Teacher turnover is rarely seen as a positive thing in K–12 education. The ripple effects of a teacher’s departure from the classroom range from decreased student performance to less cost-effective hiring and recruitment budgets. Even as recent surveys indicate fewer teachers plan to leave their jobs, districts are still struggling to fill unstable short-term staffing needs.
Long-term staffing challenges also loom ahead. Enrollment in new teacher prep programs is steadily decreasing or stagnating, including in newer versions of traditional programs, like Grow-Your-Own initiatives and residences. Turnover in leadership roles, especially among superintendents and principals, has become more turbulent.
With all this in mind, there remains one kind of turnover that is actually beneficial for districts.
Coaching programs can help districts cultivate internal advancement opportunities for teachers, which can not only mitigate some of these challenges with turnover but also grow their candidate pipeline for the long run.
Coaching for instructional leadership opportunities
Internal hiring and promotions come with many well-known benefits, like retaining institutional knowledge and boosting employee satisfaction rates. A coaching program offers multiple opportunities for teachers to step into new roles, take on different responsibilities, and ultimately, prepare them for the next leap in their careers.
Take Carlsbad Municipal Schools (CMS) in New Mexico, for instance, which implements a distributive leadership and coaching model, using the Opportunity Culture framework, to create growth opportunities for teachers. “Multi-classroom educators,” or MCLs, in each school provide structured mentorship to a small number of teachers, managing key coaching data, feedback, and observations to build their peers’ instructional skills.
By creating space for teacher-coaches to flex their skills for broader impact, districts indirectly cultivate qualified candidates for existing or future district-level roles requiring these skills.
Things To Keep In Mind
- Design clear entry points for teachers to step into leadership roles, like managing a professional learning community or informal mentorship for brand-new teachers in the classroom.
- Be mindful of the time and effort asked of a teacher taking on such roles. Where financially possible, provide correlating compensation for additional responsibilities they take on. Low pay is consistently a top concern reported among teachers who ultimately choose to leave their job or the profession entirely; on the other hand, a stipend for coaching leaders can go a long way in retention and upward mobility efforts.
- Don’t forget to coach your coaches, too, especially if they come from your existing pool of teachers. Mentors can participate in peer feedback rounds to help each other build the skills required to effectively coach teachers to change instructional practices.
Coaching for administrative advancement
Some of the turnover has been from promotions from within … [staff members] had been ‘mentored to sort of step into that role.’
District Leader from New Jersey
Study: Sharing Solutions: K-12 Administrators Weigh in on Strategic Resourcing
Many principals and district administrators started their careers in the classroom, yet the skills required to run a classroom don’t always translate to leading an entire school or district department.
Through coaching, districts can nurture today’s teachers to become tomorrow’s school and district leaders.
Nurturing teachers into administrator positions can start before any formal training or certification processes are necessary. For instance, a teacher interested in that career path might set coaching goals tied to specific skills necessary for the job, then take on opportunities to collaborate with their principal more closely in alignment with those goals.
Ironically, a high-quality principal can also make or break a teacher’s decision to stay or leave their role. Investing in concrete career pathways for teachers interested in administrator roles pays off in creating the kind of leaders educators need now and in the future.
Things To Keep In Mind
- Clarify your hiring criteria for a principal or district leadership position. Then map those skills or experiences to your coaching rubrics and goals used with teachers.
- Implement consistent coaching structures and data collection methods across buildings. The goal is to create a level playing field for internal candidates to receive mentorship and coaching so they can pursue administrator positions within your district.
A note about coaching and evaluation
Though coaching cycles should operate separately from evaluative cycles, the data generated by coaching activities proves invaluable when considering a teacher internally for promotion. Whether you directly link coaching objectives with evaluation goals or create a less formal system, it’s essential to clearly identify where and how coaching outcomes will play out during evaluation cycles. Don’t forget to communicate these expectations with principals as well as teachers to maintain trust in coaching processes.
Grow your internal bench of talent with Level Data
However your coaching program creates growth opportunities for teachers, Grow by Level Data is ready to help. The framework-agnostic platform flexibly adapts to fit your unique coaching model, streamlining core processes and data collection that are foundational to a program’s success.
Learn more about Grow today.
