Special Education Teacher Burnout and ACT

Special educators are a high risk group, prone to low job satisfaction, low self-efficacy, and increased stress and burnout. The attrition rate of special educators is particularly high, contributing to an overall shortage of qualified teachers throughout the United States. While the problems of special educators are widely discussed in the literature, scant intervention research has targeted this population, and what has been done suffers from design limitations, lack of a guiding theoretical framework, and a focus on symptom reduction, rather than mediating psychological processes. Acceptance and commitment therapeutic (ACT) interventions hold promise for addressing special education teacher burnout.