Putting Teachers First

How to Inspire, Motivate, and Connect with Your Staff

Brad Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138586659
• eBook ISBN: 9780429996979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Putting Teachers First, author and speaker Brad Johnson offers tons of invaluable tips for building and maintaining strong, dynamic relationships with your teachers, leading to greater job satisfaction, lower turnover, and improved performance across the board. You'll learn how to boost teacher morale and drive engagement by providing sincere feedback and recognition, creating incentives for teaching excellence, building trust between all faculty members, and more.

Topics covered:

• The Importance of Teacher Satisfaction
• Motivating Your Teachers to Succeed
• Creating a Culture of Appreciation
• Learning to Become a Selfless Leader
• Inspiring Teachers to Remember Their Purpose
• Developing Your Emotional Intelligence
• Communicating and Connecting Effectively
• Building a Cohesive Team
• Celebrating Successes

Each chapter includes practical advice as well as inspiring stories and anecdotes to motivate you on your journey.

1

The Importance of Teacher Satisfaction

Great teachers leave a legacy.

—Brad Johnson

There is no profession where job satisfaction is more important or has more far reaching impact than in teaching. If teachers aren’t happy, it can be carried into the classroom and ultimately affect the whole learning culture of a classroom and school. There has been extensive research in the corporate world regarding the impact of job satisfaction on employees’ work production, morale, and even the effects on personal life, but the teaching profession has failed to be a part of this important conversation. However, this doesn’t mean that teacher job satisfaction is not important or that it can’t be significantly improved when leaders make it a focus.

We have always been told the student comes first, and to the teacher this is true, but for the administration, teachers come first. When teachers feel like they matter, they not only affect students’ lives positively, but they can affect their lives forever. What if our schools welcomed all their staff the way that Apple welcomes their employees? Here is the note that is given to Apple employees when they start with the company:

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Welcome to Apple.

What if you encouraged your teachers to put their fingerprints all over their work, to swim in the deep end, and to do something big? Put your teachers first and see how quickly the whole culture of the school will change and student achievement will soar.

What Affects Job Satisfaction?

Many factors affect job satisfaction, such as pay, autonomy, planning time, and even support from administration. And one of the biggest influences on job satisfaction among teachers as we will see throughout the book deals with feeling valued, having input into decision making, and developing strong positive relationships with their administration.

Lack of Resources

Teachers continually deal with lack of resources, especially in lower socio economic districts. But even in more affluent areas, teachers don’t have the same access to resources to perform their jobs as employees of a local business, for example. In the corporate world, there is an expectation that you will have every resource necessary to perform your job effectively, but this is not the case in education.

One example of a teacher struggling with job satisfaction due to lack of resources is an Oklahoma educator, Teresa Danks Roark. She has even become a celebrity of sorts. The reason was not that she was named teacher of the year, had high standardized test scores, or even created some interesting project for her students, but that she was out panhandling on the highways of Oklahoma. Yes, a veteran teacher with a master’s degree was on the side of the road begging for money. Teresa wasn’t asking for the money for herself, but for her students. She said that budget cuts in the state had left supply levels even lower than usual. She said that she typically spends about $2,000–$3,000.00 of her own salary each year on supplies and that she felt like it was time to make the public more aware of the lack of funding in schools. In an email interview with us, Teresa shared a little of her experience.

I knew I wanted a photo for social media and that I was doing it to make a point about how bad it is in public education today. However, the public did not know the facts. As teachers, we are forced to do more with less, it really does create a negative environment where job satisfaction and motivation suffer greatly. If I can’t even get the resources I need to do my job effectively, am I really valued as a teacher and a professional? So, I decided to create a sign and go out on the highway and basically beg for money to do my job. As the light turned red, I became very nervous. I had a no idea how people were going to react to me standing out there “panhandling.” I wondered if they would shame me with words or even worse throw things at me. I had no idea what was coming.

However, my belief in what I was doing gave me the courage to take the risk. I feel that public awareness and public support is so important in order to create real change. As it turned out, I experienced the total opposite of what I had feared. I became overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and generosity from the public. Then, one stranger literally took me to tears. It was a young woman who handed me a few one dollar bills, her tips for the day, while saying “a teacher like you is why I am alive today.” That was it. I knew at that moment, this was so much bigger than me and my classroom needs. I went home, and posted the picture. About an hour later I was contacted by local media and the story took off. After receiving hundreds of emails and messages from teachers across the state and the nation, I knew I had to fight for all teachers and the children we serve.

