Managing workload and mitigating burnout

The University of Calgary Community Mental Health and Well-being Strategy outlines many recommendations to contribute to a healthy campus. In a 2022 presentation as part of the UCalgary Summer Wellness Series, Roxanne Ross points to research about the strong connection between student well-being and learning experiences including coursework and assessments. Instructors play a pivotal role in shaping students' educational experiences and creating a positive classroom environment, conducive to student academic success and overall health and happiness. 

One of the biggest challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, for both students and staff, is workload. While you may not be able to influence all aspects of workload, as an educator you can examine your own courses to ensure they have a reasonable workload. 

Below are strategies and actionable steps for supporting student wellbeing in the classroom. 

Student burnout reduction strategies for educators

1.  Use a student workload estimator when designing your courses to estimate how many hours of learning effort can be expected of students in your course. This workload estimator allows you to add the number of hours required for labs, as well as study, assigned readings, field studies, simulated clinical labs, and many other learning activities. Keep in mind the scope of a three-credit course and how much work can reasonably be expected of students. 
2.  Be clear about student learning expectations in your course. Include course outcomes on your syllabus, and be transparent about class activities, assignments and policies. This will help students to understand the workload for the course. Make sure the workload is appropriate for its number of credits and be cautious about workload creep. 
3. Provide strategies for students to keep pace in a course. Provide checklists for students to track their own progress week to week. Use cumulative assignments in which students submit work in progress at various points, rather than one large project late in the term. For example, a project could be broken into stages such as a proposal, annotated bibliography, data analysis and final project.
4. Plan assessments that are spread throughout the course. Include a low-stakes assessment early in the course for students to get a sense of how you grade assignments and/or quizzes. 

Instructors can experience stressors as well, such as workload, increasing class sizes, and learning new technologies. Strategies such as the following will help you to manage your instructional workload and prevent burnout.

Burnout reduction strategies for educators

1.  When planning the assessments for your courses, block time in your calendar to grade them and give student feedback. Setting aside time at this stage will help to prevent grading student work in the evenings and on weekends, which can lead to burnout. 
2. Use efficient grading strategies. 
   • Save a “comment bank” of frequent feedback that you give students, so that you don’t have to compose the same comments multiple times. 
   • Keep a list of links, too, to resources such as the writing centre. 
   • Consider in-class presentations where you can grade students’ work during class time.
   • Grade the same questions or sections of all quizzes and assignments at the same time, which should speed up grading. 
   • Consider scaling back written assignments. Do they need to write an entire paper, or just parts of it? Can you shorten the word length? 
   • Use a simple grading scheme, avoiding strategies such as late day banks that require you to track submissions for each student separately. 
   • If you are teaching multiple courses, stagger due dates so that you don’t have a mountain of marking at one time. 
3. Use the PERMA Model, created by Shawn Achor in his book The Happiness Advantage, to enhance your well-being as an educator. The five facets of the model include positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Indeed, in The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?  the authors found that focusing on the positives can help to mitigate stress and burnout.
4. Avoid the idea that you have to redesign a course every time you offer it. Instead, make small tweaks over time. One year you might work on the assessments. Next year, spend some time improving a specific unit or module. Prioritize what needs to be done and accept that a course is never actually perfect. 

When planning your courses, reflect on the course design and how it impacts both student and instructor workload. Some questions you might consider include:

• What do students “need to know” and what is “nice to know”? What could be taken out of the course?
• Do I have reasonable expectations for student learning? 
• How do my assessments and grading practices affect my own workload? 
• What strategies can I use as an instructor to prevent burnout?