On the surface, many preschool classrooms look like everything is going well: happy children, engaging activities and smiling teachers. Behind that, many educators are planning at home in the evenings, catching up on documentation and switching between tasks all day. In the first session of illumine's teacher burnout series, Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis, creator of the WINGS curriculum, joined the illumine team to look at where teachers' time really goes, the early warning signs of burnout, and how clarity and capacity can help leaders keep good teachers. This is the written recap. The full recording is at the top of this page.
Speaker
Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis, Bestselling Author, Founder and CEO, Ideal Early Learning LLC
Hosted by the illumine team
Best for
Center directors, owners and preschool teachers
Session length
57 minutes
In this recap
Where teachers lose time, six warning signs of burnout, the ripple effect of turnover, how clarity and capacity help, and what leaders should track
Key takeaways
- Burnout is not only a staffing problem. It often starts when teachers spend too much time on everything except teaching.
- In the poll, attendees named staffing shortages as the biggest contributor to burnout, and the chat pointed to pay, lack of mentorship and untrained new hires.
- Teachers lose time to lesson planning, parent communication, administrative requests, resource preparation, documentation and compliance, often all at once.
- Most teachers show warning signs long before they resign, from more absences to withdrawing from the team.
- Hiring quickly to fill a gap can backfire. Invest in the team you already have so new hires start well.
- Clarity about expectations reduces rework, inconsistency and decision fatigue. Dr. Bisa recommends about an hour and a half of planning time a day.
- Technology should remove work, not create it. One login for planning, assessment and records saves teachers time.
The burnout behind beautiful classrooms
Dr. Bisa has worked in early childhood since 1993, as a classroom teacher, a college instructor and dean, and the leader of several child development centers and a Head Start program. She described how good educators are at making everything look fine. The environment is beautiful and the children are happy, but behind the smiles, teachers are:
- Planning after hours. Many programs give teachers little or no planning time, so lesson planning happens at home and at weekends.
- Carrying a documentation overload. State licensing rules come on top of the requirements for state-funded pre-K, Head Start or national accreditation.
- Keeping parents informed all day. With infants and toddlers, that includes every diaper change, feeding and what was left uneaten.
- Doing wellness checks. Dr. Bisa encouraged a check whenever children change hands, not only at arrival and departure.
- Switching tasks constantly to meet administrative requests from the moment they walk in.
The session's slide put it simply: the industry assumption is that burnout happens because there are not enough teachers. The reality is that it often begins when teachers spend too much time doing everything except teaching.
What attendees said is driving burnout
A poll asked what contributes most to burnout: administrative workload, staffing shortages, lesson planning, documentation or parent communication. Staffing shortages came out on top. The chat added pay, lack of mentorship, feeling undervalued, communication, and new staff who were not properly trained.
Dr. Bisa pointed out that teaching vacancies in early childhood rarely exist because a program is growing. Most open up because someone left. Directors then rush to put "a body in the room" to stay in ratio, but an untrained person adds stress to everyone around them, because colleagues pick up the slack.
Stronger
Invest in the current team
- Prepare and support the staff you already have
- Build communication with the team before new hires arrive
- Onboard new staff properly so they start well
- Remember that every staff member needs support, not just long-serving ones
Riskier
Hire fast and cut corners
- Fill the gap with whoever is available
- Skip parts of onboarding
- Leave the rest of the team to cover
- As the illumine host put it, one wrong hire can collapse your whole team
Where teachers lose time
Lesson planning
Good planning is individualized and based on assessments of the children in the room right now, which takes time.
Parent communication
Parents should leave with something every day, whether a piece of work or a note about the day, written with thought rather than scribbled.
Administrative requests
Requests from leaders often cannot wait until the end of the day or week.
Resource preparation
Setting up materials for each activity, and for the next morning before leaving.
Documentation
Meals, diapering, routines, health checks for each child, and daily safety checks of the classroom.
Assessment
Notes on sticky notes or a clipboard during play, then turning them into an evaluation of what children know and what to plan next.
Compliance
From washing bedding to sanitizing toys that children have mouthed. Regulation books can run to hundreds of pages.
Teachers don't burn out from meaningful work. They burn out from carrying too many competing responsibilities.
The illumine host added that leaders sometimes forget they were teachers first. The goal is not to remove these tasks, because they have to be done, but to make them easier so teachers have more time for the hands-on work they love.
A day in the life of an educator
- Planning and preparation
- Learning experiences
- Documentation
- Family engagement
- Transitions and routines
- End-of-day paperwork
Dr. Bisa noted that transitions take up a large part of a young child's day, and teachers manage handwashing, toileting and diapering while everything else is happening, sometimes with 20 or more children in the room.
The host described the risk of teachers running on adrenaline and treating the day as a checklist. When the focus is only on getting each item done, steps get skipped and it becomes hard to stay nurturing, hands-on and intentional, which is why teachers came into the profession in the first place.
