Rethinking the teacher role requires rethinking the principal role
This post is adapted from an email originally shared on June 30, 2023. If you would like to receive future emails, you can sign up here.
When this school year ended, I asked my son to reflect on 1st grade. His teacher featured prominently in almost every story. What was funny? The jokes she made while teaching. What was his favorite memory? When his teacher called his name as the star student. What does he remember learning? The way his teacher helped him understand the different versions of the Cinderella story. Great teachers matter so much in all the ways they support learning and in all the ways they shape lives — my son’s reflections drove home the point. Every child needs a great teacher every year.
These reflections were in my mind as I read Education Resource Strategies’ (ERS’) recent report about teacher retention. This report builds on other studies that document concerning increases in teacher turnover, finding that teacher movement — within and outside of the profession — increased compared to pre-COVID rates. The impacts of teacher retention challenges are compounded by diminished interest in the teaching field. Once again this summer, across district contexts, I’m hearing that leaders are seeing “two applicants for roles that used to get 20.” Keeping great teachers is the top priority I hear from school and system leaders right now.
ERS’ report introduced some new data about the relationship between teacher retention and principal retention that is critically important to every strategy aiming to improve teacher quality or experience. ERS found that teacher turnover is higher when there is principal turnover — when the principal leaves a school, teachers are more likely to leave too. Though there are many factors that shape teacher morale and satisfaction — as is the case in most industries — whether teachers ultimately leave or not has a great deal to do with how they feel about their boss.
We already know that principals have an outsized impact on teacher satisfaction, retention, and student learning. Researchers acknowledge that the impact of principals has been, if anything, underestimated. Principals shape the weather for the school community. Certainly, they cannot operate alone; leadership teams and distributed leadership are the only way to engage the school team and make the work sustainable. However, the principal has a singular role to play in setting and supporting a vision, marshaling resources, and modeling and reinforcing culture.
I have spent a lot of time this year thinking about what it means for a principal to be an instructional leader. In Instruction Partners’ eight years of work, we repeatedly find that principal involvement in instructional improvement efforts entirely correlates with the success of the effort; when principals are involved, instruction improves — when they are not, improvement stalls. We also find more confusion and misalignment than clarity about what it means for a principal to be an instructional leader.
I am increasingly convinced that any effort to improve teaching and learning at scale must first reckon with the fundamental structure of and support for the principal role. This reckoning is pressing not only for instructional efforts but for any plan to address the concerning patterns we see in teacher retention.
Starting with principals as the key lever for a reform effort is not common in practice. In most of the state, district, or philanthropic reform efforts I have observed, the question, “How do we support principals as they lead this change?” comes up late in planning, if at all. When implementing a new curriculum, changing the approach to summer school, rolling out new mental health support for students, or considering a new vision for reading instruction, it is either tempting or habitual to first think, “What support needs to be provided for teachers?” Question two is usually, “Who can we get to provide that support?” Only after teacher support plans are clear might someone ask, “What do principals need to know about this?” or “What role do principals need to play?” I have rarely seen an implementation effort start with the question, “If we remember that how principals lead on this will determine the success of the effort, where would we start?”
This pattern comes from a place of empathy and practicality. Everyone knows that principals are incredibly busy; they are pulled in multiple directions — across academics, operations, and community engagement — but trying to work around them always bites back in the end. Whenever principals are brought to the table after a plan is in place, the post-action reflection tends to be, “We should have brought principals in sooner.”
There has been an uptick recently in the number of conversations and collaborative efforts aimed at “rethinking the teacher role.” Driven by a sense that the role design is outdated as well as concerns about the limitations and sustainability of the current role structure, these are important and worthwhile conversations. However, the recent ERS report furthered my sense that these efforts only stand a chance if they are paired with efforts to rethink the principal role. Let us not learn the same lesson about the importance of considering principals early in the journey the hard way, again. Given how intertwined the roles are, perhaps the conversation needs to shift from “rethinking the teacher role” to “rethinking the teacher and principal roles, together.” Only teachers will be able to disentangle where there are fundamental problems in role design and where they could do the job as structured with better support. And, any effort to rethink the teacher role will only work if principals are ready to support new models.
Though the quality of my child’s teacher will be what matters most in his next year of school, the support his teacher gets from her principal will clearly be one of the most important factors in her year. As we all work to ensure that every student has a great teacher every year, let’s remember that great teachers require great principals. And, to support great principals, we will have to take a hard look not only at principal recruitment and preparation but at the fundamental design of the job.
