policy and your contract, because this varies and this is not legal advice. What is worth knowing is that under federal law a teacher’s private notes sit outside the definition of an education record only when they are kept in the sole possession of the maker, used only as a personal memory aid, and not revealed to anyone except a temporary substitute (34 CFR 99.3). The practical answer is simpler than the legal one: keep student names out of the journal and the question mostly stops mattering. If your school mandates a reflection log, treat that as a separate work product and keep your own journal alongside it.

    Do parents have a right to see what I wrote about their child?

    If the entry names or identifies a student and you have shared it with anyone else, it may no longer qualify as a sole-possession record, and your district’s records policy takes over. The cleaner practice is to write “a student in third period” rather than a name. You lose nothing — you are writing about your own instructional decisions, not building a file on a teenager — and you avoid the whole question.

    How is this different from the reflection I already write for my evaluation?

    Audience, and it changes everything. An evaluation reflection is written to be read by someone who rates you, so it tends toward the defensible. A journal is written for the version of you who reads it in March, so it can say “I lost the room and I know exactly why.” There is nothing wrong with keeping both. There is a lot wrong with pretending one file can do both jobs.

    I have tried journaling before and quit by October. What should I do differently?

    Three things. Make it weekly rather than daily — volume is the documented failure mode, not the goal. Put it on the calendar at a specific time in the building, not at home. And cap it at ten minutes with a timer. Most abandoned journals were abandoned because they were designed for a version of the job that has more free time in it than the real one does.

    Does a teacher reflection journal actually improve student learning?

    There is no good evidence that journaling on its own moves student achievement, and you should be skeptical of anyone who tells you otherwise. Reviews of reflective practice describe the research base as thin, and reflective writing left unstructured mostly stays descriptive. What the research does support is reflection and feedback as one feature of sustained professional learning, and structured reflection with another adult — coaching — which shows pooled effects of about 0.49 SD on instructional practice and 0.18 SD on achievement, shrinking substantially at scale.

    What should a coach or administrator do with this?

    Ask about one entry the teacher chooses, and ask the follow-up question rather than the evaluative one: what would you expect to see if that guess were right? Do not ask to read the journal, and do not mandate it building-wide. Mandated reflection reliably produces compliance writing — long descriptions of routine, written for approval rather than for figuring anything out.

    Should I write about specific students or only about lessons?

    Write about your decisions. Students appear in a good entry as conditions you were responding to — four students never picked up a pen, eleven exit tickets missed the same step — not as subjects of a running file. If your entries are mostly a record of what teenagers did to you, the document has inverted, and it has stopped being useful for the thing it is for.

    Handwriting or typing — does it matter?

    Only in terms of whether you will still be doing it in March, with one real exception: you cannot search a notebook. The entire payoff of a journal is finding a pattern across months, and finding it in paper means rereading the whole thing, which almost nobody does. Start on paper if that is what gets you writing, but plan to end up somewhere searchable.

    Sources

    1. Gläser-Zikuda, Michaela, Chaoran Zhang, Florian Hofmann, Lisa Plößl, Lea Pösse, and Michaela Artmann. “Mixed methods research on reflective writing in teacher education.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, art. 1394641, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11496957
    2. Jaeger, Elizabeth L. “Teacher Reflection: Supports, Barriers, and Results.” Issues in Teacher Education, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 89–104. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1014037.pdf
    3. Suphasri, Pariwat, and Sumalee Chinokul. “Reflective Practice in Teacher Education: Issues, Challenges, and Considerations.” PASAA, vol. 62, 2021, pp. 237–264. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1334998.pdf
    4. Darling-Hammond, Linda, Maria E. Hyler, and Madelyn Gardner. Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute, June 2017. ERIC ED606743. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606743.pdf
    5. Kraft, Matthew A., David Blazar, and Dylan Hogan. “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence.” Review of Educational Research, vol. 88, no. 4, 2018, pp. 547–588. Full text (University of Maryland)
    6. Steiner, Elizabeth D., Phoebe Rose Levine, Sy Doan, and Ashley Woo. Teacher Well-Being, Pay, and Intentions to Leave in 2025: Findings from the State of the American Teacher Survey. RAND Corporation, RR-A1108-16, June 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html
    7. U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. “Education records” definition, 34 CFR § 99.3 (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-A/part-99/subpart-A/section-99.3

