Tackling burnout and repairing trust in schools

On March 10, SXSW EDU conference goers journeyed on a special field trip to visit The Holdsworth Center’s Campus on Lake Austin and hear President Lindsay Whorton in conversation with Beth Frerking, editor-in-chief of Education Week. They focused on rebuilding trust between teachers and principals and why burnout is a signal that outdated structures are failing educators.

Teacher burnout and overburdened principals are linked

When conversations about educator burnout surface, they often focus on teachers alone. But as Whorton made clear, that framing misses a deeper — and more solvable — problem. 

“We finally realized the crisis facing the teaching profession, but it’s not just about teachers. We also have a real problem with the expectations we hold for principals,” she said.

Whorton unpacked what she calls a structural impossibility in today’s schools: we ask too much of too few people, then wonder why the system bends — or breaks — under the weight.

For decades, schools have been organized around a familiar idea: one principal at the top, responsible for nearly everything. Instructional leadership. Teacher development. Student culture. Family engagement. Operations. Crisis management. Compliance.

The result, Whorton argues, is not just exhausted principals, but systems that unintentionally undermines teachers, too.

“When we don’t structure leadership in ways that support teachers, we also create conditions where principals can’t sustain themselves in the role,” she said.

That insight echoes what teachers themselves have been saying for years.  

In Education Week’s annual teacher survey, the State of Teaching, educators consistently point not only to workload and stress, but to leadership, trust and school culture as defining factors in whether they feel supported enough to stay in the profession.  

The message is clear: Working conditions matter and strong leadership is central to shaping them.

Pressure as a catalyst for change

In October of 2025, Dr. Whorton released “A New School Leadership Architecture,” which makes the case for a fundamental redesign of how leadership roles are structured and practiced in schools, offering a bold new blueprint to make jobs sustainable and give teachers the coaching and support they need so that students thrive. 

At the time, she wondered if educators would be receptive. Budgets were tight, and the solution she offered wasn’t exactly a quick fix.   

In conversations with educators, she found that the challenging environment may actually create an opening for change.  

“We don’t have the people. We don’t have the money. We can’t just keep doing things the way we’ve always done them,” Whorton said.

That pressure is forcing schools and systems to confront a hard truth: incremental tweaks won’t fix a structure that was never designed for sustainability in the first place.

And while resistance to change is real, Whorton doesn’t believe it comes from educators themselves.

“Teachers and principals are hungry for people to acknowledge the structural impossibility of what we’ve asked them to do,” she said. “And they’re hungry for different ways of thinking about how we support teachers and serve students.”

Education Week’s reporting reinforces this point. When teachers describe why they consider leaving they point to systems that make it impossible to do their work well — especially in environments where trust feels thin and leadership feels distant.

Repairing trust and being on the same team

One of the most powerful threads in the conversation centered on trust — not as a soft value, but as essential for change. 

Whorton describes how deeply mistrust can run between teachers and administrators, often unintentionally reinforced by systems meant to support improvement: “Coaching, feedback, and observation often feel like mechanisms of control rather than support.” 

Rebuilding trust, Whorton argues, requires grounding these practices in respect and professional trust, not compliance. Teachers need guidance and support not because they are deficient, but because teaching is one of the most complex jobs we can ask anyone to do. 

“How could we expect one person to master something so complicated alone?” she asks. 

This reframing shifts the narrative from evaluation to collective growth and positions leadership as something done with teachers, not to them. 

“School leaders have to be really mindful about their mindsets about teachers and be more honoring in how they interact with them,” Whorton said. “And I also want to challenge teachers to try to be curious about the perspectives, goals and motivations of their school leaders.”  

Repair means slowing down, practicing curiosity and intentionally rebuilding shared purpose. 

“From our seat, we see a lot of people really trying to do what’s right for kids, and really misunderstanding each other in the process,” she said.