My third-period sophomores were presenting their history projects, and I couldn’t stop glancing at the classroom across the hall, where students were completing a similar project. Through the window in my door, I could see my co-worker’s students. They were standing at the front of her room, speaking with real authority, answering questions from their peers like they’d been doing this for years. My kids were reading directly from their notecards, barely making eye contact. One of them had started with “So, uh, like, this happened.” That was it. That was his opener.
I walked back to my desk, sat down, and had a conversation with myself that I’ve since learned has a name. It went something like this: “She’s just a better teacher than I am. She probably doesn’t have the same behavior issues I do. Her admin probably gives her more time to plan. She’s been doing this longer. She just has it.” I wasn’t thinking about what my colleague had actually done to prepare her students. I wasn’t thinking about the scaffolding she must have built or the way she’d chunked the assignment. I was thinking about how I wasn’t good enough and never would be.
That feeling has a name. It’s called imposter syndrome, though you’ll also hear it referred to as the impostor phenomenon. In the academic literature, it was first identified by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in their 1978 paper, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women.” They described it as an internal experience of intellectual phoniness. That’s the academic way of saying what I felt sitting at my desk that day: the persistent self-doubt that you don’t actually belong, that you’ve fooled everyone into thinking you’re competent, and that sooner or later, you’ll be found out.
The secret thoughts of successful women, as Clance and Imes called them, are often filled with feelings of inadequacy unrelated to their actual abilities.
Click above to listen to the podcast episode: “Dealing with ‘Imposter Syndrome’ as a Teacher”
What teacher imposter syndrome actually looks like
Here’s what I’ve realized after years of training teachers. Impostor syndrome in education doesn’t look like the “fraud syndrome” they talk about in the business world. It doesn’t show up as a fear of being exposed in a boardroom or feeling unqualified to lead a meeting. In teaching, it shows up as the “yeah buts.” I would try that project, yeah, but I don’t have time. I would try student-centered learning, yeah, but I have too many IEPs. I would try that engagement strategy, yeah, but my kids are different than hers.
It’s the internal struggle that keeps you from trying something new. It’s the negative self-talk that says the teacher down the hall has something you don’t, and you’ll never get it. It’s the fear of failure that convinces you it’s safer to keep doing what you’re doing, even if you’re exhausted, even if you know your students could be learning more, even if you’re counting the days until summer. The impostor feelings tell you that everyone else has figured it out and you haven’t.
I started teaching high school history in 2007, and I’ve worked in both a nationally ranked academic school and a Title I CTE school. Since 2018, I’ve been training K-12 teachers across grade levels, school types, and resource levels to implement student-centered learning. I’m the author of The Classroom Dichotomy and Teaching When You Have Nothing Left, and I’ve been featured in Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and Teach Better.
I tell you this not to impress you, but to let you know that I’ve worked with more than 1,700 students over my classroom career and thousands of teachers since then. In every single setting, I’ve watched imposter syndrome do the same thing. It convinces good teachers they’re bad teachers. It tells high-achieving individuals they’re actually failures waiting to be discovered.
The research on how widespread this really is
You aren’t alone in this. The prevalence of imposter syndrome is remarkably high across professions. A systematic review published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that prevalence rates vary widely from 9 to 82 percent depending on the screening tool and cutoff used to assess symptoms. Bravata et al. conducted this comprehensive review and found that imposter syndrome is particularly common among ethnic minorities and is often comorbid with depression and anxiety, associated with impaired job performance, job satisfaction, and burnout among various employee populations, including clinicians.
A 2025 study of female physician trainees found that 76.3 percent screened positive for imposter syndrome, with Black trainees showing significantly higher rates. The mean IP scores were notably elevated across all groups. The same study found a strong inverse relationship between self-compassion and imposter syndrome. A 2025 study of resident physicians found that higher-level residents reported lower levels of imposter syndrome, with each year of training reducing the odds by about 29 percent.
That means experience helps. It also means that even doctors in their third year of residency, people who have literally been to medical school and are now practicing medicine, still feel like impostors. If they can feel this way, you can too.
The characteristics of imposter syndrome in teachers
The imposter syndrome cycle usually follows a predictable pattern. You’re assigned achievement-related tasks, a new unit, a challenging student, and an observation. You experience feelings of anxiety and self-doubt. You either overprepare, spending hours on something that should take thirty minutes, or you procrastinate, avoiding it entirely because you’re convinced you’ll fail. When you succeed, you don’t attribute it to your own abilities. You attribute it to luck, to random chance, to the fact that you worked harder than anyone else should have to. Then the next task comes along, and the whole imposter cycle starts again.
