Health promotion in schools attracts researchers and educators since 1998 World Health Organization‘s report “Health promoting schools: a healthy stetting for living, learning and working”.According Mukoma and Flisher (2004, p.357), “the concept of ‘health promoting schools’ has been embraced internationally as an effective way of promoting the health of children, adolescents, and the wider school community”, despite the complexity of its evaluation. In “Health-Promoting Schools” model teachers have a double role: educators applying these principles and workers suffering consequences of this application, since their physical work context is school.

Recently, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (2014) created "Healthy workplaces" campaign, alerting for job stress/burnout as psychosocial risk. At human services, workers’ negative emotional/physical state can have strong impact on their users, and teachers are a vulnerable group, since their tasks implies chronic demands from their students (Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001), and interactions with colleagues, administrators and parents (Aloe et al., 2014).

Burnout is a job stress psychological syndrome that occurs ”among individuals who do 'people-work' of some kind” (Maslach & Jackson, 1981, p.99) presenting “physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by log-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding”. Teachers presents high emotional exhaustion level (Maslach et al., 2001), since “teaching offers its personal challenges which include managing the trauma of stress, overcoming fear of failure, developing resilience and emotional stamina, as well as carving satisfaction out of the overarching routine, and being cherished or respected by pre-service student teachers. Teacher education involves intensely personal aspects of one’s life, aspects that have no barriers to breeding both empowerment and despair” (Tsiwo-Chigubu, 2004, p.1).

Traditionally, teaching role was nurturing and developing students’ potential, but actually teachers’ work includes also learning new information and skills, keeping abreast of technological innovations and dealing with students, parents and the community, all demanding roles (Pillay et al. 2005).Thus, teachers’ stress/burnout become a concern and studies reveal a pattern of mental and physical diseases among teachers all over the world, as well absenteeism and dropout (Karsenti & Collin, 2013; Stoel & Thant, 2002).

European Commission done a survey about teachers’ work related stress (Nubling et al., 2011), including a Portuguese sample, and referring emotional demands, physical violence, burnout, general health state and work-family conflict as common factors. Moreover, teachers’ burnout implies psychological suffering at job and burned-out teachers negatively affect themselves, their students and the educational system, having negative consequences on class quality and students’ learning outcomes. Some studies (Stoel & Thant, 2002; Whitaker et al., 2015; Zhang & Sapp, 2009) revealed that teacher burnout adversely impacted student state motivation and affective learning, and students perceptions about teacher burnout has a negative impact on perceived teacher competence, caring, and trustworthiness. A recent meta-analysis showed negative relationship between burnout and teachers’ self-efficacy or attrition (Aloe et al., 2014).

It is crucial to study teachers’ burnout in order to prevent it and avoid extreme suffering situations that leads burnout teachers to resign earlier, dropout, depression symptoms and even commit suicide (Karsenti & Collin, 2013; Stoel & Thant, 2002). Web-forum discussions frequently referred teachers’ low well-being and suicide rate as higher than other groups, presenting an recently increase (e.g. http://saveourschoolsnz.com; http://www.teachersolidarity.com). Burnout prevalence varies according countries and occupations, but is estimated between 3-16% (Maslach et al., 2001) and for teachers was reported between 25-35% in Europe, being 19,7% in Italy (Quattrin et al., 2010).

Due the social and cultural importance of teachers, this study aims to analyze burnout levels and discuss stress sources of three samples of Portuguese high school teachers, with data being collected during 2006, 2009 and 2013.

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