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Teacher Burnout Quiz: What a Score Can Tell You, and What It Can’t

    Teacher Burnout Quiz: What a Score Can Tell You, and What It Can’t

    By Clay Shumate

    No online teacher burnout quiz can tell you whether you have burnout. The best-known instrument in the field, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, removed its cut-off scores in 2016 because they had no diagnostic validity, and its publisher says outright that it is not a clinical diagnostic tool. What is worth doing instead is describing the job rather than scoring yourself.

    If you typed the question at eleven at night and wanted a number, that is a reasonable thing to want. A number feels like permission. The problem is not that you wanted one — it is that nobody has built one that works on a person.

    This page is about the instruments. For the word itself, start with what the word covers, and the three dimensions every instrument is trying to catch; for what the three symptoms look like in a 6–12 room, the symptom picture, described rather than scored. What follows is the measurement question, and it ends in a reflection sheet that returns no score on purpose.

    Key takeaways

    • The Maslach Burnout Inventory deleted its cut-off scores in 2016. Its publisher says they went “due to having no diagnostic validity” and that the authors came to see them as a mistake.
    • The original “high / moderate / low” labels were population thirds. You were “high” in exhaustion if you landed in the top third of a sample. A third of any group is in the top third.
    • Burnout is not a medical diagnosis. The World Health Organization calls it an occupational phenomenon rather than a condition, so there is nothing for a score to be positive for.
    • Measurement is not hopeless. Cut-offs do exist for one newer instrument — validated on Belgian workers, not American teachers.
    • Uncertainty about the measure is not uncertainty about the problem. A weak instrument is no evidence that nothing is wrong.
    • A self-report survey hears least from the staff with least security. Anyone whose renewal is a live question answers their employer carefully.
    • Use five questions about the job instead. No rating scale, no total, no names. It ends with one sentence and one person to ask, not a result.
    Free download

    The Teacher Burnout Job Check

    Two printable pages. Page one is the five write-in questions — load, control, recovery, support and direction — with room to answer in sentences and a boxed rule about what never goes on it. Page two is how to read the five answers together, the one sentence and one name they are supposed to produce, and the two rules for any school thinking about handing these out. It is not a screening instrument, there is nothing to add up, and it returns no score. Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12.

    Download the free PDF

    Is there a real teacher burnout quiz?

    Yes. It runs to 22 questions, it costs money, and it will not tell you whether you have burnout.

    The instrument teachers are looking for is the Maslach Burnout Inventory — Educators Survey, the version written for people who work in schools. Twenty-two items, ten to fifteen minutes, sold by Mind Garden — $20 for a self-report version, $50 for the manual, $2.75 a head to administer it with a fifty-person minimum.

    So the free quiz you found is not the MBI. It cannot be. What it usually is instead is somebody’s paraphrase of the MBI’s items with a scoring rule bolted on, and the scoring rule is the invented part.

    Then there is what the publisher says about its own product. Mind Garden’s page states that the MBI “is a research measure… but it is not a clinical diagnostic tool,” developed “to assess burnout as a continuum.” A continuum has no line on it that you cross.

    Why did the Maslach Burnout Inventory remove its cut-off scores?

    Graphic headed The cut-off was withdrawn in 2016, summarising what the Maslach Burnout Inventory's publisher says about cut-off scores: that they were removed from the 2016 MBI Manual fourth edition due to having no diagnostic validity, that the authors came to regard them as a mistake, that high moderate and low were calculated by splitting a normative population into thirds, and that the MBI is a research measure and not a clinical diagnostic tool.
    The publisher’s own account of why the thresholds went. Source: Mind Garden, Cut-Off Scores for the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

    Because the people who built it decided the cut-offs were a mistake.

    Mind Garden publishes a short document about it, worth reading in the publisher’s own words. “In the 2016 publication of the MBI Manual 4th edition, the cut-off scores were removed due to having no diagnostic validity” — and “the MBI authors realized that the cut-offs were problematic and a ‘mistake’.”