I’ve seen this play out in real time with teachers I’ve trained. One teacher in a workshop I led last fall had been teaching for twelve years. Twelve years. When I asked her why she hadn’t tried project-based learning yet, she said, “I don’t think I’m smart enough to pull it off.” This is a woman who had a master’s degree, who had been rated “effective” on every evaluation for a decade, who had letters from former students taped to her filing cabinet. She still felt like a fraud. Her low self-esteem had nothing to do with her actual competence.
The published literature on this confirms what I see in my trainings. People who experience imposter syndrome are often high achievers who set unrealistic expectations for themselves and have difficulty accepting positive feedback. They tend to attribute success to external factors and failure to their own inadequacy. The impostor phenomenon doesn’t discriminate based on how much hard work you’ve put in. In fact, high-achieving professional women are particularly susceptible because they’ve often worked twice as hard to get half the recognition.
Ruchika Tulshyan, who has written extensively on this topic, notes that imposter syndrome is often framed as an individual problem when it’s actually reinforced by the social context and workplace culture. When you’re in an environment that doesn’t value your contributions, it’s easy to internalize that message. The social interactions you have with colleagues, administrators, and even parents can either reinforce or diminish those feelings of imposter syndrome.
How external factors make imposter syndrome worse
Teacher imposter syndrome isn’t just an internal problem. External factors matter. When you’re in a school that doesn’t support you, when you’re given unrealistic expectations, when you’re evaluated on things outside your control, all of that feeds the imposter cycle. The high expectations placed on teachers are unlike almost any other profession. You’re expected to be an educator, counselor, disciplinarian, data analyst, and surrogate parent all in one.
I was talking to a group of teachers in a training session last year, and one of them said, “I feel like an imposter because I can’t get my students to pass the state test. My admin keeps telling me it’s my fault, so am I actually an imposter, or am I just being gaslit?” That’s a real question, and it deserves a real answer.
There is a difference between imposter syndrome and actual incompetence. Actual incompetence means you don’t have the skills to do your job. Imposter syndrome means you have the skills, but you don’t believe you do. If you’re in an environment that constantly reinforces the message that you’re not good enough through unfair evaluations, impossible standards, or just a culture of blame, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. The intense pressure of teaching makes this distinction even harder to see clearly.
I’ve seen this hit new teachers hardest. The first time you stand in front of a classroom, it’s completely normal to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re learning on the job. But I’ve also seen veteran teachers with fifteen, twenty years in who still feel the same way. Because teaching is a profession where the goalposts keep moving. Every year, there’s a new initiative, a new curriculum, a new set of standards. You never get to feel like you’ve mastered it. That’s not a personal failing. That’s the system. Different people experience this in different ways depending on their past experiences, socioeconomic status, and career paths.
What imposter syndrome actually does to your teaching
Here’s what I’ve watched imposter syndrome do to good teachers. It makes you play small. It makes you stick to worksheets and direct instruction because those feel safe. It makes you avoid trying student-centered strategies because you’re afraid they’ll fail and prove you’re a fraud. It leads you to dismiss positive feedback from your principal, colleagues, or students because you assume they’re just being nice. This negatively affects your professional performance, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I trained a teacher in a Title I school last year who was convinced she wasn’t reaching her students. She was in her third year, and she told me she felt like she was failing them. We started working together, and within six weeks of implementing a student-centered approach, her students were having academic conversations I’d expect from a college seminar. She said to me, “I can’t believe I was so worried. I thought I was the problem. I was just using the wrong strategies.“
That’s the thing I want you to hear. When you’re stuck in the imposter syndrome cycle, you don’t see the situation clearly. You see yourself as the problem. You don’t see that maybe the problem is the approach, the system, the resources, or lack thereof that you’ve been given to work with. When I help teachers make the shift to student-centered learning, the first thing they tell me isn’t “my test scores improved.” It’s “I feel like a real teacher again.” The better outcomes in their classrooms provide evidence that their professional inadequacy is unfounded.
My honest take on overcoming teacher imposter syndrome
Most advice about imposter syndrome is useless for teachers. Business people talk about “owning your expertise” and “leaning in.” The Harvard Business Review has published countless articles on this topic, but most of them assume you work in an environment where your expertise is valued. That’s not the reality for most teachers.
What actually helps is doing something that proves your imposter syndrome wrong. Not through positive affirmations. Not through therapy (though that can help). Through tangible, observable evidence of your professional competence. For me, that evidence came when I switched to student-centered learning. I started seeing my students engaged in ways they hadn’t been before. They were talking about history with real interest. They were asking questions I hadn’t anticipated. I was learning alongside them.
