A Blueprint for Teacher Retention: Leading Schools that Teachers Don't Want To Leave

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baederr.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program James Bailey and Randy Weiner. James Bailey's career has encompassed teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, school turnaround leader, consultant, and superintendent roles spanning Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming. He holds a PhD in educational leadership and innovation from the University of Colorado Denver, is a prolific publisher and presenter, and currently serves as a core faculty member at Walden University in the area of educational leadership. Randy Weiner has worked in education and education technology and consulting throughout his career. He co-founded the country's first public Montessori arts integration and design thinking school in Oakland. A Teach for America alum and father to two daughters, Randy taught for five years in Oakland and Madagascar and holds two BAs from Middlebury College and an MA in education from Stanford.

[01:03]

They are the founders of Brass Tax Innovations, a consultancy focused on leadership development, workplace culture, teacher retention, and other challenges that schools face. They are the co-authors of The Daily SEL Leader. And James is the author of the new book, A Blueprint for Teacher Retention, Leading Schools That Teachers Don't Want to Leave.

[01:23] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:25] Justin Baeder:

James and Randy, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much, Justin. I'm excited to get the gang back together to talk about what you have been up to since we last spoke about your previous book. Tell us about the work that led up to the new book, A Blueprint for Teacher Retention.

[01:42] James Bailey:

Yeah, so we were here, I don't know, four or five years ago, however long ago it was, talking about the book that Randy and I co-authored, Daily SEL Leader. And that was sort of right in the middle of tail end-ish of the start of the COVID pandemic. crisis. And as we were talking to people around the country, working with schools, working with principals, one of the things that we just kept hearing was the turnover of teachers, just the pressure, the stress. And it led to some really interesting conversations over time about like what's, you know, beyond COVID, we know that was a once in a lifetime, a black swan event. But what else is causing that?

[02:25]

Because as we started to dig into the research, we really started to see that this has been a growth trajectory. And it really equated with my experience when I was a superintendent where, you know, we would start with 20 candidates and over the next few years, we'd be down to two or three and it just became increasingly more difficult. So it just became something, I think, that raised a real dilemma in our mind and what was causing that, how would we deal with it? And what does the world need to do with that problem right now?

[02:56] Randy Weiner:

I might add that as we were providing support following the publication of the Daily SEL Leader, which was again premised on this idea that adults were not receiving the necessary support to develop their own SEL skills. And therefore, the notion of supporting children, especially across diversity, to do the same felt at least disconnected. I think James and I realized quite quickly how relevant those very same adult SEL skills are to leaders seeking to decrease attrition and increase retention, and oftentimes how unprepared those leaders are through no fault of their own to do that incredibly complex work. So I think there's a real tight connection of one leading to the other.

[03:50] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, certainly there were Black Swan kind of hopefully never to be repeated events that occurred that created some challenges for us. And yet there are also, you know, ongoing challenges with teacher retention. And I think sometimes we think about teacher retention as something that is a little bit beyond our control. When we see people leave for personal reasons, you know, maybe somebody's career unfolds or, you know, they move across the country or they take their next steps in life and we feel a little bit powerless, you know, maybe rightly so to prevent that type of turnover. But in your work, you have found that there is significant opportunity to reduce turnover and keep people in a good place and keep people on staff. Take us into a little bit more of your research on turnover, because I don't think any of us believe that we can eliminate it all or should try.

[04:39]

But there are some real costs to losing people more quickly than we ought to.

[04:44] James Bailey:

Yeah, it's a definite problem. And, you know, a lot of what's happening around the nation right now with this issue is that we're seeing it just primarily as a supply issue. Like if we just had more people, we would solve this problem. But it goes much further than that, and that is the research shows that there's definite impacts on student achievement. There's definite impacts on school culture. There's definite impacts on the continuity of what you're trying to implement with change to improve as a school.

[05:17]

There are community issues that deal with it. And so what the research really says, you know, again, there's no national or federal database on the amount of turnover. So much of this is collected by, you know, state organizations or other things. But what the data points out is that anywhere between about a half million to three quarters of a million of a teacher's turnover every year. Okay. And that is not all from retirement.