    Here is how the original categories were built. “‘High’, ‘moderate’, and ‘low’ classifications were calculated by splitting the normative population into thirds — where a person was considered ‘high’ in emotional exhaustion simply because they scored in the upper third percentile of the population.” Then the line that should end the argument: “The upper third of a large population is not a definition of people experiencing a severe case of burnout.”

    Read it as arithmetic and it gets clearer. A third of any group is in the top third of that group. Score a thousand teachers, label the top third “high burnout,” and you will label a third of them every time — in a brutal year and in a good one. The label tells you where somebody sits in a queue, not whether anything is wrong.

    That is the machinery underneath most burnout quizzes online: a convenience the instrument’s own authors withdrew a decade ago, kept anyway.

    How well can burnout be measured at all?

    Graphic headed What the measurement research found, with four rows: a 2021 COSMIN review of nineteen studies and five instruments rated the Maslach Burnout Inventory very low quality of evidence on six of eight psychometric properties despite having the most validation studies; the same review reported that the absence of an accepted diagnostic standard prevented any sensitivity or specificity being calculated; a meta-analysis of 221 studies found depersonalisation and personal accomplishment reliabilities well below levels recommended for high-stakes decisions; and cut-off scores do exist for the newer Burnout Assessment Tool but only for Flanders.
    Four findings, including the one that cuts the other way. Sources: Shoman et al. 2021; Wheeler et al. 2011; BAT Manual 2.0.

    Better than nothing, worse than you would hope, and not well enough to draw a line.

    The most systematic answer is a 2021 review in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences that put five burnout instruments through COSMIN, a standard framework for rating measurement quality. The MBI had more validation studies behind it than any of the others and still came out with “very low quality of evidence on validity for six psychometric properties out of eight.” Only the Copenhagen and, less so, the Oldenburg inventory met the reviewers’ bar for valid medical use.

    The same review explains why no quiz can honestly claim a threshold: “the absence of an accepted diagnostic standard precluded measuring sensitivity and specificity” for any of them. You cannot work out how often a test catches the thing, or cries wolf, when there is no agreed definition to check it against.

    A second problem sits inside the MBI itself. A meta-analysis of 221 studies, 84 supplying usable reliability figures, found emotional exhaustion holding up reasonably well while the other two subscales did not: depersonalization and personal accomplishment were “well below recommended levels for high-stakes decisions, such as the diagnosis of burnout syndrome.” Two of the three scores a quiz hands back are the least reliable two.

    One warning about how to read that. Uncertainty about the instrument is not uncertainty about the problem. Nothing here says teachers are fine, and none of it is a reason to answer a teacher who says the job has become unmanageable with a note about psychometrics. Correcting a measurement is not answering a complaint. For the size of the thing rather than the quality of the ruler, the same question asked of the national numbers.

    So does any burnout score mean anything?

    Yes, and this is the part a debunk usually skips.

    In 2001 a team led by Wilmar Schaufeli tested the MBI on people who had actually sought psychological treatment, rather than on working adults well enough to be at work: 71 employees with work-related neurasthenia under ICD-10 criteria against 68 without. The three-factor structure held up, burnout was partly distinguishable from anxiety and depression, and two of the three scales — emotional exhaustion and depersonalization — discriminated between the groups. It measures something real, and it tracks a clinical distinction.

    Cut-off scores exist too, for a newer instrument. The Burnout Assessment Tool’s manual reports norms against the Flemish and Dutch workforce, representative samples of 1,500 each, and states that “based on a group that suffers from serious burnout cut-off scores have been calculated. To date, such cut-off values are only available for Flanders.”

    So the honest summary is narrower than either headline. Burnout can be measured, and for one instrument, in one region of Belgium, there are cut-offs built on a clinical sample. None of that describes a free web page scoring an American teacher against a threshold nobody validated here. The BAT norms are Belgian and Dutch workers across all occupations, not teachers. And the 2001 sample was people already in treatment — the opposite end of the pipeline from somebody searching at eleven at night.

    Is burnout even a diagnosis?

    No, and that is not a technicality.

