Behind the classroom door, beyond lesson plans and curriculum goals, lies an emotional landscape few outside the profession truly understand.
For Australia’s educators, the day-to-day realities of teaching often mean absorbing the trauma of students, navigating fraught relationships with leadership, masking exhaustion with forced positivity, and managing behaviour in an increasingly data-driven system. Yet despite the deep emotional labour at the heart of teaching, there remains little space – or language – for teachers to process what they feel.
New research based on interviews with 42 Australian teachers has laid bare the emotional challenges facing teachers and highlighted the need for policymakers, school leaders and communities to better understand how to support the profession.
The powerful new book, ‘Teachers' Emotional Experiences: Towards a New Emotional Discourse’ lifts the lid on the emotional lives of teachers, revealing raw, first-hand stories of joy, distress and everything in between.
Authored by Dr Saul Karnovsky, Senior Lecturer and Course Coordinator in the School of Education at Curtin University, and Nick Kelly, Associate Professor in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology – the book calls for a richer, more authentic language to explore how educators navigate the emotional toll of toxic positivity, datafication, strained leadership and high-stakes classrooms.
The top emotional challenges for teachers in 2025
Dr Karnovsky says Australia’s teachers are toiling away as security guards, counsellors, data administrators, co-parents, citizen makers and child-minders for the economy.
“The book demonstrates that although teachers strive to be ethical, empathic, passionate, and committed professionals, at present this work is threatened by a range of issues including unnecessary administrative burdens, workload and time pressure, poor work-life balance, vicarious trauma, and emotional burn out,” Dr Karnovsky told The Educator.
“These threats are making it increasingly difficult for educators to make a meaningful difference to the communities that they serve. The book shines a light on the complexity and nuance of teacher emotions, giving these professionals a voice that has too long been silenced in public conversations.”
Dr Karnovsky said public conversations about teaching fail to address the emotional realities of the profession.
“Every school day, across the country, education professionals labour emotionally—in the classroom, in the staffroom, online—yet the language available for talking about these experiences in public conversation has a history of being fragmented, inadequate and polarized as either overwhelmingly negative or unrealistically positive,” he said.
“Our book shows that the emotional realties of the profession such as when teacher’s experience guilt, helplessness, frustration, alienation, and demoralisation.”
Dr Karnovsky said these emotions largely arise in the difficult conditions that teachers work in, such as toxic school leadership, accountability cultures, dealing with complex student trauma and poor behaviour by parents.
“The book demonstrates that teachers wish to share their emotional burdens with the community, they want to be heard and seen by the public and to be recognised as full professionals who labour under difficult conditions.”
Practical steps to support teachers’ wellbeing
Dr Karnovsky said while ‘solutions based’ leadership is in vogue within school management practice, this approach is “an impediment to truly honest, collaborative, and collegial work” that is required to improve teachers’ working conditions and school climates.
“Many teachers experience work environments where they feel silenced for fear of speaking out, so they retreat to online spaces to decompress and talk to one another about shared concerns and problems,” he said.
“Leadership structures within school space need to trust their staff and cultivate practices which allow them time and space to decompress, take time away from the business of their work, find solitude when needed and come together in a spirit of honesty and of collective, localised strategic thinking.”
Dr Karnovsky said policy makers must create the conditions for this important change to occur in schools by trusting education professionals to create local solutions to issues present in their communities.
“Many teachers feel that their work in undervalued in the Australian community. If you are an educator reading this, as editors we encourage you find ways to resist, transform or refuse those wellbeing practices in schools which only burden you further,” he said.
“You are not alone, and you certainly don't have to be quiet about it. You may find tools within our text to equip you with new concepts and ideas with which to think through your work and the emotional problematics this entails.”
Dr Karnovsky said teachers may also find a language with which to speak these problematics back to your leaders and administrators.
“There is great power in marshalling institutional knowledge, when done in a balanced way.”