How social media powers discussions of burnout, career transition among teachers

New research from three University of Georgia alumni shines a light on the way teachers congregate and discuss issues in the profession, specifically burnout and transitioning away from teaching, via the social media platform Reddit.

The study, published in “Teachers College Record,” is co-authored by three alumni of the Mary Frances Early College of Education: Stacey Kerr (Ph.D. ’16), an independent scholar; Mardi Schmeichel (M.Ed. ’09, Ph.D. ’12), an associate professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Beth Wurzburg (Ed.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’15), a clinical associate professor in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice.

Prior studies focused on the positive aspects of social media for teachers, such as how it provides support, networking, and other resources, which the research team initially planned to further investigate. However, after joining teacher groups on their own Facebook and Instagram accounts, they saw evidence of the opposite point of view.

“As we, with our own social media feeds, started joining some of these groups that teachers were in, we just couldn’t deny that there was this emerging current of real dissatisfaction with teaching,” Schmeichel said. “It’s not unknown to any of us who have been teachers or work with teachers, but the fact that it was so prevalent we could not ignore it in our social media that we were seeing once we joined these groups, we realized that we kind of had to pivot from what we had intended to do and really focus on what we call the ‘get out of teaching’ discourse.”

The researchers gathered 1,171 posts from the subreddit r/TeachersinTransition which were posted during one week in March of 2024. They sorted posts into three categories—burnout, which consists of 33% of the posts; leaving, which is 36% of the posts; and other, which includes the remaining 29% of posts. The team omitted the “other” category from analysis due to the varying topics included in the category.

The burnout and leaving categories were further divided into subcategories. The burnout category includes cyclical burnout, emotional toll, and physical/mental health, with 53% percent of those posts falling into the physical/mental health subcategory. The leaving category includes advice seeking, self-doubt, success, urgency, and validation, with the advice seeking subcategory making up 56% of posts in the category.

The team chose to analyze posts from Reddit because users are largely anonymous, and the platform does not provide the same expectation of privacy as other social media sites.

Coming from the background of teacher education, Wurzburg said the study can help frame discussions around teaching and teacher well-being to improve the situation.

“I think the really cool part about the data is that it is not filtered through the traditional sort of research process. I think that the folks’ voices who are captured here are really authentic in a way that just kind of foregrounds a situation that teachers know about intimately,” Wurzburg said.

The research also highlights the experiences of specific subset of teachers, whose struggles in the profession may not be known to teachers or teacher educators who are not in the subreddit or similar social media groups.

“The way these groups function and the way they talk about teaching goes beyond individual concerns about difficult situations and is kind of shaping the commonsense conclusion that teaching is impossible, so getting out and doing something different is really the only rational response to a broken system,” Schmeichel said. “Those aren’t necessarily realities that we think that our colleagues know about, so we thought it was really important to kind of bring this issue to the forefront in the educational research community.”