What this experience taught me was that while I eventually came to trust my own intuition, I was not pausing to check in with myself before accepting professional commitments. I rarely, if ever, stopped to ask myself if the roles I was taking on would contribute to my own growth as an educator. I did not ask if these service positions would actually serve me.

In this series, I offer you and every educator a principled method for teacher self-care, what I prefer to call teacher sustainability, because for me it’s about sustaining ourselves in a system that is very efficient at overwhelming and wearing down educators who are passionate about public service, therefore resulting in high teacher turnover especially in high-need areas.