When I train teachers, I always tell them the same thing. Pick one unit. One class period. One strategy. Do it well. See what happens. If it works, and it usually does, you’ll have evidence that you’re not a fraud. If it doesn’t, you’ll have data about what to adjust, not proof of your failure. That’s the difference between imposter syndrome and honest self-assessment. Imposter syndrome says, “I am a failure.” An honest self-assessment says, “This strategy didn’t work for these kids today.”
The most effective treatments for imposter syndrome aren’t about changing your personality traits, though that can help. They’re about changing the evidence you’re looking at. When I started keeping a folder of student work, student feedback, and observation notes, I had something to look at when the imposter feelings crept in. I had proof. That proof kept me going through the hard days. Healthcare professionals often use similar strategies, documenting patient outcomes to combat their own sense of self-doubt.
What I’d actually do if I were you
If you’re in the thick of imposter syndrome right now, here’s what I’d actually do.
First, I’d stop comparing myself to the teacher next door. Full stop. That person has different students, different resources, and a different relationship with their administration. Their success doesn’t measure your failure. It doesn’t measure anything about you at all. The gender differences in how imposter syndrome manifests are worth noting, too. High-achieving women often experience it more intensely because of societal expectations and the pressure to prove themselves in ways their male colleagues don’t face.
Second, I’d choose one thing to get better at. Not everything. Just one thing. I’d work on it for a month. I’d track my progress, and when I saw improvement, I’d let that be the evidence that I’m not an imposter. Personal growth happens in small increments, not giant leaps.
Third, I’d find a colleague I trust and tell them exactly what I’m feeling. Not in a self-pitying way. In a “this is what my brain is telling me, and I need you to tell me if it’s true” way. Research on resident doctors found that normalizing imposter syndrome, providing specific feedback, demonstrating trust, and fostering a safe space to discuss negative thoughts were all effective leadership strategies. That works just as well in a faculty lounge as it does in a teaching hospital. Jodi-Ann Burey has written about the importance of team members having these conversations rather than suffering in silence.
And fourth, I’d give myself permission to be learning. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to have lessons that bomb. You are going to have days when you think you should have been a librarian. That doesn’t make you an imposter. It makes you a teacher. The most important thing is to keep showing up and keep trying, even when your impostor feelings tell you to hide.
What the research actually says
The research on imposter syndrome is clear about a few things. First, it’s incredibly common, especially among high-achieving women and minority groups. Clance and Imes’s original research focused on high-achieving women, and subsequent studies have shown that Black women and other women of color experience imposter feelings at even higher rates, often because of the added pressure of representing their communities and the lack of representation in leadership positions. Future research continues to explore these disparities and how to address them.
Second, imposter syndrome doesn’t just affect your mental health. It affects your physical health too. The chronic stress of feeling like a fraud takes a toll on your body. It affects your performance. The persistent self-doubt leads to overpreparation, burnout, and avoidance of challenges. It makes you less likely to seek out professional development, to apply for leadership positions, or to take on new responsibilities. It holds you back from your own career success.
Third, there’s a growing body of evidence about what actually works. The 2025 study of physician trainees found that self-compassion was strongly inversely associated with imposter syndrome. That means being kind to yourself isn’t just a nice idea. It’s a measurable intervention. And the resident physician study found that trust, specific feedback, and normalizing the experience all help reduce feelings of imposterism. A pilot study on group therapy for imposter syndrome also showed promising results, with participants reporting reduced feelings of inadequacy after just eight sessions.
Maya Angelou famously said, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everyone, and they’re going to find me out.'” If Maya Angelou felt like an imposter, so can you. The question isn’t whether you feel it. The question is what you do with it. Smart people are actually more likely to experience imposter syndrome because they’re aware of how much they don’t know.
The different types of imposter syndrome
Not all imposter syndrome looks the same. Researchers have identified several types of imposter syndrome that manifest in different ways. The perfectionist sets impossibly high standards and feels like a failure when they inevitably fall short. The superwoman or superman feels like a fraud if they can’t do everything perfectly in every role they hold. The natural genius believes that smart people shouldn’t have to work hard, so when something doesn’t come easily, they see it as evidence of their inadequacy.
The soloist believes they must accomplish everything on their own and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. The expert feels like they need to know everything before they can do anything. Sound familiar? How many teachers have you met who fit one or more of these types? I’ve worked with all of them, and I’ve been each one at different points in my career.