While this may seem like an extreme case, there are teachers all around the country creating GoFundMe accounts to raise money for their classrooms. They are in essence panhandling as well, but aren’t standing on the highway to do it. In what other profession would you see people resort to begging or “panhandling” just to do their job more effectively? And limited supplies is just one of the many challenges faced by teachers and as challenges mount, they greatly affect teacher job satisfaction and motivation in the classroom.

Teachers Aren’t Viewed as Professionals

In our Teachers First survey that we sent out to teachers around the country, one of their responses to increasing job satisfaction was to be seen as professionals by their administration and especially by parents and their communities. One reason that teachers may not be viewed as professionals is that teaching is often seen as a “calling” rather than as a profession, which is a way of saying that teachers are born and that teaching doesn’t really require rigorous training beyond knowing the subject being taught.

While teaching may be a calling for some, it is a profession to all that requires rigorous academic training, student teaching experiences, certification/licensing, and continual professional development to maintain certification. This sounds like a profession and until teaching is seen as a profession, teachers will continue to endure a culture where teaching is not respected to the level that it should be.

When teaching is viewed solely as a calling, it gives the connotation of a servant rather than a servant leader. So teachers are often expected to be accepting of lower pay, increase in workload, and lower job satisfaction all under the motto that “students come first.” They feel compelled to spend their own money on supplies, or even panhandle on the highway because they are often left to fend for themselves for their classroom needs.

The sentiment that teaching is not really a profession is deeply immersed in our culture. According to Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania,

We do not refer to teaching as a profession. It doesn’t have the characteristics of those traditional professions like medicine, academia, dentistry, law, architecture, engineering, et cetera. It doesn’t have the pay, the status, the respect, the length of training, so from a scientific viewpoint teaching is not a profession.

(Ingersoll, 2001, 15)

While the pay and status of teaching is not on the level of other professions, it is noteworthy to share that 56% of all teachers have a master’s degree or higher and with state certification requirements, teachers have training that is comparable to other professions.

Another point made by Ingersoll is that one hallmark of a profession is longevity, sticking with the work. In that respect, teaching doesn’t make the grade. As noted earlier, his research indicates that at least 40% of new teachers leave the field within five years, a rate of attrition that is comparable to police work. However, there are several factors which make this number skewed. For instance, most new teachers are females in their early twenties. This means they are at a life stage where they may marry and begin families. So, part of the attrition has nothing to do with teaching itself. But the number is high enough to cause concern.

Why is it a big deal that teachers are viewed and treated as professionals? How often are teachers expected to work long hours, spend their own money on classroom materials, or to fall in line with the latest program “no questions asked” because it is all about the students? As many teachers responded in our survey, “we continually have more added to our plate, but nothing is ever taken from our plate.” Teachers overwhelmingly replied that part of their low job satisfaction is the fact that they aren’t treated as a professional.

Have you wondered why teachers in Finland, South Korea, and other high-performing countries are seen as professionals and in turn have higher job satisfaction than teachers in the US? It is in part due to the fact that teachers are viewed as the experts and it is their expertise that drives curriculum and teaching. And the administration is there to support their experts by creating a positive school culture. In the US, education is used as a pawn by politicians, who are not teachers, but who develop policies for education. Teachers are rarely given a voice and have very little control over decisions that directly affect their ability to do their job.

Putting Teachers First: Lesson from the Corporate World

While the concept of putting teachers first may seem like a strange concept, effective corporate leaders have used it for decades. This is not to say that the student isn’t important, but the phrase “students first” is so engrained into our thinking that to think otherwise is all but heresy. But if educational leaders were to have a shift in thinking and focus on teachers first, think how much it could affect teacher job satisfaction, motivation, and performance.

Take for example, Vineet Nayar, CEO of Sampark and former CEO of HCL Technologies (one of the largest IT outsourcing companies in the world, who authored the book, Employees First, Customers Second). In the book (2010), he shares how he took over the control of HCL Technologies which had been a high-performing company but had become stagnate over the course of several years. Nayar was determined to make it excellent again. So after much self-examination within the company and discussion with employees of the company around the globe, he realized that everything hinged mainly on two important questions. In a Forbes interview, Nayar shared some insight into the questions and how he realized the employee is more important to him than the customer.

The first question is “what is the core business of any corporation?” and the answer is to create different shared value for its customers. This is really the same goal of education, to create different shared value. We see this “different shared value” as personalized education. Each student has different learning styles, needs, interests and passions. So the more we can offer our learners in regards to personalization, the better the outcome (societal outcome).

