The Short-Term: Create Healthy School Communities
In the short-term, school leaders must deal with a pressing issue at our collective doorsteps—communities of adults, including the leaders themselves, are anxious and exhausted. We need to heal to move forward and then adopt strategies to place well-being at the core. How do you get started? I suggest that one option is to understand the level of burnout at your school and the drivers behind it.Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a core researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying burnout throughout her career. I had the pleasure of meeting her in the ‘90s when she was named a Council for Advancement and Support of Education Professor of the Year. Her research, which has focused on service communities like health care and education, has confirmed the complex nature of burnout. She says it is not just about overwork. Rather, seven core needs must be met for employees to be engaged, motivated, and socially and emotionally healthy: autonomy, belongingness, competence, positive emotions, psychological safety, fairness, and meaning. She created the Maslach Burnout Inventory to assess the levels of burnout in an organization so that strategies for change can be targeted. There is one aimed at educators that focuses on emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. As we begin to build back from the ravages of an impossible year, Maslach suggests that we consider taking the following steps toward building healthier workplaces:
- Ensure a sustainable workload in which there is time to recover and get needed rest before going back in and doing more.
- Give choice and control.
- Recognize and reward.
- Create a supportive work community where people know how to work out conflicts, trust, and who they can go to for advice and help.
- Ensure fairness, respect, and social justice.
- State clear values and ensure meaningful work.
The Mid-term: Prepare for a New Generation of Teachers
We need to build succession plans for our education workforce in the mid-term. DASL 2020-2021 data identifies that the largest segment of the NAIS teaching workforce has been teaching for more than 21 years. Many of these teachers may be nearing retirement age, and the pandemic has coaxed some into retiring early. Every school leader needs to review their current workforce data and establish recruitment and retention goals for the next three to five years. We know that millennials and Gen Z will soon be the dominant employees in the workforce, and they may have slightly different motivations and ways of working than baby boomers or Gen Xers.Microsoft recently conducted a study with 1,000 pre-service and early career teachers from 10 countries around the world to understand how they might approach their careers. What itfound is that this new generation of teachers “has a strong focus on values, ethics, and a sense of social justice.” According to the study, “Close to 50% of the respondents expect to devote more time to teaching about global issues such as climate change and to have an increased focus on social and emotional learning.” Sixty percent of respondents also reported an enhanced use of technology in their practice, suggesting that this generation may drive the use of gaming, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence (AI). The study also revealed that many of these new or aspiring teachers did not feel adequately trained for the classroom of the future, with 38% identifying training needs in teaching for a multicultural classroom and for using digital technology for instruction. Finally, although competitive salaries are important to this group, they also are seeking deep collaboration through “mentorships and peer-to-peer sharing networks.”
Another concern to address in succession planning is how this period of remote work will drive where people live and how they choose to work. Some moved for less density and lower cost during the pandemic, with cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago seeing the largest exodus. No one knows if this will be a long-term trend, but schools in expensive urban areas may find it harder to recruit faculty and staff in the years ahead, and those in lower-cost cities and suburban areas may find a richer recruiting pool. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that the remote-work revolution “will allow smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas to compete with the superstar cities on the basis of price and amenities. It will shift the main thrust of economic development from paying incentives to big employers to investing and building up a community’s quality of life.” Of course, this also calls out that more people will be seeking hybrid work arrangements, which will challenge schools to experiment with how they use time and space differently to offer diverse arrangements to faculty and staff while still meeting the needs of students and families.
The Long-Term: Plan for Humans Working with Machines
Schools also need to plan for longer-term workforce changes. There will be a growing need for teachers in the coming decade, but what the job looks like may change largely because of technology. School leaders need to engage in generative conversations about those changes now and begin launching small experiments to identify where they may make shifts.McKinsey & Co. recently conducted a study with teachers in four countries (Canada, Singapore, the UK, and the U.S.) with high education technology adoption rates to find out how much time they spend on core activities such as lesson planning and grading, where they anticipate spending less time in the future because of technology, and which technologies they are currently using successfully. Their findings indicated that “teachers, across the board, were spending less time in direct instruction and engagement than in preparation, evaluation, and administrative duties.” The study then projected how much time could be reallocated to activities that directly support student learning through the use of technology, as outlined in the chart below:
Some caution, though, that we need to move carefully in adopting AI in education. A 2019 Brookings blog, “AI is Coming to Schools, and If We Are Not Careful, So Will Its Biases,” notes that systemic racism is already embedded in our education systems and that if we don’t build AI systems through a lens of racial equity, we could make the current situation even worse. The blog authors note, “Recent attempts to introduce AI in schools have led to improvements in assessing students’ prior and ongoing learning, placing students in appropriate subject levels, scheduling classes, and individualizing instruction. Such advances enable differentiated lesson plans for a diverse set of learners. But that sorting can be fraught with pernicious consequences if the algorithms don’t consider students’ nuanced experiences, trapping low-income and minority students in low-achievement tracks, where they face worse instruction and reduced expectations.”
There is a lot to think about as we prepare for a workforce that could change in many ways. The time to begin is now by looking at these changes through the lens of the short-term, mid-term, and long-term.