Understanding which type of imposter syndrome you’re dealing with is the first step to overcoming it. The first step is recognizing the pattern. The next time those feelings creep up, you can name them. You can say, “Ah, there’s my perfectionist imposter syndrome showing up again.” That simple act of naming can reduce its power over you. When you make small mistakes, as all teachers do, you can remind yourself that those mistakes don’t define your competence.
Let’s talk about what you’re actually dealing with
Imposter syndrome isn’t a clinical diagnosis. You won’t find it in the statistical manual of mental disorders. It’s not a pathology. It’s a normal human response to being in a role that requires constant learning and growth….and if teaching doesn’t require constant learning and growth, I don’t know what does.
Just because it’s common doesn’t mean you have to live with it. You can change the way you talk to yourself. You can change what you do when the imposter feelings show up. You can change the evidence you’re using to measure your success. It takes time. It takes practice. And it takes a willingness to believe that maybe, just maybe, you’re actually good at this.
When I think about the teachers I’ve worked with who have overcome imposter syndrome, they all have one thing in common: They stopped waiting to feel ready. They started doing the thing they were afraid of. They made mistakes. They adjusted. They made more mistakes. They adjusted again. And somewhere along the way, they realized they weren’t impostors anymore. They were just teachers who had learned a lot. The common feeling of being a fraud in new environments eventually fades as you build evidence of your competence.
Social media makes all of this worse. We see the highlight reels of other teachers’ classrooms and assume that’s how it always is for them. We don’t see the lesson that bombed, the student who disengaged, the parent who complained. We compare our behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel, and of course, we come up short. The best way to combat this is to limit your exposure or to follow accounts that show the real, messy, beautiful reality of teaching.
Your past experiences play an important role in how you experience imposter syndrome. If you’ve been told you’re not good enough in the past, you’re more likely to believe it now. If you’ve had to work harder than others to get the same recognition, you’re more likely to feel like you don’t belong. But you can rewrite that narrative. You can recognize that your struggles have made you stronger, more empathetic, and more effective with your students.
What would change for you if you let yourself believe you actually knew what you were doing? What would change if you stopped giving those impostor feelings so much power? What if you decided that doing a good enough job today was actually okay?
Is imposter syndrome the same as just being humble?
No. Humility is an accurate assessment of your limitations paired with a healthy respect for what you don’t know. Imposter syndrome is a distortion that makes you believe you’re less capable than you actually are. The humble teacher says, “I don’t know everything, but I’m good at what I do.” The teacher with imposter syndrome says, “I don’t know everything, so I must be bad at everything.
How do I know if I actually need to improve or if it’s just imposter feelings?
This is the hardest question to answer. I tell teachers to look at the evidence. If you have student work, test scores, observation feedback, and peer evaluations that all say you’re doing fine, it’s probably imposter feelings. If you have consistent negative feedback and evidence of student struggle, it’s probably a skill gap. But even if you have a skill gap, that doesn’t make you a fraud. It makes you a teacher who needs to learn something new.
Does imposter syndrome ever fully go away?
For most people, no. The feelings can diminish, but they rarely disappear entirely. High-achieving individuals tend to experience imposter syndrome throughout their careers because they keep setting higher standards for themselves. A 2025 study of resident physicians found that imposter syndrome declines with increased experience, but it doesn’t disappear. The goal isn’t to eliminate the feeling. The goal is to stop letting it run your life.
What if my admin actually is making me feel like I’m not good enough?
This is real, and it’s more common than you’d think. Some school cultures are genuinely toxic, and leaders who use blame and fear to motivate will trigger imposter syndrome in even the most confident teachers. If you’re in this situation, I’d start by documenting everything. Track the feedback you’re getting, the evidence of your success, and the evidence of your struggles. If you can show a pattern of unfair treatment, you may need to advocate for yourself or look for a different school. Your mental health matters more than your job.
Can my students tell when I’m feeling this way?
Yes and no. Students are more perceptive than we give them credit for, but they’re also self-centered. They notice when you seem uncertain or anxious, but they don’t usually interpret it as imposter syndrome. They interpret it as you being tired, frustrated, or having a bad day. The real risk isn’t that they’ll “find you out.” It’s that your imposter feelings will lead you to play it safe with your teaching, and your students will get a less engaging experience because of it.
Is it worse for newer teachers, or does it hit veterans too?
It’s common at both ends of the career spectrum, but for different reasons. New teachers feel like impostors because they’re actually learning the job. Veteran teachers feel like impostors because the job keeps changing. If you’ve been teaching for a decade, you’ve lived through four different curricula, three different evaluation systems, and two different state tests. Of course, you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. The goal isn’t to master everything. The goal is to keep learning and keep showing up.
This article was originally published on April 2, 2021.
