Attending to Race in Teacher Well-Being Interventions: A Systematic Review and Recommendations

Many teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs, struggle with feeling effective at work, experience high levels of stress and burnout, and report higher levels of depressive symptoms than the average adult. Moreover, growing evidence shows that teachers’ professional experiences are racialized, resulting in well-being disparities between White teachers and Teachers of Color (TOC). In this article, we use a novel AI-assisted tool to review existing research on interventions ( N = 89) geared to improve teacher well-being, with a specific focus on whether and to what extent researchers acknowledge or discuss the racialized nature of teachers’ professional experiences. Grounded in a theory of schools as racialized organizations, we (a) review the most common intervention strategies for improving teacher well-being and (b) document the extent to which teacher well-being interventions address race or racism in their designs and analyses. Consistent with past work, we find that the vast majority of interventions to improve teacher well-being aim to equip teachers with psychological tools (mindfulness, coping strategies, compassion training) to navigate their professional experiences. However, only half of the studies reviewed here report the racial demographics of their samples, and only four consider how their interventions might differentially impact TOC versus White teachers. We discuss the reasons for and implications of this omission from the teacher well-being literature and provide recommendations for researchers to contend with the racialized nature of teacher well-being in research.