Tackling Teacher Burnout with Erica Mackey

Welcome back to another episode of Voices of Your Village! Today is episode 138 and guys, this is a good one. I got to hangout with my new friend Erica Mackey, she is the cofounder of My Village. I continue to fall more in love with MyVillage every day, it is such an incredible program that you will hear a bit about throughout this episode. Today Erica and I talked about all things teacher burnout cus oh man, the statistics surrounding teacher burnout are alarming. 

We have a lot of work to do in the early childhood community in supporting teachers so that they aren’t living in a space where they are getting burnout so fast. I know what that’s like firsthand in the classroom, I know what it’s like to leave every day exhausted. A lot of ideas have been tossed around about what causes and leads to teacher burnout, today in this episode we are diving into this data and the trends we have noticed in our collective experience.

 “Access to care is an ongoing issue, a lot of families aren’t even looking for quality care because they are just looking for care. Which is an ongoing problem in early-ed. Every child should have access to high quality care.”

In my experience as a teacher, a huge factor of teacher burnout was being under resourced and not feeling valued enough, and being thrust into a position where I had to wear many hats and there wasn’t enough support for me to adequately show up. I needed to learn how to set boundaries with families, with kids, and with the administration, and to find out what it looked like for me to be able to do this work from a place of rest rather than stress.

Next week, I am launching a free webinar series for early childhood educators, directors, and home care providers where we are diving into four different topics with four other experts in the field of early childhood education. If you want to join us, you can go to seedschools.org to sign up for the free webinar series. If you can’t attend live, you will be able to access the replay feature. This is an opportunity for early childhood educators to come together and be on this journey as a village, most crucially to carve out time to take care of ourselves. 

On those webinars we will be sharing about our SEED (Schools Excelling in Emotional Development) Certification program that is going live on September 23rd. In the SEED Certification we have a webinar on self-care to prevent teacher burnout, plus seven other workshops, for a total of 7 hours of professional development and ongoing support from our Seed team. SEED Schools will also get access to our Tiny Humans, Big Emotions program for all of the parents within their school so everyone can be working in collaboration. To find our more about the certification program, to join our webinar series for free, to hangout with your fellow educators, come on over to seedschools.org and sign up today! I love hanging out with you live! Alright, without further ado, let’s dive into this week's episode! 

“It’s good to feel valued as an early childhood educator.”

Erica Mackey is the CEO and Cofounder of MyVillage, a program that makes it easy and rewarding to start a home-based childcare organization. More than 50% of kids across the U.S. are in home-based programs, I believe that home-based programs are a great way to give more families access to high quality care. 

Erica explained that what led to her founding of MiVillage was parent paint. So, her course correction of imbalance in the marketplace was to start by interviewing anyone she could find in the early childhood education sphere. Then, once she started getting more involved with home-based care she learned that 20% of the early childhood education industry turns out every 5 years, an astounding statistic. When she pushed further to get to the root of this turnout Erica found that the financial side was not the main stressor, but instead she encountered the realities of teacher burnout.

“Overcoming this isolation is so core in building sustainable strategies for change.”

Everyone who goes into early childhood knows that pay is not the reason why you go into that field, and often teachers have multiple jobs just to afford to live. Yet, pay is not what drives teachers out of classrooms. Instead, teacher burnout comes from the combination of lack of support and lack of resources.

Erica and I continued to discuss the roots of teacher burnout and the best tactics to eliminate the burnout cycle. For our full episode, click on the link above! For more of Erika and MyVillage, head on over to MyVillage.com They are operating right now in Colorado and Montana, and are soon launching a national educator-focused virtual teacher’s lounge, click here to become a member! Erika, thank you so much for joining me to dive deep on such an important topic. 

Have you ever experienced teacher burnout? What strategies did you use to overcome it? Or, if teacher burnout got the best of you, what tools do you wish you had to help you navigate the burnout? Come on over to @seed.and.sew and message me to let me know! I am always happy to chat with you all, let’s get nerdy about early childhood education!

Until next time,

Xoxo

Alyssa