Reframing Teacher Burnout in Vietnamese K–12 Education: Teachers’ Adaptation Mechanism as a Process-Oriented Extension of the Maslach and JD–R Frameworks

Abstract

This study suggests an adaptation mechanism for the teacher burnout issue in Vietnamese K–12 education context. The mechanism uses the Maslach Burnout Framework and Job Demands–Resources model as two main foundations for the theoretical development. The educational environments focusing on K-12 teachers in Vietnam that create more and more pressure on teachers, from pedagogical and administrative burden, examinations, to expectations from multiple subjects, for instance, students and their parents, the Board or the Faculty of the school itself, colleagues, and so on. Particularly, the two bases are useful in explaining the dimensions and context of “burnout” at work. However, the Maslach Burnout Framework and Job Demands–Resources model offer less the details about the process that how teachers make sense of pressure, the way they mobilize their resources, how they respond to burnout matters, and how adaptive patterns emerge over time. The study puts a teachers’ adaptation mechanism as a teacher-centered, context-dependent process, involving teacher responses to conditions in the workplace, and burnout outcomes. The article provides a conceptual theory-development approach and is based on the relevant literature on burnout, job demands and resources, coping, self-regulation and teacher professional support. It affirms that the mechanism supplements the current frameworks with a description of a teacher's adaptive response to the pressures associated with burnout in specific environments, focusing on the K–12 system, Vietnam. Fundamentally, this work further the discussion by offering a process-oriented perspective sharing about how teachers with the same demands and resources to have different burnout results. Also, the paper provides five propositions for research in the future, and presents implications for teacher professional development in Vietnamese K–12 educational settings.