Burnout is a type of prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job (Kleiber and Enzmann, 1990; Schaufeli, Maslach, and Marek, 1993). As such, it has been an issue of particular concern for people-oriented occupations in which (a) the relationship between providers and recipients is central to the work and (b) the provision of education, service, or treatment can be a highly emotional experience. The first articles about burnout, which appeared in the mid-1970s in the United States (Freudenberger, 1974, 1975; Maslach, 1976), provided an initial description of the burnout phenomenon, gave it the identifying name of “burnout”, and showed that it was not an aberrant response by a few deviant people but was actually quite common. My own article focused on the experiences of 200 workers in such occupations as health care, poverty law, social welfare, and mental health care. Interestingly, one of the occupational groups I did not study in this pioneering research was teachers, and among the most frequent comments I received about my article was “teachers have the most experience with the phenomenon you are describing, so why didn't you study them?” Since that time, many researchers and writers have risen to that challenge, so that we now have a substantial literature on burnout within the teaching profession and the opportunity, within this volume, to assess its implications.