School administrators out there reading this, you're by far the most difficult group for me to address. There's nothing about teachers that I can tell you that you don't already know. The teacher shortage probably affects you more than it affects us. And I'm well aware that most of the pressure you put on us is put on you first.
Teachers want you to back off. The higher-ups want you to bear down. You spend an unthinkable amount of time hearing from the small number of most dissatisfied (and unsatifiable) members of the community.
You're in an impossible spot.
And when it comes to having a happier staff, you have no good reason to listen to me.
But hey, you clicked over here, so I may as well try!
Of the seven reasons most commonly cited for teachers wanting to quit, you as school administrators have the ability to have a big, positive impact on five of them of them - time, expectations, voice, recognition, and support. That's a lot of responsibility, but it is also a lot of opportunity. It can be uncomfortable to know that so much rides on you - especially when so many decisions are pushed down on you from above - but it can also be somewhat freeing to know that it is at least somewhat within your control.
Here are five ways you can help influence teachers' time, expectations, voice, recognition, and feeling of support so that the ones working for you today stick around and the ones you need in the future want to join you.
1. Tell teachers individual, specific things you appreciate about them
Administrators, I have to be honest - a lot of time, the only affirmation we hear from you is vague, general, and aimed at the entire staff. “You all are the best teachers in the world!” Stuff like that. I’ve worked at four schools, and would you guess it - all four of them had the best teachers in the world!
What’s not as common - and what really motivates a teacher to keep showing up and work even harder - is hearing specific, individual compliments. “I’ve never seen students smile in a classroom as often as they do in yours.” “Suzie Smith has really done a 180 from last year in your class.” "Students in your class are absolutely mesmerized when you read aloud to them.” "I’ve shared the way you sequence your math lessons with all the new teachers.” Those are the kinds of compliments that will keep us around.
I hope you'll notice that those are individual, specific, and short. You don't have to write us long, verbose letters of appreciation. All we need to hear are compliments that make us feel like you notice what we're doing or the impact we're having.
Teachers want you to back off. The higher-ups want you to bear down. You spend an unthinkable amount of time hearing from the small number of most dissatisfied (and unsatifiable) members of the community.
You're in an impossible spot.
And when it comes to having a happier staff, you have no good reason to listen to me.
But hey, you clicked over here, so I may as well try!
Of the seven reasons most commonly cited for teachers wanting to quit, you as school administrators have the ability to have a big, positive impact on five of them of them - time, expectations, voice, recognition, and support. That's a lot of responsibility, but it is also a lot of opportunity. It can be uncomfortable to know that so much rides on you - especially when so many decisions are pushed down on you from above - but it can also be somewhat freeing to know that it is at least somewhat within your control.
Here are five ways you can help influence teachers' time, expectations, voice, recognition, and feeling of support so that the ones working for you today stick around and the ones you need in the future want to join you.
1. Tell teachers individual, specific things you appreciate about them
Administrators, I have to be honest - a lot of time, the only affirmation we hear from you is vague, general, and aimed at the entire staff. “You all are the best teachers in the world!” Stuff like that. I’ve worked at four schools, and would you guess it - all four of them had the best teachers in the world!
What’s not as common - and what really motivates a teacher to keep showing up and work even harder - is hearing specific, individual compliments. “I’ve never seen students smile in a classroom as often as they do in yours.” “Suzie Smith has really done a 180 from last year in your class.” "Students in your class are absolutely mesmerized when you read aloud to them.” "I’ve shared the way you sequence your math lessons with all the new teachers.” Those are the kinds of compliments that will keep us around.
I hope you'll notice that those are individual, specific, and short. You don't have to write us long, verbose letters of appreciation. All we need to hear are compliments that make us feel like you notice what we're doing or the impact we're having.
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2. Tell the community about us
Even better than telling teachers themselves individual things you appreciate about them is telling everybody else things you appreciate about them! Tell the other teachers. Tell the community. Tell the local newspaper. Tell your social media network. Send pictures and testimonies to the district PR person. There's no reason that only bad news is allowed to be spread. Really want to make a teacher feel like you can’t live without them? Tell the world why. |
"It says here you're actually allowed to share good news online, too. That can't be right, can it?"
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3. Learn what makes individual teachers feel appreciated
A really tough thing about being a school administrator who wants to show his or her appreciation is that different people feel appreciated in different ways. I’m not sure how scientific these are, but I’ve always found the five “love languages” to be a pretty good way to categorize the ways different people express appreciation, and, most importantly for my point here, the ways they feel appreciated by others. If you haven’t seen them before, those are:
- Acts of service
- Gifts
- Quality time
- Affirming words
- Physical affection
What’s so hard about this is that it means there’s no way to appreciate everybody at once. When you give the whole staff a coffee mug for Teacher Appreciation Week, it only makes the people for whom gift-giving is the way they express and receive gratitude feel validated. Everybody else just puts it in their cupboard. Harder still is that whatever YOUR love language is, you are most likely to express appreciation that way, but only a fraction of people are validated by it. It’s tough.