    The World Health Organization includes burn-out in ICD-11, but under “Factors influencing health status or contact with health services,” and states plainly that it is not classified as a medical condition. Its definition names the three dimensions the research uses: “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion,” “increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism,” and “reduced professional efficacy.” It also “should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.” It is a relationship with a job.

    Two things follow. When a quiz reports “you have moderate burnout,” it is borrowing the grammar of diagnosis for something that is not one — there is no condition to be positive for, so nothing for the result to be right or wrong about. And the things nearby that are diagnosable — depression, anxiety, a thyroid problem, sustained sleep loss — get diagnosed by a person who can ask you a follow-up question. The overlap with depression in particular is real and unsettled, and the symptom page goes through what is and is not distinguishable.

    What to use instead: five questions about the job

    Graphic headed Five questions about the job, listing load, control, recovery, support and direction as write-in prompts, followed by four rules: no rating scale and nothing to add up; question five compares the job to itself rather than you to other teachers; no student or colleague names on the sheet; and keep it on paper rather than a district device. A closing note states that the output is one sentence and one name, not a score.
    The sheet is a job description, not a self-rating. There is nothing on it to total up.

    Stop measuring yourself and start describing the job.

    That switch is not a way of dodging the question you came with. It is that between you and the job, the job is the part that can change. Every instrument above tries to detect a state inside a person; the research keeps pointing at the position instead — the demands loaded onto it, the resources attached to it. That is the Job Demands–Resources frame, and it makes the useful exercise a job description rather than a self-rating. Five questions, answered in sentences rather than scores.

    • Load. What is on my plate this year that was not on it last year?
    • Control. Which of those did I choose?
    • Recovery. In a normal week, when am I off the clock and actually off?
    • Support. Who do I ask when something goes wrong, and did I ask them this month?
    • Direction. Is this heavier, lighter, or about the same as three months ago?

    Four rules are the difference between this and a quiz.

    • No rating scale and no total. No one to five, no counting, no “if you answered yes to three.” Everything above about invented cut-offs applies to one you invent for yourself at the kitchen table.
    • Question five is the only comparison, and it compares the job to itself — not you to other teachers. Direction is the honest version of what a score was pretending to give you.
    • No names on it. Not a student’s and not a colleague’s; describe the situation. A sheet with a student’s name on it stops being private reflection and becomes a record about a child.
    • Paper, and off the district network. A work device is not a private place to write down that you are not coping.

    You should end with two things: one sentence describing the job, and the name of one person who could change one item on it. That is the output — not a number, not a category, not a verdict on whether you are the kind of teacher who copes. For which of your answers is even addressable, which items on that list somebody with a title can actually lift; to write it somewhere built for it, a blank page built for exactly this kind of writing.

    Question four most often has a fixable answer, and it is the one worth taking to a coach or a department chair, because knowing who to ask is learnable rather than a personality trait. But keep the categories straight: a coaching cycle offered in place of removing an item from question one will be read as exactly that. And take one item to that person, not the sheet — a completed sheet handed across a desk reads as the opening of a grievance, which is not what you were doing.

    If the honest answer to question four is that there is nobody — you are the only person teaching your course, the chair is the problem, the building is between principals — write the item down anyway. A written description of the job is what you need for every conversation after this one, including the one about whether to stay.

    A note for the people in a school who get scored most, which is the students. The question this page turns on is worth owning — what was this cut-off built from, and who decided where it went? — and it applies to a reading-level band or a benchmark percentile too. Sometimes the answer is solid. Sometimes somebody split a population into thirds. That is a fair thing for a sixteen-year-old to ask about a number attached to their name.

    What a school should never do with this

    Turn it into a threshold.

    The failure mode is easy to walk into with good intentions. A district likes the five questions, prints them for a faculty meeting, and adds one line at the bottom: three or more flagged, refer for follow-up. It has now built the kind of cut-off the MBI’s own authors withdrew in 2016 for having no diagnostic validity — except this one has no normative sample behind it at all, and it is attached to somebody’s employment.

