Designing a Future Without Burnout
Estimated Reading time: 8-10 minutes
For the first time in 30 years, I am entering the month of April and the impending approach of May not feeling exhausted and burned out. For decades, especially during my 12 years as a head of school, this moment in the year came after three-plus weeks of international travel and the onslaught of performances, program celebrations, admission and alumni events, board meetings, hiring season and year-end rituals and traditions. The end of year for me came on the afternoon of graduation, usually a Saturday, and culminated in a 3-hour nap on the couch in the head's house. My family joked that it was the ritual that ushered in "Summer AV," a lighter, happier, rested, and a more relaxed version of me. This version existed for about five weeks. On August 1st, Summer AV was gone.
With time comes perspective and now that I am no longer experiencing the calendar inside the life of school, spring feels different to me now. The spring has become a time when projects begin wrapping up, locking in dates and finalizing projects for next year begins. I have time to write and reflect, play the ukulele, draw and listen to music.
Part of the shift is this: I’m no longer living inside the school calendar. I’m working alongside it. And in that space—at just enough distance—I’ve begun to notice something. My days, weeks, and months now follow a different rhythm. And from this new vantage point, I see the calendar more clearly—not as a given, but as a design choice. One we’ve collectively inherited and sustained. And in that choice, we’ve accepted exhaustion as normal. As the cost of doing business. As a feature, not a flaw.
But why have we designed school to be this way?
And more importantly—what if we didn’t?
Optimistic futurists contend there is a possible, preferred future if we are willing to see the signals and trends, learn by looking backwards at what has worked and not worked and designing for human needs.
Calendars as Invisible Structures
The school calendar is a concrete, brutalist-inspired mega design element that is seen as immovable and untouchable. September school starts, June school ends. Summer is meant for plugging yourself into whatever recharging device you deem essential to starting back up in August. This rhythm is so deeply ingrained in our educational experience that it feels impossible to consider a different design.
The school calendar is an inherited design element. It wasn't designed for humans living in 2025; it was meant for humans living in 1925. Farming families needed students to be available for planting and harvesting. Urban families wanted to escape the heat, lack of air conditioning and the infrastructure of schools made it impossible to teach in these conditions. The traditional September-June calendar is a design element of 19th-century city planning and industrial-era efficiency rather than student development or teacher wellness.
What makes this design element especially significant is that it's invisible. We don't question it. We work within it and assume that the burnout is just a cost of doing the job of teaching and learning. Think of what we lose in the experience we are creating in schools: creativity, reflection, relationship repair, and joyful closure.
Designing for Human Needs, not Tradition
As design thinkers, our approach should be to interrogate this design element. What do humans actually need from time in school? What if we started with empathy and not tradition? These questions lead me to be curious about all sorts of ideas.
Humans need consistency, rhythm, and rest. We benefit from depth of experience, time to process, reflect, and time to recover.
Humans need pacing that sustains their energy and capacity for curiosity and creative work. This includes time to plan, design, collaborate, and recharge, not just during the summer, winter, or spring breaks but throughout the year.
Humans need the school calendar to align with modern life, with fewer pressure points for childcare, transitions, learning loss and general burnout.
What if we designed a school experience around these human needs?
The containers are arbitrary. Independent schools could design whatever calendar they wanted—the privilege that comes with independence. What if we had natural moments to pause, reflect, and reset, designing more space for enrichment, remediation, travel, and curiosity-based learning?
The 10-week block model has 200 instructional days which is 25% more than the typical 160 instructional days most independent schools adhere too. A shift from 61% of available time in the yearly container to 77% of available time. I wonder if we could see a school experience where no one brings work home—not students, not teachers. What if we designed the calendar so the work of school is designed to be done during the day and in the liminal spaces that frequent and consistent breaks could provide. What if the design allowed everyone to go home and have time to focus on other important things in our lives. Family, passion projects, hobbies, wellness, spirituality, play, community?
By expanding to 200 instructional days we would still use only 77% of the year’s weekdays, offering more space to breathe, slow down, and distribute learning more humanely. It also allows for extended breaks of four weeks in winter and summer. It’s no wonder the current model leaves so many feeling exhausted and burned out. We have compressed learning into a container that reflects a little more than half the total available teaching days. This prototype increases the amount of instructional time by 25% and spreads it out more evenly.
School has been traditionally designed to focus on what and how we teach, but rarely do we pause to ask WHEN we are asking humans to learn and grow. If time is such a precious commodity, and if the consistent trend I hear with schools designing new schedules is that there isn't enough time to do everything, then the container itself matters a lot. The September to June calendar was never designed for the challenges of modern-day life; maybe it's time to redesign it.
Time for a Time Redesign
If we are human-centered design thinkers and reflective change makers, here are some things to consider:
Audit your calendar: What rhythms make the most sense for your community and educational philosophy?
Ask new questions: What would a joyous and transformative year feel like for students, teachers, and parents?
Prototype possibilities: Why has the implementation of intersessions or mini-terms stalled at your school? If you have them, what can you learn from the experiences the community is having by including them in your calendar?
Interrogate your reality: What is the outcome of your current design? Does it align with your mission and core values?
Three years out from working in the traditional calendar has offered me valuable insight. It's April, and I don't feel like collapsing. I am not counting down the days or dragging myself to the finish line. I am not rationing my energy for one more push to the middle of June when school is closed and I wake up from my post-graduation nap eager to experience a few weeks of calm and rest. For thirty years, I accepted this rhythm as fixed, and now with some distance—and a new vantage point working alongside schools—I see it as something else entirely: a design decision waiting to be reimagined.
Redesigning time in schools isn’t just about well-being—it’s about making smarter, more sustainable choices. What if we reallocated the significant financial resources currently poured into summer programming—childcare, camps, enrichment—and reinvested them into the human and capital infrastructure of the academic year itself? Could we pay teachers more? Reduce burnout? Lower the risk of talented educators leaving the profession altogether? A more balanced school year could also mean more consistent use of facilities, technology, and staffing—leveraging what we already have more effectively. And by distributing learning across the full calendar year, we could finally address one of education’s most persistent challenges: the inequity of summer learning loss. Let’s reconsider the assumption that school advances by grade and have students advance at their own pace, rethinking the calendar would allow that.
I know it won't be easy. But I believe it is possible. And it begins with the courage to ask: What might it look like to end the year with energy, not burnout? With purpose and not just relief?
This week, seventy time-traveling, truth-seeking, optimistic futurists will converge in Cambridge, MA—not just to imagine what’s next, but to design it. Together, we’ll explore the big “what ifs”—and perhaps begin to shape a preferred future where school feels different. More humane. More joyful. More aligned with the rhythms of modern life.
I believe that somewhere in this gathering, we’ll see a preferred future—one where school is designed to feel different.
Where time is human-centered.
Where joy and curiosity are not electives, but core to the experience.
Where learning is driven by meaning, not just metrics.
It's time.