The second question is “where does that different shared value get created?” and the answer is in the interface of the employees and the customers. Hence, we ask if the employees in that interface create a different shared value, what should the business of managers and management be? The answer to that question is the business of managers and management should be to enthuse and encourage employees so that they can create a different shared value: enhance employees first and customers second. Here again in education, the interface is between the teacher and the student, then what is the function of the administration? It is to encourage and enthuse the teachers so they can create such experiences with the students.

Nayar believed that his managers had to encourage and serve these value-zone employees, rather than having the workers serve their managers. He believed that the company needed to put its employees first in order to achieve more effective customer service. Concentrating on your staff members and how they can contribute to your business is the best method for ensuring continued success. As effective administrators and educational leaders, the method to ensure maximized success in the classroom is to focus on teachers and they will take care of the students.

The question you may be asking yourself is if job satisfaction is even an issue among teachers. Well, unfortunately, according to the 2012 MetLife Teacher Survey, teacher satisfaction has declined 23 percentage points since 2008, from 62% to 39% very satisfied and the percentages are currently at the lowest level in 25 years. This reflects our own survey (which included hundreds of K–12 teachers from around the country) where 32% of participants said they were very satisfied with their teaching job (conducted via online survey 2017). A question similar to the satisfaction question asked participants to rate the morale of teachers in their schools and only 10% responded very high. Sixty-one percent of respondents rated morale as three or lower on a linear scale with five being very high and one being very low. Interestingly, nearly 70% of respondents believed that increasing teacher recognition would improve morale of teachers in the school.

Improving teacher job satisfaction is important because research showed that younger teachers are more likely to leave their jobs because of low job satisfaction, which leads to a shortage of teachers (Green-Reese, Johnson, & Campbell, 1991).

Yet, when teachers feel a high level of job satisfaction, they provided higher quality teaching and their students were more successful (Demirtas, 2010), which meant high teacher job satisfaction benefits education overall. In order to improve the quality of teaching and ease the difficulty of a shortage of teachers, it is very important to maintain teachers’ high job satisfaction. The issue isn’t just a teacher shortage, but high turnover rates as well.

Education is as much about the people as it is the policies and programs. We are aware that the relationship between a teacher and student is a critical part of a student’s success in the classroom. But did you know that the relationship between administration and teachers is just as important for a positive school culture and success of students? Two of the most important factors in job satisfaction are the way that principals manage their schools and the relationships with faculty (Minarik, Thornton, & Perreault, 2003).

Increasing Satisfaction: The Survey Says …

As you can see from the different examples above, there are many factors which affect teacher job satisfaction. There are some factors, like pay and funds for resources, that administration may have limited or no control over in your position. These still affect job satisfaction so they should not be ignored, and we should do a better job of voicing our concerns on these matters as a society. However, there are many factors in which administration does have control.

As mentioned above, the most important factor in job satisfaction tends to be the relationship between administration and faculty. Interestingly, this is a similar finding to the relationship between teacher and student affecting student success. Kathy Cox, former State Superintendent of Georgia, conducted a longitudinal study in schools across Georgia to see what factors most influenced student success (Johnson & McElroy, 2010). It turns out that factors such as parental involvement, socio economic status, etc., were important, but the most important factor was the relationship between student and teacher. So, it only makes sense that the most important factor for teacher job satisfaction is the relationship between teacher and administration. Within this relationship dynamic there has to be a level of respect, recognition, and responsibility, in essence treating teachers like professionals for them to experience a high level of job satisfaction.

This sentiment was echoed in our survey. The following are some of the responses to the question how can job satisfaction can be improved.

• Less testing pressure on our students. Also more things keep being added to Teachers’ plates without taking anything away.
• Feel like I’m part of decisions that affect me and my students.
• If all members of my grade level team were willing to do their share.
• Working for administrators who appreciate the effort that teachers put in and that have the respect to acknowledge the staff.
• More reinforcement from administration that we are making a difference. More positive encounters from others—positive notes, messages, re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Author
• 1 The Importance of Teacher Satisfaction
• 2 Motivating Your Teachers to Succeed
• 3 Creating a Culture of Appreciation
• 4 Learning to Become a Selfless Leader
• 5 Inspiring Teachers to Remember Their Purpose
• 6 Developing Your Emotional Intelligence
• 7 Communicating and Connecting Effectively
• 8 Building a Cohesive Team
• 9 Celebrating Successes
• References