Introduction

"It was honestly great to feel understood. When a teacher is just as eager to learn about you as they are to teach, I feel like there is a bond and mutual respect, which makes it easier for both students and teachers."

-Leianna, Class of 2017

Why We Wrote This Book

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, our lives, like everyone else's, were thrown into upheaval. New York City was ground zero for the initial wave of the pandemic, and we were both locked down inside our homes, Rebekah in the South Bronx, and Meredith nearby in Baldwin, Long Island. As we struggled to maintain some semblance of normalcy in our personal and professional lives, we checked in with each other remotely. One day that April, Meredith texted Rebekah, "I still dream about our book." She was referring to the book we'd started talking about writing years earlier, when we were teacher leaders and coaches together during the 2012-2013 school year. We'd periodically talked about cowriting a book about our experiences as mid-career educators, but life had gotten in the way, and we never took it any further. In April 2020, however, we had nothing but time. We started writing on our own and then meeting weekly online to read and discuss each other's work. We spent the entire first two years of the pandemic writing together. Many people had pandemic projects. This was ours.

Originally, we thought we were writing a book about how to prevent and heal teacher burnout. However, as we wrote, we discovered that actually we were writing a book about purpose. We realized the key to avoiding burnout and recovering from it over the course of our own careers has been having a strong sense of why we are educators in the first place. We came to understand that when you are able to stand in your purpose, you can use that purpose as a litmus test for decision-making to ensure you are actually living and working in alignment with your purpose. We've found that burnout generally stems from a misalignment around purpose, and educators can prevent and heal burnout by rekindling, reconnecting, and recommitting to their purpose.

Our own purpose in this book is to help other educators uncover how to maintain a long, productive, inspired career in education. Through stories from our own careers over a combined four decades as teachers and leaders, as well as reflective activities to help you think about your own journeys and experiences, you'll learn how to stay connected to your why: your dynamic sense of purpose as an educator. You'll learn to uncover and nourish your own why and how to keep that purpose close when all of the things that lead to burnout start to separate you from it.

We want to reinforce that we're sharing our stories to illustrate what this reflective work has looked like in our own lives, not as instructive case studies of what we think you should do. We share our experiences not because we think they're universal but because we know they're real. You have your own real experiences in your own real context, and we hope our stories provide examples that give you new ways to think about the choices you're making in your personal and professional life. We've spent our education careers in urban communities, and we were both high school humanities teachers, but the reflective work that we've done ourselves, that we're supported other educators in doing, and that we're inviting you to do is applicable for educators in all grades, subjects, and settings.

Who This Book Is For

While this book is for individual educators and the leaders who support them, we want to acknowledge there are structural factors that lead to educator burnout. We strongly support the systemic changes necessary to transform the profession into a sustainable lifelong career option, especially in the schools and districts where the demands on teachers and leaders are particularly Herculean. However, this book is for the people who need support right now and can't wait for the often-protracted pace of systemic change, so we focus on actions that individual educators can take to improve their own working conditions and quality of life. We are grateful for the work that researchers, labor unions, and other advocacy organizations are doing to fight for the systemic changes that will impact all educators and students for the better. We also recognize that, while the pandemic exacerbated the factors that contribute to burnout, many of those factors long preexisted the pandemic. We believe reflection on and connection to purpose is the way forward for individual educators in the context of challenges both directly related to and beyond the pandemic.

We're especially interested in engaging with educators who are in the early-to-middle stages of their careers. Much of what we share in this book is advice we wish we'd received as preservice and beginning teachers, as well as when we were at crucial career crossroads, including burnout periods. If you are new to the profession, supporting those who are, or considering whether to continue in the profession, we hope you find stories and activities here to help you maintain a long, productive, and sustainable career in education. Teachers have the best jobs on the planet but also the hardest ones. Most of us can't do it on our own or without a strategy for how to make it through the tough days, weeks, and years. We want all students to have happy, healthy teachers, but that can't happen if teachers don't have opportunities to reflect, heal, and reorient around their sense of purpose so their students are at the center of their work, which is why we start each chapter with a quote by one of our own current or former students. At the same time, our goal is not to keep all educators in the classroom no matter what. Rather, we want all educators to understand and live in alignment with their own sense of purpose, whatever that is.

We also want to emphasize that we are not mental health professionals. If you are in crisis, please seek professional help for the sake of your loved ones, your students, and your colleagues, as well as yourself.

How to Use This Book

In each chapter, we share our own reflective process with respect to the chapter's subject, followed by prompts and activities designed for all educators (the "Your Turn" sections) and then the "Additional Considerations for Leaders" in particular. Our goal in sharing our own experiences is to make our thinking visible, as we've worked through these same reflective prompts and activities in our time as teachers and leaders.

We hope our examples help illustrate the essential, rewarding, and messy process of reflective engagement we have undertaken and continue to work through two decades into our careers in education. However, if our stories don't resonate with you or you'd prefer to jump right into practice and application for your own experiences and context, feel free to skip to the "Your Turn" sections of each chapter, as well as the reproducibles in the appendix and at http://www.wiley.com/go/educatingpassionpurpose.

In Chapters 1 and 2, we focus on the process of uncovering your purpose and what can happen when your actions and experiences aren't aligned with your purpose: burnout. In the remaining chapters, we focus on how to make decisions aligned with your purpose so you can maintain a sustainable future in the profession and prevent burnout moving forward. By staying connected to your why, you can figure out for yourself when to say "yes" and "no" in all the right ways.

As educators ourselves, we know everyone learns in different ways, so please engage with the "Your Turn" activities in the ways that will be most resonant and effective for you. Here are a few possibilities:

• Read the reflective prompts, pause, and respond to them in your head.
• Write out your responses on paper or your device.
• Keep a separate journal or blog while you read this book and write your responses there.
• Record voice memos or videos on your phone or elsewhere for private use.
• Record voice memos or videos and post them on a platform of your choice to share with your community.
• Share and discuss your responses with a book group, professional team, or other reading community.
• Work through the book with an existing professional learning community (PLC) or a new one created just for this purpose. Read a chapter a week, select prompts and activities to work through independently and collaboratively, share your reflections, and develop community commitments to next steps.
• Work through the reproducibles, either in the book or via the downloads at https://www.wiley.com/go/educatingpassionpurpose.

Why Reflection Matters

Committing to a long, productive, sustainable career as an educator while maintaining your personal health and relationships, as well as fulfilling your nonprofessional goals and dreams, is long, hard work. We do not believe you'll be able to leave burnout in your rearview mirror forever by simply reading this book and completing all of the reflective activities. Rather, the work of staying connected and committed to your purpose is an ongoing, iterative process we continuously return to on our journeys as educators, especially because for so many of us the reasons why we became...