GUEST POST: What’s Missing in Professional Development and Educator Preparation
By Katrina G. Huels
Katrina G. Huels is an educational consultant and former education leader with more than twenty years of experience working across classrooms, programs, and district leadership. Her work focuses on helping educators sustain their passion and effectiveness in one of the most emotionally demanding fields. She is the author of Transformational Tools for Special Educators: How to Beat Burnout and Become the Best at What You Do (Corwin, 2026) and The Motivation Toolkit: Cultivate Your Inner Drive.
Drawing on a background in psychology, neuroscience-informed practice, and educational leadership, Katrina translates research into practical tools educators can use in the middle of a demanding school day. Her work centers on emotional intelligence development, neuroplasticity, and the cultivation of professional resilience.
Katrina is the creator of Applied Harmony, an initiative focused on helping educators build inner mastery and long-term professional sustainability through emotional intelligence development. Her work advocates for emotional intelligence training to be recognized not as a wellness trend, but as a professional competency that strengthens school culture, educator retention, and student outcomes.
Educators are well-trained professionals. Preparation programs and ongoing professional development ensure skills like instructional planning, assessment, data use, classroom management, technology integration, and culturally responsive teaching are firmly in place so that all learners have the opportunity to progress and succeed. But technical preparation alone does not account for the full scope of what educators are expected to carry. The emotional and psychological dimension of this work remains unaddressed in any sustained, structured way.
This gap in learning and preparation has consequences. And they are showing up as attrition, burnout, and chronic fatigue.
Burnout in Education
The scope of educator burnout is no longer a matter of anecdote. Forty-four percent of K-12 education employees feel burned out either always or very often (1), and teacher-specific data show a similar pattern. Steiner and colleagues (2) found that fifty-three percent of K-12 teachers reported burnout in 2025. The strain is especially consequential in special education, where staffing shortages remain notably high. In the 2023 to 2024 school year, more than half of districts and 80 percent of states reported a shortage of special education teachers (3).
Individuals currently working in the field are not surprised by these statistics. They know that the rewards of being an educator are vast, but so are the demands. Each day brings a constant layering of instructional, relational, behavioral, and administrative responsibilities across the workday, with little time to recover between tasks. Without the tools to manage the stress attached to the work, burnout can seem inevitable.
Image by Kampus Production on Pexels
A meta-analysis of the burnout-attrition relationship identifies burnout as a significant predictor of teachers' intent to leave the profession, and the intent to leave is the most direct precursor to attrition and a significant threat to long-term workforce retention (4). Teachers who experience burnout very often or always contribute to high absenteeism as they are “63% more likely to take a sick day” (1). Burnout is also associated with measurable workforce consequences, including weaker classroom functioning and lower student outcomes, both behavioral and academic (5).
The level of burnout in education and its impact is not a background condition. It is an active workforce crisis. The question is what districts and schools are doing to address it.
The Missing Investment
The professional development and teacher preparation landscape continues to grow and improve. Technical preparation for educators reflects decades of research, policy evolution, and hard-won knowledge about how to best serve students. What remains largely absent from that landscape is the targeted training that builds the internal capacity of the professionals themselves; the skills that allow educators to process the weight of this work without being diminished by it.
There is a longstanding assumption that stress tolerance and emotional regulation are personal traits. Resilience, balance, and emotional composure are things educators either possess naturally or develop on their own outside of professional systems. But that assumption is neither accurate nor sustainable. The emotional and psychological demands of an educator are not incidental features of the role. They are central to it. Expecting professionals to navigate those demands without targeted skill development is no different than expecting them to write a compliant Individualized Education Program (IEP) without training in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or to design and deliver effective instruction without preparation in classroom management, assessment, and evidence-based teaching practices.
Emotional intelligence encompasses precisely the internal skills that professional preparation has left unaddressed, and a growing body of research shows that these capacities can be taught, measured, and directly tied to teacher well-being and positive student outcomes.
Emotional Intelligence Development: What the Research Shows
The Prosocial Classroom framework draws on existing research and proposes a model in which teachers' social and emotional competence (SEC) plays a central role in the development and maintenance of supportive teacher-student relationships and effective classroom management (6). Simply put, the social-emotional competencies educators bring to the work show up externally in how classrooms function. Internally, teachers’ SEC connects to stress levels and the potential for burnout:
Evidence suggests that SEC is related to emotional stress and burnout. In particular, the dimensions of self-awareness and self-management appear to influence a teacher’s ability to cope with the emotional demands of teaching (6) (pp. 496-497).
The broader literature reinforces this assertion by linking educators’ social and emotional competence to psychological resilience and well-being, and interventions designed to strengthen these capacities are linked to reduced psychological distress (7).
