Inside the Burnout Crisis: What Turkish Teachers Reveal About Workload, Coping, and the Cost of Caring

Teaching has long been described as a calling, but a new study from Türkiye suggests that the calling is coming at an increasingly heavy price. In research published in BMC Public Health, Engin İş and Halil Karadaş of Mardin Artuklu University set out to understand how teachers actually experience their working lives—not through surveys and statistical scales, but through long, open-ended conversations about what it feels like to stand in front of a classroom while paperwork, administrative demands, and personal obligations pile up behind the scenes. Their findings paint a portrait of a profession under sustained pressure, sustained not only by heavy workloads but by the blurred boundary between work and home that modern teaching seems to enforce.

The study took a qualitative approach, conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 teachers drawn from preschool, primary, and secondary education settings in both public and private schools across Türkiye. Rather than testing predetermined hypotheses, the researchers used reflexive thematic analysis informed by a phenomenological orientation—a method that prioritizes the lived experiences of participants and the meanings they attach to those experiences. In practical terms, this means the researchers were less interested in measuring stress levels numerically and more interested in how teachers themselves make sense of the demands placed upon them, what exhausts them, what sustains them, and what they believe would make their working lives healthier.

From those interviews, six major themes emerged: occupational workload, work–life balance, sources of stress, coping strategies, institutional support, and teachers’ own suggestions for enhancing well-being. The consistency of these themes across different school types and educational levels is itself telling. Whether a teacher was guiding preschoolers through their first classroom experiences or preparing secondary students for examinations, the underlying architecture of strain looked remarkably similar: too much to do, too little time, and too few structural supports to absorb the difference.

The workload theme is the study’s gravitational center. Participants described heavy teaching loads compounded by administrative pressures—bureaucratic tasks, documentation requirements, and managerial expectations that extend far beyond instruction. The researchers frame this within the Job Demands–Resources model, a widely used framework in occupational health psychology that holds that well-being depends on the balance between the demands a job imposes and the resources a worker has to meet them. When demands chronically outstrip resources, strain accumulates. The teachers in this study described exactly that imbalance: limited time to complete their responsibilities, and demands that spilled over into evenings and weekends, eroding the recovery time that psychological research identifies as essential for preventing burnout.

That spillover is where the work–life balance theme becomes central. Teachers reported genuine difficulty separating their professional obligations from their personal lives. Lesson preparation, grading, and administrative follow-ups did not end at the school gate; they followed teachers home, intruding on family time, rest, and the personal activities that buffer stress. This finding resonates with a broader international literature. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has repeatedly documented that teachers work longer hours than many comparable professions, and public health researchers increasingly treat chronic work–home interference as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, sleep disruption, anxiety, and depression. In other words, what teachers in Türkiye described is not merely a matter of job satisfaction—it is a measurable occupational health exposure.

The sources of stress identified by participants extended beyond raw workload. Emotional strain featured prominently: the constant interpersonal intensity of teaching, the responsibility for students’ development and behavior, and the pressure of being evaluated against standards that teachers sometimes felt did not reflect the realities of their classrooms. The study’s phenomenological lens is particularly valuable here, because it captures how these stressors are experienced cumulatively. A single administrative form is trivial; forty of them, layered on top of a full teaching schedule and a difficult student situation, become something qualitatively different—a sustained state of vigilance and overload that teachers described as emotionally draining.

Yet the study is not simply a catalogue of grievances. Its account of coping strategies reveals the resourcefulness of teachers navigating these conditions. Participants described individual coping approaches—efforts to manage their time, mentally disconnect from work, and protect moments of personal recovery. Just as important, they described collegial relationships as a lifeline. Support from fellow teachers, the exchange of practical advice, and the simple experience of being understood by people facing the same pressures emerged as meaningful protective factors. This aligns with a well-established finding in occupational psychology: social support at work is one of the most reliable buffers against the health-damaging effects of job strain. Institutional resources, where they existed, were also described as important supports for managing occupational demands.

But the study’s most consequential finding may be what teachers said about institutional support—or its insufficiency. Participants emphasized the need for supportive leadership, meaning school administrators who recognize teacher well-being as a legitimate professional concern rather than a personal weakness. They called for manageable workloads, professional development opportunities, and organizational practices deliberately designed to promote well-being. This is a crucial reframing. Much of the popular discourse around teacher burnout focuses on individual resilience—mindfulness apps, stress-management workshops, advice to practice self-care. The teachers in this study, by contrast, located much of the solution at the organizational level, arguing that no amount of personal coping can compensate for structurally excessive demands.

The researchers draw the same conclusion in their analysis. Teachers’ well-being, they argue, is closely connected to how occupational demands are experienced alongside available individual and organizational resources. Efforts to improve teacher well-being should therefore extend beyond individual coping strategies to include supportive institutional practices, manageable workloads, and working conditions that facilitate genuine work–life balance. This position carries real policy weight. Teacher shortages and attrition are growing concerns in many countries, and the World Health Organization’s framing of health as complete physical, mental, and social well-being—not merely the absence of disease—makes the school a workplace whose conditions matter to public health in their own right. There is also an educational argument: teacher well-being is closely tied to educational quality, school climate, and student outcomes, meaning that burned-out teachers ultimately cost students as well as themselves.

The study, which received ethics approval from the Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee of Mardin Artuklu University and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, arrives at a moment when questions about teacher well-being have never been more urgent. Its limitations are those inherent to qualitative research: 30 teachers in one country cannot represent every teaching context, and lived-experience accounts, however rich, describe perception rather than clinical measurement. But that is precisely the point. Scales can tell us how stressed teachers are; only teachers can tell us why, and what would actually help. What they told İş and Karadaş is unambiguous: the profession’s health depends less on teaching teachers to endure more, and more on building schools that demand less of their endurance. As education systems worldwide grapple with recruitment, retention, and quality, that message—grounded in the plain testimony of the people who staff the classrooms—may be the most important finding of all.

Subject of Research: Occupational health and psychological well-being of teachers in relation to workload, coping strategies, and institutional support

Article Title: Teachers’ health and well-being in Türkiye: a qualitative study of workload, coping, and institutional support

Article References: İş, E., & Karadaş, H. (2026). Teachers’ health and well-being in Türkiye: a qualitative study of workload, coping, and institutional support. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29759-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29759-y

Keywords: teacher well-being, occupational health, workload, work–life balance, burnout, coping strategies, institutional support, qualitative research, thematic analysis, Türkiye, public health, education