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Why would your school or district need a culture and climate evaluation? With so much available data and published research, don’t we know enough about the causes of teacher attrition as well as how to address them?

Sure, there’s no shortage of data that paints a picture of the current state of the profession that is, well... rough. Without detailing every brush stroke, we know from aggregate survey data that teacher pay is still too low, teachers feel more burnout and disrespect than peers in other professions, teacher morale is reaching new lows, etc. These are just a few of the many oft-noted reasons why teacher retention is still a challenge. But we also know a lot on the positive flipside about how to prevent attrition with the pages and pages that have been written about building a vibrant school culture.* So what more could your school or district gain from an evaluation? 

Here are three reasons why you need a culture and climate evaluation to truly identify your schools' unique challenges and where to begin to address them:

1) School culture and climate is extremely local. In our recent post about teacher exhaustion, we noted how very similar schools that are mere miles apart within the same district can have widely varying cultures. One reason for this is that individual school leaders have a profound role in shaping school culture, but culture isn't the result of their actions alone; it is also shaped by the unique mix of skills, personalities, and even flaws of the rest of the people in the building. To really understand each school's culture, you need to take a very close look inside--which is also why anonymous surveys are just a starting point.

2) Teachers are often reluctant to share feelings with supervisors and there are several legitimate reasons for this. Teachers often blame leadership for the more burdensome parts of their jobs (some examples include evaluation, testing pressure, and mandated meetings). Teachers are not often involved in big decisions affecting their day-to-day. The nature of the power dynamics at play is such that even in schools that appear to have happy teachers, you'll hear gripes about admin. And the more unhealthy the school culture, the less likely any administrator will be able to get honest feedback from their staff--even if it is purportedly anonymous. All of this is why you need to involve a more objective third party to get at what teachers are really thinking. 

3) The most commonly used tool for examining culture and climate--survey data--will only tell you so much. Focus group and interview data will tell you a lot more. But a complete evaluation also includes detailed analysis and recommendations to help you make sense of findings, prioritize next steps, and chart a course of action. 

Stay tuned for our next post where we'll say more on this last point!

When we conduct a culture and climate evaluation for a school or district, we invariably uncover findings that surprise everyone--it's just what happens when you collect truly open, honest, and anonymous feedback from your staff that they wouldn't otherwise share with a colleague or supervisor. In this first of what will be a series of posts on the topic of surprises, let's look at a short case study from our work on a subject that has gotten plenty of attention over the years: teacher exhaustion. 

What could be surprising here? We all know teaching is tiring. Decades of research show that the threat of widespread burnout has loomed in classrooms since at least the Carter administration. But in one of our partner districts, the existence of exhaustion wasn't the surprise. It was the prevalence of it. And moreover, there were shocking differences in our evaluation data between similar schools that were less than two miles apart. So what counts as "shocking"?

For starters, two of this district's schools had almost half (43-44%) of their staff report that they "almost always" felt exhausted in a given week (with many more reporting they felt so "frequently"). If that wasn't concerning alone, these two schools had almost *double* the number of teachers responding with "almost always" than other comparable schools in the district. Why were teachers so exhausted at these two schools, and why were more of them feeling this way compared to those at the district's other schools?

To begin to understand why the data looked the way it did, we looked down the street at the schools with less reported exhaustion. Through a series of interviews and focus groups informed by our survey data, we were able to find some notable differences, some of which were clearly contributors. The high-exhaustion schools required teachers to handle more non-teaching duties such as lunchroom and recess monitoring. Their specials classrooms were more spread out, which meant escorting students down to those rooms cut into more self-directed time. 

But other differences could easily have been missed as contributors to exhaustion. Most interesting was that the two schools in question also mandated stricter adherence to the district's managed curriculum and its pacing guides. Related to this, one school's embedded coach had a rocky relationship with many teachers and demanded a lot of them. On the whole, teachers at these two schools used the word "micromanaged" far more often when discussing all of this. These factors likely wouldn't have been revealed or understood without the follow-up focus groups. 

So while it was no surprise that many of this district's teachers were tired, the sheer extent of exhaustion--and the role of curriculum implementation in that--posed a real threat that leadership didn't quite expect. It's only when staff are given the opportunity to offer brutally honest feedback that surprises like these can be revealed--and acted upon.