    The second rule is do not collect them. A reflection sheet is honest precisely because nobody is going to read it; ask teachers to hand it in and what comes back is the set of answers people give their employer. Harder version of the same point: a collected sheet is a record, records can be requested, and a district holding staff-written statements that the workload is unmanageable has documented its own notice. If you are going to ask, intend to act — and the records a district already keeps are better material than a survey. Sections, preps, duties, coverage days and time-to-fill are facts, not self-reports.

    There is a constructive version of the five questions for an administrator, and it is not screening: ask them of a role rather than a person. Take one position on paper, before anybody is in it, and answer load, control, recovery and support about the job as written. That is a scheduling conversation, it belongs to whoever builds the master schedule, and it can be answered in August while something can still be done.

    One more reason to be careful with self-report, and it is not about psychometrics. The staff most likely to give a careful, unrevealing answer to a workplace questionnaire are the ones with the least security — anyone new, anyone whose renewal is a live question. A survey does not just measure the job imprecisely; it hears least clearly from the people whose jobs are hardest to refuse.

    What to do next

    Take the five questions onto any piece of paper, or print the sheet above. Answer question five first, because it is the one that tells you something. Write your sentence about the job, name the person who could change one item, and ask for that one thing.

    Then keep the two questions apart, because that is this page’s whole argument. “Is this job too heavy?” is answered by describing the job. “Am I all right?” is not, and if the honest answer is that something is wrong in a way a schedule change would not touch, that is a conversation with your doctor or a counselor — and if you are not sure who that would be, the checked list of who that person could be. A person who can ask you a follow-up question, not a page that hands back a score.

    Want it as a printable? Download The Teacher Burnout Job Check (2 pages, free, no email required) — five questions, no scale, and nothing to total up.

    Frequently asked questions

    Is there a free teacher burnout quiz that actually works?

    Not in the sense you are hoping for, and the reason is not that the free ones are cheap imitations of a good paid one. The paid instrument does not do it either. The Maslach Burnout Inventory’s publisher removed its cut-off scores from the 2016 manual “due to having no diagnostic validity” and states that the MBI “is a research measure… but it is not a clinical diagnostic tool.” A free quiz that hands you a category is using a threshold the instrument’s own authors withdrew. What a free page can honestly give you is a set of questions about the job and no score, which is what the sheet on this page is.

    Can I take the Maslach Burnout Inventory myself?

    You can buy access to it. Mind Garden sells a self-report version for $20 and the manual for $50, and the Educators Survey is the 22-item version written for people who work in schools. What you will not get is a verdict. You will get three subscale scores on a continuum with no cut-offs, because the cut-offs were deleted. Worth knowing before you spend the money: a 2011 meta-analysis of 221 studies found the depersonalization and personal accomplishment reliabilities “well below recommended levels for high-stakes decisions, such as the diagnosis of burnout syndrome.” Two of your three numbers are the shaky ones.

    Why does this site not publish a burnout quiz?

    Because a quiz implies a threshold and there is no validated threshold in this literature for a person to cross. A 2021 COSMIN review of five burnout instruments reported that “the absence of an accepted diagnostic standard precluded measuring sensitivity and specificity” for any of them — meaning nobody can say how often a burnout test is right, because there is no agreed definition of the condition to check it against. Publishing a scored quiz anyway would mean inventing a line and putting this site’s name on it. The five questions on this page return no score on purpose.

    Can a quiz tell burnout apart from depression?

    No. The one study that tried the clinical version of this question — testing the MBI on 71 employees in treatment for work-related neurasthenia against 68 who were not — found burnout could be partly distinguished from anxiety and depression, with two of three subscales discriminating between the groups. Partly, in a clinical sample, by researchers. That is a long way from a web page sorting the two from twenty questions. If the distinction matters to you right now, it matters enough for a doctor or a counselor rather than a page.

    My school wants to give the staff a burnout survey. Is that a good idea?

    It can be, with two conditions. Do not attach a threshold to it and do not tie it to any individual. A scoring line invented for a faculty meeting is the same mistake the MBI’s authors corrected in 2016, with no normative sample behind it and employment attached. And be realistic about what a survey hears: the staff with the least job security give the most careful answers, so the people whose workloads are hardest to refuse are the ones you will hear from least. Counting what the district already records — sections, preps, duties, coverage days, time-to-fill — is usually better material, and it is fact rather than self-report.