[05:47]

So again, A great majority of that is people who just leave schools, who either leave the profession entirely or who move to a different school. And really, there's some basic causes of that. And we place this in the—we use the theoretical model. I use the theoretical model that's called the job demands and resources model, which has been empirically proven. in hundreds of industries, right? And basically what it says is any job, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a counselor, a principal, somebody who works at McDonald's, right?

[06:20]

You have demands of your job and you have resources. Demands are those things that decrease energy. right? So if you look at a teacher, there's an emotional demand, there's a cognitive demand, there's a physical demand. And when that becomes too high, it starts to get into what they call the health impairment process, right? So it impacts people's health.

[06:44]

That's why insurance for schools is so high. On the other end of that spectrum are the resources. And resources are things that can help you develop. There's things that help you get your job done, right? So it's good leadership, it's good colleagues, it's the right materials, it's the right training. And when those things balance, people's wellness tends to be okay.

[07:08]

And so what we've seen though, probably over the last 20 to 30 years with intensified work, intensified accountability, is that the demands have outpaced the resources. And so that's why, again, you see a lot of turnover is because people's health, their well-being just can't handle it anymore, their mental health, their physical health, those sort of things. And so I always talk about it like a teeter-totter. When the teeter-totter of demands is too high, you get way out of balance. And so you're always trying to get to this balance point. And that's why the primary outcome from my research was, basically says that it's the well-being of teachers that is the primary outcome, right?

[07:53]

And we've done a lot of other moves over the last 30 or 40 years to change that. It's all about great instruction. And I don't disagree with that. But it's hard to be a really good instructor when you don't feel well, when you're overstressed, when you're emotionally taxed, when you're physically tired all the time. It is very difficult to teach well. And so, again, I think if we'd start to work more around a well-being mentality, social determinants of health mentality, we'd probably get a lot more achievement in the long run.

[08:26] Justin Baeder:

There's the old saying from W. Edwards Deming that every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it's getting. And you say in your model that we have created an unintentional turnover system.

[08:40] James Bailey:

So what I think people who lead schools recognize, you know, I used to be a principal myself. And what we recognize is, yeah, there's going to be some turnover, right? You have people that retire. You have people that move because their spouse gets another job. They move to a different place. But I don't think we've recognized the system that is causing that, right?

[09:02]

And so, again, what I talk about in the book is that you have to really understand sort of three things. You have to have a model in mind. And we lay out a pretty clear model about what that looks like from these ideas of demands and resources and what we call the emotional path and how that can really help support teachers. You have to have a simple strategy language, right? And that simple strategy language are really the levers that you can pull as a principal to help retain teachers, right? So you can develop those adult social emotional skills, okay?

[09:37]

We talk a lot about it, as Randy mentioned earlier, we talk a lot about supporting students, but we don't really talk about how we can support our teachers who are prone to stress, how we handle challenges, how we work together as a team. So that's one lever. Then you can reduce demands as another level, or you can increase resources as the other level, right? So you have to have these sort of levers or strategies in mind, and you have to have some tools that you can do to collect data. We survey the heck out of our educators, right? But for what purpose?

[10:14]

Like we've all done culture surveys, but again, how does that fit into a model of retention? And so in the book, we lay out 10 or 12 that start from teacher well-being. You can gauge teacher well-being. You can look at the jobs and demands and resources, right? Because the evidence is pretty clear about what those causes of turnover are. And then the last thing that you can really do in this intentional system to retain your teachers is just think about these processes for small changes, right?

[10:46]

So the example that we use quite a bit is the excessive meeting time, right? The intensification of meeting time, which doesn't give teachers a lot of spaciousness in their day. So what if we moved away from a staff meeting per week to once every two weeks? Would that help decrease stress? Would that give people more time to do things, right? So once you have an idea of a demand you could reduce, then what's the impact of that, right?

[11:14]

Does it lessen stress? Does it increase well-being? If we work more on student behavior support, What does that do to decrease people's stress? So all of those things, again, are happening whether we know it or not, right? The unintentional system of the demands and resources and all those sort of things, it's happening whether we know it or not. But we need to move to a more intentional system where we can recognize those things and add what we need to, subtract what we need to, but really, again, focus on that well-being of teachers.