Six early warning signs of burnout
Dr. Bisa's message to leaders was that burnout starts long before a resignation letter, and the signs show up early enough to act on.
More absences
A teacher who rarely took time off starts taking it more often.
Lower creativity
Lesson plans become less detailed, and activities less inventive than they used to be.
Frustration with small challenges
Small issues trigger strong reactions, or more visits to your office to complain. The issue raised is often a symptom of something bigger.
Reduced engagement
They stop socializing, leave the moment their shift ends and skip staff outings.
Withdrawal from the team
A former team player becomes less understanding and less involved.
Mental checkout
You can see on their face that they are no longer invested in what happens in the program.
Her closing question on this slide was simple: most teachers show these signs long before they leave, so are you paying attention?
The ripple effect of turnover
The illumine host described what happens when a teacher leaves unexpectedly in the middle of the year:
- Children lose their routine, and the class structure has to restart.
- Families want to know why, through emails, visits to the office and sometimes online reviews.
- The team absorbs the gap, with teachers moved between rooms or working alone to keep ratios.
- Enrollment suffers. Families attached to a teacher may withdraw, and a center that is short of staff cannot enroll more children without breaking ratios.
- Growth slows, because a constant cycle of hiring and leaving is expensive.
Clarity reduces burnout
Intentional classrooms do not happen by accident. Dr. Bisa recommended about an hour and a half of planning time a day, and asked leaders whether their programs really allow it when teachers are often pulled to cover lunch breaks or absences. Teachers also need clarity about how your program works, whatever their experience or credentials, and the consistency that children benefit from helps adults too.
With clarity
Teachers have
- Confidence in their work
- Consistency across the program
- Focus on what matters
- Better classroom experiences, because they are fully present
Without clarity
Teachers face
- Uncertainty about expectations
- Rework
- Inconsistency between classrooms
- Decision fatigue
How the WINGS curriculum brings clarity
Dr. Bisa created WINGS after building her own training materials, schedules and lesson plan forms for staff who struggled to follow a mix of curricula. It was first published in 2009 and is now in its fourth edition. WINGS stands for wonder, interests, needs, goals and skills: it uses each child's wonder, interests and needs to teach their goals and skills, through an ongoing cycle of assessment, evaluation and planning.
Ebooks and forms
Forms and lesson plans in print and electronic versions, which teachers can download, type into, save, print or email.
Music
Downloadable songs for each month and age group, aligned with that month's themes and studies.
Parent newsletters
Ready-made newsletters to keep families informed about what children are learning.
Capacity: how technology gives time back
The illumine team's philosophy is that technology should remove work, not create it, and that AI is there to support teachers, not replace them. They showed two examples:
- AI lesson planning. A teacher enters a lesson title (in the demo, multicultural music around the world), a category, the room, the age span and the developmental areas, and the AI drafts the lesson. WINGS users can use the WINGS curriculum alongside these AI features. The host estimated it took about five minutes or less. Read more about AI lesson planning for childcare centers.
- Observations. Teachers record an observation, reflection or concern, choose whether to hide it from parents until it is approved, notify a staff member, and use AI suggestions to expand the text or adjust its tone. Notes can be translated with the original kept alongside, linked to photos, developmental areas, milestones and a lesson, and tracked in an observation report. See preschool assessment software.
The session's summary: clarity plus capacity equals less burnout, with the aim of more teacher time, stronger retention, better classroom quality and sustainable growth. illumine and WINGS also invited programs to join a pilot cohort of the partnership.
What leaders should track
Teacher satisfaction
Check in regularly on how your team is really doing.
Planning time
Find ways to protect the planning time teachers need.
Documentation burden
Look for ways to make documentation faster, so teachers can be hands-on.
Retention indicators
Watch for the warning signs before the last moment.
Operational bottlenecks
You cannot improve what you cannot see.
Dr. Bisa added that with so many regulations to track, leaders can forget the social and emotional side of their workforce. Some programs ask teachers to use five or six different curricula, for literacy, math and STEM. Bringing planning, assessment and records into one place, with one login, saves teachers time and helps prevent burnout.
Resources mentioned
- A burnout prevention toolkit, emailed to attendees, with a teacher time audit worksheet, a burnout warning signs guide, a burnout risk scorecard, a leadership reality check and a technology and workflow audit.
- A professional development certificate for attendees.
- The next sessions in the series, on assessments and lesson planning. Read The Burnout Behind Childcare Assessments and The Burnout Behind Preschool Lesson Planning.
What to do next
- Ask your teachers where their time actually goes in a typical day.
- Check how much protected planning time each teacher really gets.
- Review the six warning signs against your team, and talk to anyone who shows them.
- Before your next urgent hire, plan how you will onboard them and support the team around them.
- Write down how your program works, so every teacher has the same clarity.
- Count the tools and logins teachers use, and look for ways to bring them together.
For more ideas, read how to prevent preschool teacher burnout and our guide to staff retention strategies for childcare centers. To see how illumine supports teachers, explore teacher-parent communication or book a live demo.