Teachers are deeply ingrained in the educational system and have a pivotal role in the classroom since their work directly influences the organic growth of school activities. Teachers, meanwhile, are dealing with more students and higher expectations for their work as a result of the different international and local literacy and numeracy ranking of the Philippines. Regarding substantive work, teachers perceive an increase in both difficulty and pressure to succeed due to the additional online format, which compels them to persistently address technological difficulties during video conference sessions. Instructors’ dissatisfaction with their jobs grows as they realize they cannot adequately address these issues. Loss of professional identity is a real possibility for teachers who need more time to relax. Professional burnout can develop to varied degrees in instructors over time due to negative feelings such as insomnia, stress, anger, fatigue, etc. It is simpler for instructors to carry out instructional tasks inadequately when highly burned out. Given the extraordinary circumstances, it will have long-term consequences on the usual schooling operation.
Research on school teachers’ professional issues has rarely examined professional identity and burnout in the same study. As far as we know, none of the previous studies were carried out during the COVID-19 epidemic. A substantial percentage of teachers report feeling burned out by their jobs. This could be because some teachers’ personalities are not well-suited to classroom management, while others have experienced setbacks that have made them jaded and unqualified for their positions. There is a one-to-one relationship between teacher burnout and contentment in the classroom. According to a large body of research, job happiness is positively and significantly correlated with one’s sense of professional identity. Addressing teachers’ present burnout requires more than just discussing job satisfaction; it also necessitates fortifying their professional identity and psychological motivation. Before deciding whether or not to implement the measure, administrators should consider its impact on burnout, professional identity, and work satisfaction. Based on this assumption, it is not feasible to propose appropriate strategies to guarantee the effectiveness of educators’ work and to establish a foundation for future efforts to avoid and manage teachers’ job burnout.
The department’s leadership must investigate instructors’ professional identity, work satisfaction, and burnout in light of the current situation. This may cause more people to pay attention to the challenges educators face, which could lead to solutions for the mental health problems instructors face due to the shift in the educational norm, such as identity crises and burnout.