[11:48] Randy Weiner:

Yeah, the Demings quote is apt because, as James was just sort of getting to, the system is there whether we know it or not. And we found this over and over again with just the SEL work. One, Ed Code incents very specific behaviors that teachers and leaders rightfully feel an enormous amount of pressure to deliver on. Educators are cursed in the best case scenario to want to sacrifice everything for the well-being of their children. Makes total sense morally. Makes no sense in terms of a retention model, where if we were to think like athletes, you would never structure a school year in which you did not intentionally design in recovery.

[12:37]

You just would never do that because you would burn your athlete out. That is not the system we have. That is not the leadership model that we hold up for school leaders to try to emulate. There's very little conversation that tries to equate how building in recovery, which would be in the language James was just talking about, trying to find a better balance between demands and resources, for example, in addition to supporting the ongoing development of the SEL skills. Engaging with that system, one has to be willing to let go of some amount of the way things have been done up to this point. But our argument is if you don't do that, you are continuing to try to break the laws of physics.

[13:21]

And we've got decades and decades of data that says it's not about you. You're unlikely to be able to succeed for sustained periods of time in getting the kinds of results that you want.

[13:34] Justin Baeder:

And we were able to ignore those dynamics as long as we had more replacements, right? As long as we could hire somebody else to replace every person who burned out, we could say, well, that was just not a good fit. That person just didn't have what it takes. And now we realize, hmm, maybe we don't have enough people in existence who have what it takes. So maybe we should look at what we're demanding and the support that we're providing and think about that a little bit differently. And I've been encouraged to see a lot of conversations in recent years about just the superhuman demands that are placed on teachers.

[14:04]

And sometimes we create those demands in the name of autonomy, like, oh, you have total autonomy over your curriculum, which means we're giving you nothing. We're buying you nothing. Make it up as you go, which is incredibly difficult and yet something we've valorized as a working condition that, hey, you get autonomy. You get to make all this up on your own. And I think people are starting to realize, you know, maybe I don't want that. Maybe that makes this job undoable for me when if you gave me the resources and the support, it actually would be a doable job.

[14:32] James Bailey:

Yeah, I totally agree with that, Justin, because it's in a sense like you as a teacher don't necessarily have that development time, right? And what's a fascinating finding is that with technology, with cell phones, things like that, The boundary between work and life has sort of disintegrated for most teachers, right? So my wife is a preschool teacher and we're having these high winds here. And so she was wondering if they were going to cancel school. So she was checking in all night whether school was going to be canceled or not. And that's a minor thing.

[15:08]

But, you know, when you get parent emails or your principal emails you something, those demands just have increased. So that boundary of saying, hey, you know what, at 4 o'clock I'm going home, I'm done with work like most people, that doesn't really occur for teachers. And if I'm going to create things, I have to do it during that time. which I think is wholly unfair. And so, yeah, I think really good materials, and that's something we talked about as a classroom resource, is really good classroom materials are a good resource for teachers.

[15:41] Randy Weiner:

You know, another incentive that we would submit leaders have for contemplating This approach to retention is unlike when James and I were coming up. The ability for today's teachers to very quickly compare their options to other fields in other fields, when you might be able to be a barista and have a much less stressed out life at some point, you may find if you're an average human where average is just any of us, there's no judgment about that at all. I can only handle so much and teachers leave for this reason. I just can't bear the burden. My morals haven't changed. But physically, I can't sustain this, and so I'm making a choice to take care of myself, right?

[16:33]

And so we would submit, really starting with recruitment, leaders need to have a plan, a message that helps those coming into the field understand they're going to be taken care of. They are not going to contribute to the statistics of leaving the classroom within the first three, four, five years or so.

[16:54] Justin Baeder:

And you have a visual model for this, a teacher retention model that we'll put in the show notes that strikes me almost as something that I could picture kind of floating in the water where, you know, the balancing point is kind of in the middle. And if underneath the water we have the resources that people have to do their jobs and, you know, suspended above is the demands of the job. And if that ship gets too top heavy, it tips over. Right. If there's not that counterbalance of resources there. to support people and set them up for success and keep them in a state of well-being, then they're going to burn out.

