The Future of Education

Burn out is a psychological term that refers to long-term exhaustion and diminished interest in work. Teacher burn out could be the consequence of a whole spectrum of parameters including intrapersonal, social, ethnic, and cultural. The intrapersonal factors encompass teachers' individual emotional characteristics such as motivation, risk taking, resilience, self-efficacy, self-esteem, etc. These are features ingrained in their personalities, and may have been inborn  and quite irrelevant to their environment and educational atmosphere .These intrapersonal traits are the manifestations of teachers  feelings, emotions and personal  opinions which might not be vulnerable to social or other external influences. What’s more, the external extrinsic concepts and forces like society, ethnicity and culture can tremendously affect the occurrence and intensity of teacher burn out.  Happiness, sadness, satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the community in which a teacher lives can lead to different levels and severity of teacher burn out. Teachers as individuals can be susceptible to these negative or positive feelings as the main agents of teacher burn out. Furthermore, teachers’ ethnic background cannot be ignored in the discussion on teacher burn out. Ethnic and racial characteristics have proved to be of paramount importance in teachers’ feelings of fatigue, frustration, apathy, isolation and what not. Moreover, cultural issues and concepts such as values, norms, rites and ritual, etc, are inescapable phenomena when we are dealing with the concept of burn out. In this study the different factors leading to teacher burn out at some universities in Iran have been investigated.

Key terms: burn out, emotional exhaustion, motivation, alienation, cynicism