This article appeared as "Cultivate With Care" in the Fall 2024 issue of Independent School.
My longtime mentor, Rebecca Moore, an English teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), once told me that she wanted to spend the first half of her career taking care of students and the second half of her career taking care of adults. Like her, I feel called to care for the adults in the schoolhouse, and now will have the unique opportunity to do just that in my new role as the dean of faculty at San Francisco University High School (CA). In many ways this position feels like a dream—I get the most joy from supporting faculty members so that they can create intellectually stimulating and exciting learning environments for students every day. The best day is spent observing classes and talking to faculty about the choices they are making in their classrooms and helping them feel supported in that work. But, as the work of schools continues to increase in complexity and the demands on teachers continue to grow, this work has never been more challenging or more important.
More and more talented educators are leaving our schools. In the 2022 Gallup Panel Workforce Study, K–12 teachers reported the highest levels of burnout, at 52%. “The Demographic Transformation of the Teaching Force in the United States,” published in 2021 in Education Sciences, also documents the deepening and troubling national teacher shortage. I’m tracking these trends as I take on this new role and tapping into the research to reflect and help me think about how to attract excellent faculty and how to keep them feeling healthy and whole and continuing to give all that they have to students and colleagues.
I often turn to research and literature for ideas and inspiration, and one that’s been particularly influential in my thinking and planning is Strategic Human Resources Management in Schools: Talent-Centered Education Leadership by Henry Tran and Carolyn Kelley. Tran and Kelley write that schools often make mistakes in their overemphasis on process and don’t focus enough attention on the educator’s experience of working at the school. They underscore a finding from a 2006 survey about teacher working conditions from the Center for Teaching Quality: “Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.”
And that point—thinking about caring for teachers—really hit home.
Scope of Work
As I was discussing the demands of coaching a varsity sport with a colleague, memories of my early teaching jobs (between 2013 and 2018), when I was the head boys’ and girls’ varsity squash coach, came rushing back. I loved coaching squash. The sport was a formative part of my own life and education, and to this day, I believe I learned more about teaching students on the squash court than I did as an English or social sciences teacher. But when we were in season, I was exhausted. I’d drive three hours on a Wednesday afternoon to another school, coach nine matches, and drive back. I wonder what kind of teacher I was the day after road matches. At both schools where I worked, I asked for an assistant coach.
But both schools had strict policies that teams with 12 or fewer students would not have more than one coach. The administrators believed they were being equitable—why should squash have an assistant coach when boys’ varsity basketball or girls’ crew only had one assistant and two to three times as many students?
And there it was: Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. If an assistant coach was out of the question, would it have been possible for me to have one class removed from my schedule, or perhaps a reduced co-curricular load in a subsequent semester? Were there other possible moves that could have helped get me through those semesters—to show up well for students both on my squash teams and in my English classes?
Who Cares
To build on the notion that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions, it’s important that we acknowledge that care work for students and faculty is not evenly distributed. Terri Watson’s research shows that women and people of color disproportionately take on the burden of caring for both children and adults at school. Watson refers to this phenomenon as “motherwork.” And when the well-being of students are at the center of an ask, women and people of color are likely to agree to additional burdens. This was also evident in my own 2022 research study for my dissertation, “Listening for Resistance: Stories Challenging the Binary in K–12 Educational Leadership.” According to “Unbroken, But Bent: Gendered Racism in School Leadership,” a May 2020 article published in Frontiers in Education, the faculty that we need most visible to our students, such as faculty of color, are often the most burned-out and the least likely to say no when more is asked of them.
As part of my doctoral work, I’ve sought to understand the gendered ways in which schools message who is a leader. Alice Eagly, Linda Carli, and Hannah Riley Bowles all document the ways in which masculine ways of being (decisive, rational, individual) are seen as the qualities of a good leader while feminine ways of being (relational, communal, caring) are seen as incongruous with leadership. I read the National Academy of Sciences report on sexual harassment in the hard sciences, engineering, and medicine. One of the findings in that report that has forever stayed with me is that Title IX turned universities into compliance factories but had little impact on culture. If the focus of well-researched and intended policies is only for us to make sure that we are staying within the parameters of those policies, we are losing sight of the fact that human capital is the most important resource in schools.
Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.
The Game Plan
As I begin my new role, I’m sharing research and learnings that I believe schools need to heed before it’s too late and we lose the talented faculty members who are drawn to our schools, create our communities, and care for our children. I want to practice the human-centered management that Tran and Kelley draw on—understanding the faculty experience of what faculty work feels like.
In spring 2024, I visited my new school and met with faculty to hear what was on their minds, and this past summer, I began having informal conversations with faculty about their work. This fall, my goal is to get into every classroom and have a conversation with every faculty member about their hopes and aspirations as educators, helping them find professional development that supports their visions. The clearest recommendation out of Tran and Kelley’s research is that schools that help design bespoke professional development support for their teachers are the highest functioning learning environments for students.
Everything we do in school leadership needs to align with the mission of the school as well as to maintain fiscal responsibility. Fulfilling these expectations is nonnegotiable for effective institutional stewardship. But the schools that set themselves apart by retaining great talent will be the ones that remember that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. This is how we keep the student experience at the center, by taking care of our adults.
Read More
Recruiting and retaining talent is top of mind. Don’t miss the Spring 2024 issue of Independent School magazine, which is focused on the workforce. Read these articles for more:
- “The Big Picture: Hiring & Retention in Independent Schools,” by Brenna Foley and Amada Torres
- “Research Insights: Connecting Belongingness and Faculty Retention,” by Jill Bergeron, Meghan Bollens, and Liz Davis
- “Leading Effective Teams Requires Regular and Dedicated Maintenance,” by Crystal Land and Michele Williams