[17:27]

They're going to find something else to do. And it's something that we do have some leverage over as leaders. How do leaders in your work think about Other ways of lightening the demands, because I think for years, the standard line about the demands has been, well, like you care about the kids and X, Y, Z, new thing is a mandate. We don't really have a choice about it. So what are you going to do? It's just more on the plate.

[17:54]

How are you seeing leaders start to think differently about that, getting away from just putting more on the plate and saying, deal with it?

[17:59] James Bailey:

Yeah, I think the ideas in this book, I think, are fairly, I won't say controversial, but I think they're new. In the local district a week or so ago, I met with two HR leaders. And my question to them was, if I went to one of your principals right now and ask, what sort of demands are on your teachers? Could they list those out for me? And they both kind of looked at me like with this blank look, like, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I think without that mental model, the model overall, I don't think principals really think about it.

[18:35]

I think they know when their folks are stressed and upset, but I don't think they look at it like as a cause and effect. And again, on the graphic you were talking about, that's why school leadership is in a pretty prominent position, because again, they have the most direct influence on the school itself to either lower those demands or increase those resources and take care of the emotional tenor of the school and the individual teacher. But again, my principal training didn't include this. Most principal training today does not include this. We talk a lot about change and dealing with change and change management, change resistance, but we don't look at what is labeled as the biopsychosocial impact on the individuals, right? So I used to be one as a principal superintendent that's like, let's go, go, go.

[19:28]

We got to do more. And if I went back into today, what I would begin to say is if we're going to do something different, we're What can we pull off the plate, right? What demands can we lessen so that we can actually do this? Or how do we better take care? Or do we change our time parameters, right? So rather than trying to jam so much in in so little time, how do we begin to give people more spaciousness to get better at that?

[19:56]

I think that's part of the problem because, again, one of the – and this will be no surprise – but one of the highest level demands – that teachers feel is that loss of autonomy from accountability measures. And it doesn't only happen here in the United States, but most westernized country with similar structures for school accountability. Teachers are saying that, like, I've lost my autonomy because, again, I have to cover the curriculum. I have to get to this point. I have to do this. I have to work on all these teams to decide what to do with students who are failing.

[20:32]

It just creates this work intensification. And so that autonomy is lost. And so they begin to sort of lose faith in the system, right? Because again, the pressures that we're under right now, it says, you know, as Fulon said, it's the wrong set of drivers. And it has these unintended consequences that we're facing right now.

[20:51] Justin Baeder:

So teachers are reporting that they still feel the accountability, but they feel that they're losing the autonomy. Be responsible, like the autonomy they need in order to be accountable and do the work that will produce the results that they are accountable for.

[21:04] James Bailey:

Is that what you're saying? Exactly. So again, if you look at things like pacing guides, right, that many districts use, right, it says, okay, I want you to use these materials, which is good. And here's how we're going to pace them. You need to be through unit two by Christmas time, right? Or whenever, right?

[21:22]

But what most teachers are saying is learning and kids don't work like that, right? And this was a lesson I also had to learn is that there's sometimes not enough buffer time in there, right? Because again, they may be tough concepts or you're getting a group of kids who didn't learn you know, something that they needed before that. And so what they're really saying is they feel this pressure to stay to those, right? Because again, they know that kids have to cover the curriculum, but they don't have enough latitude to actually intervene in a way that they want to or slow down a little bit or reteach something. I remember having these discussions with teachers all the time.

[22:02]

It's just moving too fast and kids can't do it. And, you know, like an idiot, I was like, oh, they'll be fine. And what I was doing was I was increasing the demands. on teachers, which again, increase the stress, which decrease their wellbeing. And so, part of the book is like a retrospect on like, what all did I do wrong when I was leading? And again, I think I would do a lot of things different and have a much different mindset now.