Image by Ann H on Pexels
Taken together, this body of evidence suggests that the capacities associated with higher emotional intelligence reduce educator stress and increase professional function. Most importantly, emotional intelligence skills can be taught and developed through intentional professional learning.
Two Programs Proving the Point
Two programs in particular are building notable evidence bases that make the case for emotional intelligence training in education. These are CARE (Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education) and CMT T (Compassionate Mind Training for Teachers).
CARE Training: CARE is a professional development program that aims to reduce the stress associated with teaching and to improve overall teacher performance. It takes a direct approach to developing teacher social-emotional competence by focusing on the internal resources educators need to sustain high-quality work. A randomized controlled trial found that participation in CARE produced significant improvements in teachers’ social and emotional competence, particularly in adaptive emotion regulation and mindfulness. The study also found significant reductions in psychological distress, including emotional exhaustion, anxiety, perceived stress, and depression, along with a reduced sense of being constantly pressed for time (8). Most of these gains were sustained over time. In a follow-up study conducted 9.5 months after the initial training, teachers who participated in CARE continued to report lower psychological distress, reduced physical distress, stronger emotion regulation, and gains in dimensions of mindfulness nearly a year after the intervention (9).
CMT T Training: CMT T is an eight-week intervention designed specifically for educators to strengthen compassion-based internal capacities that closely align with emotional intelligence competencies like self-awareness and self-regulation. In this context, compassion is not simply a prosocial attitude. It functions as a regulatory capacity that helps teachers notice distress without becoming overwhelmed by it and respond with emotional steadiness. In the 2022 randomized controlled trial, teachers who participated in CMT T showed significant reductions in depression, anxiety, stress, and burnout across the study’s stepped-wedge design (10). Both programs align with the broader research: when schools invest in the emotional intelligence of their people, burnout recedes not because the work becomes easier, but because the people doing it are better equipped to carry it.
Image by Stas Knop on Pexels
In Conclusion
Educator preparation and professional development systems in this country have produced highly skilled practitioners. Teachers who can design instruction, analyze data, manage behavior, and navigate the complexity of diverse classrooms represent a serious professional investment, and that investment deserves to be protected.
When nearly half of all education employees report burning out, and when the profession cannot retain the people it trains, the problem is not a shortage of technical knowledge. It is a shortage of the internal capacity that makes sustained professional practice possible. Emotional intelligence development is not a supplement to that capacity. It is quite possibly the foundation on which everything else rests.
Cover image by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
References:
1. Gallup (2024, February 1). Overworked and undervalued: Retaining top educators. https://www.gallup.com/education/609422/overworked-undervalued-retaining-top-educators.aspx
2. Steiner, E. D., Levine, P. R., Doan, S., & Woo, A. (2025). Teacher well-being, pay, and intentions to leave in 2025: Findings from the State of the American Teacher Survey (Research Report No. RRA1108-16). RAND. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html
3. Aldeman, C. (2024, July 30). Where are all the special educators? Education Next. https://www.educationnext.org/where-are-all-the-special-educators-teacher-shortage/
4. Madigan, D. J., & Kim, L. E. (2021). Towards an understanding of teacher attrition: A meta-analysis of burnout, job satisfaction, and teachers' intentions to quit. Teaching and Teacher Education, 105, Article 103425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103425
5. Herman, K. C., Hickmon-Rosa, J., & Reinke, W. M. (2018). Empirically derived profiles of teacher stress, burnout, self-efficacy, and coping and associated student outcomes. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 20(2), 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098300717732066
6. Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491–525. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693
7. Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2017). Social and emotional learning and teachers. The Future of Children, 27(1), 137–155. https://doi.org/10.1353/foc.2017.0007
8. Jennings, P. A., Brown, J. L., Frank, J. L., Doyle, S., Oh, Y., Davis, R., Rasheed, D., DeWeese, A., DeMauro, A. A., Cham, H., & Greenberg, M. T. (2017). Impacts of the CARE for teachers program on teachers' social and emotional competence and classroom interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(7), 1010–1028. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000187
9. Jennings, P. A., Doyle, S., Oh, Y., Rasheed, D., Frank, J. L., & Brown, J. L. (2019). Long-term impacts of the CARE program on teachers' self-reported social and emotional competence and well-being. Journal of School Psychology, 76, 186–202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2019.07.009
10. Matos, M., Albuquerque, I., Galhardo, A., Cunha, M., Lima, M. P., Palmeira, L., Petrocchi, N., McEwan, K., Maratos, F. A., & Gilbert, P. (2022). Nurturing compassion in schools: A randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of a Compassionate Mind Training program for teachers. PLOS ONE, 17(3), e0263480. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263480
