Teaching on Empty: A Guidebook for Navigating Your Calling

Schools are learning how to recognize student trauma. But who is recognizing what teachers carry home with them every day? Teaching is supposed to feel meaningful. For many educators, it feels sacred. It is a calling. But the reality inside today's classrooms tells a different story. Teachers across the country are teaching on empty. They are spending their emotional and physical miles faster than they can restock them, and the system keeps handing them more road to cover. Teaching on Empty combines compelling narratives, more than twenty teacher interviews, over two hundred survey responses from educators, and original research from my dissertation to examine the causes and symptoms of Calling Collapse™. These include compassion fatigue, school violence, toxic leadership, parent aggression, overwhelming class sizes, and values misalignment between educators and the systems they serve. Drawing on trauma research from Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman, leadership research by Einar M. Skaalvik and Sidsel Skaalvik, and recent workforce data, the book explains why so many educators feel exhausted, guilty, and overwhelmed, and why those who view teaching as a calling are often the most vulnerable to Calling Collapse™. The book offers practical, strength-based strategies for school leaders and educators alike: recognizing teachers consistently, building cultures of shared problem solving, fostering self-efficacy, setting healthy boundaries, and restoring trust within schools. Each chapter includes reflection questions, checklists, and small but powerful practices educators can use immediately. The recovery path is built on four pillars: Support, Autonomy, Self-Care, and Experience. Readers also receive the Calling Compact, a one-page agreement to sign with themselves as they find their way back. Teaching on Empty also confronts the widely repeated myth of a teacher shortage. Data from the Indiana Department of Education 2023 licensure report suggests a different reality: we do not lack qualified teachers. We lack teachers willing to return to harmful conditions. The workforce exists. The willingness does not. Teaching on Empty is both a wake-up call and a path forward. It is a guidebook for teachers still finding their way back to the calling that brought them into the classroom: for those searching for hope, for those finding the courage to stay, and for those deciding whether it is time to step away.