[22:27] Randy Weiner:

Yeah. Again, the sports frame keeps coming back to me. If we were to design teaching and learning as an endurance sport, Which maybe it's not, it is not a sport as a profession and endurance profession. We'd all think about it very differently. And it's, I think it, because it is so entrenched James and I recognize it's a big ask. of a leader in the middle of a busy, stressed out day, week, month, school year to try to create some space to think about this problem in this way.

[23:03]

But the reason we make the ask is because having the privilege to have done this, the potential upside is is enormous. And even if it doesn't end up being enormous, any dent that we might all be able to make in this problem is worth making and learning from and iterating on. Education, again, I think it's just the curse of feeling a strong moral calling makes it really hard to let go of some of these behaviors that really just end up grinding one's soul into dust for the best reasons. But nonetheless, the children are the ones who end up paying the price at the end of the day.

[23:43] Justin Baeder:

If we're finishing the year without a teacher, then whatever we got for that was probably not worth it.

[23:49] Randy Weiner:

Not worth it. Absolutely. And I think it's very hard for folks to even entertain the notion that less is more. I've got a bit of my Montessori bias is coming out here. Those three years are in part designed for this. A kid and a teacher may not be able to cover everything that they want to cover in a You've got two more years with those kids to slot that content back in those experiences back into catch your breath rather than feeling the pressure of the invented timeline of a school year.

[24:24]

That is less a pitch for Montessori and more just an observation of how these dynamics actually play out. Right.

[24:29] Justin Baeder:

Well, James and Randy, I know there's a lot in the book that we don't have time to get to, but just take us through some of the tools that you've provided to help leaders design what you call an intentional retention system.

[24:41] James Bailey:

So if you think about this kind of like a cause and effect, what you have to have is sort of an outcome measure. Right. And so certainly you want to look at the retention numbers, you know, of the staff I have this year, how many returned that didn't retire, right, officially retire. So that's sort of the biggie. But as I said earlier, the big outcome is a sense of teacher well-being. And so we put in a well-being or designed a well-being diagnostic that looks at overall energy, cognitive well-being, emotional well-being, physical well-being, all those sorts of things.

[25:17]

And so you can get a pretty good sense of that. And we, again, advise to do that numerous times throughout the year in order to see where people are. So that's kind of an outcome-based measurement.

[25:29] Justin Baeder:

But critically, it's a shorter term, more agile measure than just waiting for somebody to quit and measuring our turnover rate.

[25:37] James Bailey:

Yeah, because again, if you see a measure that, oh my gosh, well-being has decreased, then again, as a principal, you need to say, what do I need to do to bring that back up? We also included, again, back some adult SEL diagnostics. So again, we talk about three levels, the personal level, the interpersonal level, and the collective level. So again, as a principal, you could use those to diagnose the adult social emotional health of your school. We included a job demands and resource diagnostic and really looks at the degree to which those are evidence or not evident in your school. And so again, if teachers say, yeah, there's too many meetings or there's student behavior as an issue, that gives you a pretty good idea on what to do.

[26:20]

We included just a blueprint that principals can use to actually track the information, to actually know if they're getting better at a better retention system. We included a PDSA planning template. So again, if you're going to remove a demand, increase a resource, you need a system as a way to test that, short cycle trials to see if you're going to do that. So there's a lot there. And certainly, I don't think a principal would probably use all those in their first year. But certainly, you know, we would be glad to talk to anyone who would want to, you know, talk about how to use those and a way to work through it.

[26:57] Justin Baeder:

So James and Randy, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about the work that you do and your books, where's the best place for them to go online?

[27:04] Randy Weiner:

Certainly can visit our website at www.brasstaxinnovations.com. You are also welcome to reach directly out to James and me at James at or Randy at www.brasstaxinnovations.com.

[27:18]

We would love to hear from folks. We would love to support people in any way.

[27:21] James Bailey:

that we can't just the book itself is published by routledge press you can look at it amazon too so just yeah blueprint for teacher retention just google it and i'm sure you can find it we'd be glad to entertain any purchases so the book is a blueprint for teacher retention leading schools that teachers don't want to leave james bailey and randy weiner thank you so much for joining me again on principal center radio it's been a pleasure it's our pleasure thank you for having us

[27:48] Announcer:

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