The global shortage of Kindergarten to Year 12 (K-12) teachers is persistent. Moral injury is gaining attention within the discourse of teacher wellbeing and retention, yet it is not well understood in the teaching workforce. A systematic narrative review of extant literature on moral injury in the practice of teaching and its impact on teachers was conducted. The results clearly showed that moral injury has a serious negative impact on teachers’ wellbeing, professional function, and retention.
Results showed that teachers share common values and beliefs about good teaching—guiding all students to gain knowledge and skills, promote social justice, challenge injustice, and foster respectful, critical thinking for lifelong success. They believe this can only be achieved through relationships rooted in deep care, attentiveness to students’ complex learning and wellbeing needs, and sensitivity to ethical dilemmas requiring both compassion and justice. Teachers experience moral injury when systemic barriers and practice arrangements keep them from aligning their actions with their professional identity, educational goals, and core teaching values.
The literature consistently identifies neoliberalism, social and educational inequities, racism, and student trauma as potentially morally injurious. Teachers who are exposed to the failures of educational and social systems often feel complicit in the harm inflicted on students. Those who witness such harm may feel betrayed by policymakers and society, and powerless to create meaningful change—leading to serious biopsychosocial suffering. Faced with limited options—resist, speak out, or leave—teachers who are unable to act may adopt reductive moral reasoning, dulling their ethical sensitivity in ways that can harm both themselves and, more importantly, their students.
Moral injury goes beyond personal failure or inadequacy; it acknowledges the broader systemic conditions that place teachers in situations where their ethical commitments increasingly clash with the neoliberal forces currently shaping education. Moral injury offers the morally injured a language of lament, an explanation for the anguish experienced in the practice of teaching. An understanding of moral injury invites society, collectively, to offer teachers fierce compassion and moral repair by restructuring the social systems that create these conditions.