“Nearly half of all beginning teachers will leave their classrooms within five years, only to be replaced by another fresh-faced educator” Phillips (read full interview here) and scholar Richard Ingersoll says “one of the main factors is the issue of voice, and having a say, and being able to have input into the key decisions in the building that affect a teacher’s job” (here via Phillips, NPR). As educational leaders and teacher-leaders, it’s up to us to do something about this—as Ingersoll puts it, “This is an issue of management.”
The professional field of education has always dealt with change, but the environment we’re navigating now requires change at a new level. We’ve moved from experiencing episodic change to continuous change—and as John Kotter has famously noted, that requires a whole different set of skills and a whole different level of urgency. Quite simply, educational leaders must coach and support teachers to leverage the powerful values that have always defined educators and to meet the challenges of education’s disruptive external environment; in addition, they must coach and support to create a learning environment where teachers are successful and students learn.
It’s our time, leaders, to provide teachers with clear expectations and defined priorities, invest in their development, recognize them for high performance, and set an expected consistency of leadership from them to be successful. We know it’s hard work, especially in today’s world of continuous change. To survive and thrive—to recruit and retain new and experienced teachers with passion and purpose—we need to perform at an even higher level.
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Maximize Performance: Creating a Culture for Educational Excellence by Quint Studer and Janet Pilcher will help education leaders engage in systematic reviews to diagnose, apply, assess, and validate the execution of strategies across school, department, and school system levels. Learn more about Maximize Performance at https://www.studereducation.com/MP. Follow the authors on Twitter using @quint_studer and @janetpilcher and join them in Washington, D.C., for dinner.
Our mission at Studer Education is to help education systems achieve measurable results that produce positive outcomes in student achievement, employee engagement, support services, and financial efficiencies and productivity. Our goal is to help school systems provide students with a great place to learn, teachers with a great place to teach, and parents with confidence that their children are getting a great education. Follow us on Twitter at @StuderEducation and visit us online at http://studereducation.com. Studer Education is a division of Studer Group, ranked for the seventh straight year on the Best Small and Medium Workplaces by Great Place to Work® and a recipient of the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
Filed under: How to Lead…, Who’s Engaged? Tagged: #MaximizePerformance, Leader Development, Recruit and Retain, Teacher Development 
