Building a Dream Team: Joyful Strategies for Recruiting and Retaining Educators!

Outline

Content and Engagement:

Regional and statewide strategies will be shared for teachers within the three phases of their career: early career, mid-career, and late career. New teacher support such as New Teacher Academies, emergency certificate teacher support such as a statewide PREP program, and advanced teacher support such as a statewide National Board Certification support system will be highlighted. In addition, statewide strategies and structures that support further professional learning for educators and administrators will be shared. Participants will have an opportunity to share ideas and innovative solutions for recruiting and retaining high quality teachers in their own settings.

Time:

First 20 minutes: strategies for supporting and growing preservice and early career educators will be shared and participants will have an opportunity to dialogue and share practices, strategies, and ideas.
Second 20 minutes: strategies for supporting and growing mid-career educators will be shared and participants will have an opportunity to dialogue and share practices, strategies, and ideas.
Third 20 minutes: strategies for supporting and growing late career educators will be shared and participants will have an opportunity to dialogue and share practices, strategies, and ideas.

Process:

Facilitators will use strategies that promote active engagement. This will include a session designed and developed to activate prior knowledge, build knowledge/resources, transfer learning, and reflection. Technology will be integrated to support engagement including (1) Small group and partner protocols will be used to foster the sharing of ideas among participants (2) Technologies such as Padlet and digital polling tools will be used to curate ideas, strategies, and practices from the participants; (3) Videos from teachers in the field sharing their experiences and how the support impacted their retention in the profession; (4) An Electronic toolkit of resources will be shared and reviewed to support participants in replicating the ideas, strategies, and practices shared during the session.

Supporting research

Recruiting and sustaining talent in the educational sector is a challenge worldwide. Zhang & Neller (2016) shared that up to 50% of teachers leave the profession before their fifth year of teaching and up to 9% of teachers leave before the end of their first year (Riggs, 2013). The lack of teacher retention in schools can cause a financial burden for districts as they continue to have the need to invest and reinvest in teacher training and support. In addition to the financial costs, lack of teacher retention can impact student achievement, especially in high need schools (Donaldson & Johnson, 2011). There are a variety of internal and external factors that influence teacher retention. These factors include the quality and safety of the school building (Buckley, Schneider, and Shang, 2005), the level of community support for educators and the school (Inman and Marlow, 2004), supportive leadership (David, 2003), teacher’s access to high quality curriculum resources and time for collaboration with colleagues (Smollin, 2011) and non-competitive salary and benefits (Hanson, Lien, Cavalluzzo, and Wenger, 2004). However, there are research based strategies that have an impact on higher retention rates including meaningful support in the first few years of the profession, instructional design and development training as well as detailed training on planning for lessons, and support on understanding how to meet the needs of students through differentiated instruction (Reitman and Karge (2019). Holmes, Parker, & Gibson (2019) found that a leading factor in teacher retention was supportive leadership and the ability for leaders to create strong structures, processes, and procedures. Bressman, Winter, & Effron (2018) found that teachers progress through three stages of the profession: early career, mid-career, and late career. Within each of those stages, it is important that teachers feel valued, mentored, supported, and fulfilled in their professional role.