    If the measures are this shaky, is teacher burnout even real?

    Yes, and that inference is the one misuse of this page worth naming. Uncertainty about a ruler is not uncertainty about the thing being measured. The World Health Organization defines burn-out in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon with three dimensions; what it declines to do is call it a medical condition. Weak instruments make the rate hard to pin down. They say nothing about whether a particular job has become unmanageable, and answering a teacher who says so with a note about psychometrics is not a reply.

    I am a parent and I think my child’s teacher is burned out. What should I do?

    Start from the same place this page ends: you cannot score a person from outside, and a validated instrument administered by researchers struggles to do it from inside. What you can do is describe what you have actually seen — work coming back slowly, a class that seems to have lost its shape — and raise it with the school as a question about the class rather than a judgment about the adult. Two things to avoid: do not ask your child to report on how their teacher seems, which puts a kid in the middle of an adult problem, and keep it out of the class group chat. A teacher’s apparent state is not community information.

    I am a student and my teacher seems exhausted. Is that because of us?

    No. How many classes a teacher has, how many students are in each one, how many duties come with the job and whether there is any time in the day to recover are decisions made by adults, before you walked in. Nothing on this page measures a student and none of the research behind it asked one anything. You are allowed to notice that a class has gone flat, and if it is affecting your work the person to tell is a counselor or another teacher you trust — describe the class, not the person. What is not yours is fixing an adult’s workload.

    Sources

    • Mind Garden. Cut-Off Scores for the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The publisher’s statement that the cut-off scores were removed from the 2016 MBI Manual 4th edition “due to having no diagnostic validity,” that the authors regarded them as a “mistake,” and that high / moderate / low “were calculated by splitting the normative population into thirds.” mindgarden.com
    • Mind Garden. Maslach Burnout Inventory — Educators Survey (MBI-ES). 22 items, three subscales; prices as listed 2026-09-24. States the MBI “is a research measure… but it is not a clinical diagnostic tool.” mindgarden.com
    • World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon” (ICD-11, QD85). Listed under “Factors influencing health status or contact with health services” and not classified as a medical condition. who.int
    • Shoman, Y., Marca, S. C., Bianchi, R., Godderis, L., van der Molen, H. F., & Guseva Canu, I. (2021). Psychometric properties of burnout measures: a systematic review. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 30, e8. 19 studies, 5 instruments, COSMIN-rated. Read in full via KU Leuven Lirias. doi.org
    • Wheeler, D. L., Vassar, M., Worley, J. A., & Barnes, L. L. B. (2011). A reliability generalization meta-analysis of coefficient alpha for the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(1), 231–244. 221 studies, 84 usable alphas. doi.org
    • Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., Hoogduin, K., Schaap, C., & Kladler, A. (2001). On the clinical validity of the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Burnout Measure. Psychology & Health, 16(5), 565–582. 71 employees in treatment for work-related neurasthenia (ICD-10) against 68 without. Read via the PubMed abstract; the full text was not reachable from this session and nothing beyond the abstract is claimed. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    • Schaufeli, W. B., De Witte, H., & Desart, S. (2020). Manual Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT), version 2.0. Norms on representative Flemish and Dutch workforce samples, N = 1,500 each; workers across occupations, not teachers, and not a United States sample. burnoutassessmenttool.be
    • Hawrot, A., & Koniewski, M. (2018). Factor structure of the Maslach Burnout Inventory–Educators Survey in a Polish-speaking sample. Journal of Career Assessment, 26(3), 515–530. 1,206 teachers. The three-factor model did not fit well; a bifactor model fit best, so the MBI-ES behaves more like one overall measure than three independent dimensions. Polish primary school teachers — not a United States secondary result, cited for the structural finding only. doi.org

    Every source above was opened and read on 2026-09-24. Where one could not be opened in full, the list says which abstract was read instead. No figure on this page went unchecked against the document that produced it.

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes.

Teacher Emergency Toolkit — practical resources, real classroom support. Shop on TPT.Teacher Emergency Toolkit — practical resources, real classroom support. Shop on TPT.