What We Risk and What We Keep
Chris Kennedy’s blog post, What the Teaching Profession is Trying to Tell Us, had me thinking all week. Educators absolutely want healthier boundaries. Everyone wants a workload that allows us not just to function, but to thrive. Yet too often, conversations about burnout are overshadowed by curiosity, or even judgment, about changed behaviours. What’s needed is time for conversation to examine what makes it nearly impossible to sustain the same commitments that once defined the profession.
Nostalgia has me thinking back to my early career. Like Chris, I stayed at school so late that my father—pre-cell phones—would sometimes drive over just to check in, finding me still prepping at 7:00 p.m. I made time to coach. I chose to sit on many committees—both to learn about the existing culture and to nudge innovation. But that came at a cost: longer evenings, less time for family and friends. Even then—more than twenty years ago—I could feel the shift. The same handful of staff did the majority of the “above and beyond.” Fewer educators were taking on extras outside their classroom walls. Not because they cared less, but because the demands, through accountability measures and student and parent expectations, kept rising. And there were so many fewer demands. Like today, many were already navigating shifting norms around what it meant to be “all in.”
After becoming a principal, I tried to keep coaching. But I realized that if I wanted to lead instructionally—and also be the mother, wife, daughter, and friend I aspired to be—something had to give. I never got anywhere close to a balance. And that struggle, I believe, remains a quiet crisis in our system. Too much investment can lead to burnout. Too little leads to apathy. Both threaten the sustainability of public education.
What Chris Kennedy’s post surfaces isn’t just about trade-offs or adapting to new norms. It’s deeper. It’s a call for courageous, ongoing conversations, held regularly and with intention. As I wrote recently in Designing for Collaboration, our most significant investment is in time for conversations: time to vision together, to wrestle with shared purpose, and to speak honestly about what we’re willing and able to carry—not as individuals, but as a collective.
Too many school communities feel fragmented. Conversations about what matters most are sporadic or occur in private chats with trusted colleagues, rather than surfacing across the whole staff. But without courageous conversations, we can’t build a cohesive culture for collective action. Without clarity around who we are as a staff—our identity, our commitments, our non-negotiables—we risk working hard, but not necessarily in ways that serve learners.
This is both a leadership challenge and a systemic one.
If, as Chris writes, school culture is built in the cracks of the day, what happens when fewer people are in those cracks?
How do we create the cohesion, coherence, and capacity needed to preserve what truly matters in our schools?
How do we design for professional reflection, inquiry, and collaboration that lives across the school year—not just as isolated professional development days?
How do we invite dutyholders (teachers, support staff, leaders) to reflect on how their practices shape students’ everyday experiences?
And how are district expectations and supports—or the absence of them—shaping the very behaviours we question in educators?
I worry, too, about what’s being lost when fewer informal conversations occur; they offered opportunities for belonging and growth. How do we ensure that staff remain steeped in the relational wisdom that has long sustained our profession?
When we gather, we need to stop defaulting to presentations and start facilitating the conversations that matter—for adults and for students. And we need to stop imposing accountability measures that fragment learning and erode trust. Community is not built through compliance. It’s built through intentionality, relational trust, and shared responsibility.
And perhaps, as Chris Kennedy suggests, the healthiest schools will embrace both: enough builders to sustain the culture, enough boundaried educators to model sustainability. Finding that balance will require honesty, creativity, and a willingness to name trade-offs openly, in conversation.
We owe this not just to educators. Not just to students. But to a society that depends on our collective ability to listen, grapple, collaborate, and lead—together.
AI Disclaimer: AI-assisted writing tools were used to help edit this post for clarity, flow, and cohesion.