If you want to reach expert-level status at appreciating your teachers to keep them motivated and affirmed, you’ve got to appreciate them differently. A gift is just right for some, but others need you to cover their class at lunch for a day (#1), to spend some time with them talking about how things are going (me! #3), a sincere compliment or handwritten note (#4), or a hug (#5). I wish I could make this easier for you, but that’s the way it works.
4. Try to solve problems by subtraction rather than addition
We are long overdue to start solving problems in schools or individual classrooms by subtraction rather than addition. Each year we do more and more things, those things don’t move the needle, then more new things are piled on the next. The same thing happens to you, I know.
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Want to make a teacher (or your whole staff) feel like they can keep teaching for years to come? Next time there’s a problem to solve, frame it like this:
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She wisely chose subtraction as the most efficient path.
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I love reading books about productivity and excelling in your career, and a major theme in them right now is that productivity isn’t about doing more things in less time, its about doing fewer things better (here are one, two, three favorites). All we ever do in schools is to do more things worse. Maybe the results we want to see are just around the corner of simply doing fewer things. Even if they’re not, we have pretty great evidence that doing more won’t improve anything, so at very least, doing less will help you keep more people around without sacrificing any results.
5. Protect our time at all costs
As I said above, your teachers have to do a lot. And in addition to all you ask of them, there are all the things they ask of themselves. The ratio of planning time to teaching time in US schools is ridiculous. Ask yourself this:
“To do what I want and ask teachers to do, how much time on their own do they need to be able to do it?”
The real answer is - more than you can possibly provide. Teachers in the average OECD country spend about 400 fewer work hours annually directly teaching students than US teachers do. 400! By my math, that's 2-3 hours more per day of planning and professional development time. That's probably what they need.
You can't provide that, I know.
But the least you can do is not to take the too-little time they have.
Resist the urge to think that you're already doing this. Also resist the urge to use the excuse that there will be times you have no choice. You have to have the “here’s how you get fired giving standardized tests” meetings every year, yes. But go back to my advice in #4 - what can you subtract since you have to add that meeting? What regularly scheduled meeting can it take the place of?
Additionally, you wouldn’t believe the morale boost of giving time back. My current administrators regularly send us emails that say “I know we had a meeting scheduled for today, but I figured out how to condense it into a 6 minute video. Here it is. The rest of the time is yours to work.” Man-oh-man, do people love that.
There you have it. Five ways for you as a school administrator to single-handedly have a positive impact on the teacher shortage.
Is more needed than just this? Absolutely. I'm sure you've seen more of the teacher burnout reports than I have (I've only seen this one and this one) The bigger, systemic changes suggested in these are important and serious. But they aren't easy to take action on yourself or right away, and many of them are beyond your ability to control.
So at least for getting started right now, on your own, I suggest these. If you manage to master even 1-2 of these and word gets out, I suspect you'll weather the teacher shortage better than anyone else around. To think, you - yes YOU - can help end the teacher shortage starting today.
5. Protect our time at all costs
As I said above, your teachers have to do a lot. And in addition to all you ask of them, there are all the things they ask of themselves. The ratio of planning time to teaching time in US schools is ridiculous. Ask yourself this:
“To do what I want and ask teachers to do, how much time on their own do they need to be able to do it?”
The real answer is - more than you can possibly provide. Teachers in the average OECD country spend about 400 fewer work hours annually directly teaching students than US teachers do. 400! By my math, that's 2-3 hours more per day of planning and professional development time. That's probably what they need.
You can't provide that, I know.
But the least you can do is not to take the too-little time they have.
Resist the urge to think that you're already doing this. Also resist the urge to use the excuse that there will be times you have no choice. You have to have the “here’s how you get fired giving standardized tests” meetings every year, yes. But go back to my advice in #4 - what can you subtract since you have to add that meeting? What regularly scheduled meeting can it take the place of?
Additionally, you wouldn’t believe the morale boost of giving time back. My current administrators regularly send us emails that say “I know we had a meeting scheduled for today, but I figured out how to condense it into a 6 minute video. Here it is. The rest of the time is yours to work.” Man-oh-man, do people love that.
There you have it. Five ways for you as a school administrator to single-handedly have a positive impact on the teacher shortage.
- Specific, individual appreciation
- Tell the community about us
- Find out what makes each of us feel appreciated
- Problem solve by subtraction rather than addition
- Protect our time
Is more needed than just this? Absolutely. I'm sure you've seen more of the teacher burnout reports than I have (I've only seen this one and this one) The bigger, systemic changes suggested in these are important and serious. But they aren't easy to take action on yourself or right away, and many of them are beyond your ability to control.
So at least for getting started right now, on your own, I suggest these. If you manage to master even 1-2 of these and word gets out, I suspect you'll weather the teacher shortage better than anyone else around. To think, you - yes YOU - can help end the teacher shortage starting today.
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