Preventing teacher turnover, part 2: Give teachers leadership roles, and the time to do them well

How can we keep good teachers from leaving DC schools? As part of the Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship (TPF) program, a group of DCPS and charter teachers has been meeting for the past year to formulate recommendations. Part one of this series looked at ways to give teachers a greater voice in decision making at their schools, and today we present part two. Teach Plus aims to improve outcomes for urban children by ensuring that more students have access to effective, experienced teachers.

Teacher turnover is a serious problem, especially at high-poverty schools like those in DC, where the need for good teachers is greatest. One way to keep those teachers is to allow them to take on leadership roles in addition to their teaching duties. And a new initiative from DCPS is a step in the right direction.

It’s natural for those who are good at their jobs to want to move up the ladder. But for teachers, that has basically meant becoming administrators. Is there a way to give our best teachers the satisfaction of career advancement without removing them from the classroom?

One possibility is to create “hybrid roles” for teachers that allow them to take on leadership responsibilities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently announced the creation of a federal initiative designed to promote the practice.

A recent book on the subject has coined a new word for those who fill this kind of role: “teacherpreneurs.” And a national teachers’ organization has advocated giving expert teachers release time so they can mentor novice teachers, coach their peers, and develop proposals to improve teaching.

DCPS has developed its own programs to retain teachers by giving them these kinds of leadership opportunities. Two years ago, the school system created LIFT, an acronym that stands for Leadership Initiative for Teachers. LIFT is a career ladder with five stages, with advancement up the ladder dependent on performance on the district’s teacher evaluations.

As teachers move up the ladder, they can qualify for increasing leadership roles, including writing curriculum and helping to hire new teachers.

As a DCPS teacher, I have gained access through LIFT to responsibilities such as being the lead teacher for my grade level and analyzing testing data at my school.

Need for more time

These experiences were great for my professional development. But because my teaching duties remained the same, they left me overextended. I felt I could not put enough time or effort into my teaching and leadership roles to perform either one to the best of my abilities.

It became clear to me that if school districts are going to give teachers additional responsibilities, they also need to decrease their teaching loads. My TPF cohort came to the same conclusion.

And, as it turns out, so did DCPS. In addition to continuing the LIFT program, this year the school system has piloted the Teacher Leadership Initiative (TLI) in 7 schools. TLI allows participating teachers to spend part of the day teaching and the other part engaging in leadership activities like coaching and mentoring colleagues. Next year DCPS is expanding the program to an additional 16 schools.

With the help of federal funds, DCPS provides money for each school to hire one or two extra full-time employees to cover the time the TLI teacher-leaders spend out of the classroom. Each TLI school has 3 to 5 teacher-leaders, who get stipends of $2,500.

Teacher-leaders also receive training and coaching in leadership, which their schools help pay for. As with LIFT, only teachers with excellent evaluations are eligible to participate in the program.

My TPF cohort is also urging DCPS to encourage the use of teacher-leaders as instructional coaches in their content areas. An instructional coach helps teachers set goals, develop unit and lesson plans, and implement instructional practices. Currently DCPS places one instructional coach in each school, but many schools could use more.

While instructional coach is one of the roles TLI teacher-leaders can fill, they can also spend their time on other school-based needs, such as analyzing data and working on behavioral interventions. Each school determines how to use its teacher-leaders’ time.

One of the schools DCPS selected for the TLI program is Tubman Elementary, where I work. Next year, as a teacher-leader, I will be spending half my day in the classroom and the other half analyzing data to determine which of our students need more support.

Studies have shown that teacher turnover has negative effects on student achievement, so it’s exciting to be in a school system like DCPS that is actively coming up with new solutions to the problem. My TPF cohort and I hope that DCPS will continue to expand the TLI initiative, and also enable more teacher-leaders to spend time as instructional coaches.