Teachers during COVID-19: Examining burnout levels and their work-life

In March 2020, with the scope to reduce the spread of COVID-19, most national governments around the world canceled in-person education and moved to online learning. Therefore, teachers and students had to adapt a new way of teaching. Most of Italian teachers never had such an experience before and encountered difficulties in effectively carrying out this process on their own. Difficulties that can naturally increase anxiety and stress, leading, in situations perceived as extreme, to burnout syndrome.

This paper endeavored to verify levels of job stress and burnout of Italian teachers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic using the validated Maslach Burnout Inventory-General. This study aimed to measure the association among the three main dimensions of burnout and the variables of teachers' personal and working lives that changed due to COVID-19.

The aim of this paper was to verify burnout state and to measure the association among the three dimensions of burnout and the personal and working lives of Italian teachers using structural equation model analysis. The analysis was conducted in December 2021 and considered the situation in which the Italian teachers (from primary to middle and upper school) are working since March 2020.

The results showed that teachers were emotionally exhausted; they did not feel able to fully fulfill their task towards the students. This involved a high absenteeism, a lower quality of work performance and the impossibility of making an objective evaluation of the students with an inevitable flattening of the class level. In contrast, the study shows that teachers who experienced few problems had relatively low levels of burnout.

The findings brought out some proposals to reduce the risk of burnout and increase the individual well-being of schoolwork organization with positive effects on the lives of students: to strengthen social identity, to avoid a full-time online connection, to promote a psychological support service and to promote resilience training.