You have too much going on to try to create and implement teacher retention strategies on your own. Even if you do create them, following up with everyone and making sure nothing slips through the cracks is impossible.

iAspire will automatically run world-class processes that impact your teacher retention rates for you throughout the school year.

Imagine automatically collecting your team’s input through pulse surveys and stay interviews throughout the school year, having a cadence of recognition and appreciation, and providing opportunities for your people to have deeper, more meaningful relationships.

With iAspire, you will have access to the actionable data you need to reduce teacher turnover and provide the right supports before it’s too late.

Teacher Retention Strategies

Before digging into the specifics into teacher retention strategies, it’s helpful to have a firm understanding of what teacher retention/turnover means and why teacher retention is so important.

What does teacher retention mean?

Teacher retention is the percentage or number of teachers that remain in your district or school after one year.

What does teacher turnover mean?

Teacher turnover is the percentage or number of teachers who leave the school before starting their subsequent year of teaching.

How is teacher retention calculated?

Teacher retention is calculated by taking the number of staff who started the year and subtract the number of people who left. You then divide this number by the original number of staff to get the teacher retention percentage.

For example, if you employee 50 teachers and 12 leave during the school year, that would be 50-12 = 38.

Then you divide 38/50 (the original number of teachers), which equals .76. In this example, you would have a 76% teacher retention rate.

How is teacher turnover calculated?

Alternatively, if you want to calculate teacher turnover, you take the teacher retention rate you found above and subtract it from 100.

In the case above, 100 - 76 = 24% teacher turnover rate.

Why is teacher retention important?

Teacher retention critical for the success of your district or school in terms of operations, student achievement, and student long-term success

The nation and beyond are facing a critical teacher shortage currently. There are not enough teachers and staff to fill classrooms, drive buses, and serve food. Substitute teachers are in great demand as many districts have transitioned substitute teachers to full-time classroom teachers. When there aren't enough teachers or substitutes, principals are forced to teach themselves, combine classes, or pull from supports throughout the building and district. Some districts have even shifted to virtual instruction for some time until enough teachers can be hired or positions filled through substitutes.

The shortage of bus drivers is also a problem as some districts have had to take an "all hands on deck" approach to get anybody with a background check and a CDL license, including transportation staff and directors, to drive a bus. Again, some districts have been forced to transition to virtual instruction or change school times when they were too short on bus drivers to transport students to and from school.

Teachers are more influential on student achievement than any other factor. In fact, researchers claim the effect is two to three times stronger than any other factor, such as facilities, services, and even building- and district-level leadership.

The effects on teachers don't stop with student achievement either. Teachers influence student development in other ways as well, such as self-regulation, self-confidence, and social and emotional well-being.

Simply put, teachers matter. They matter a lot. And typically the higher teacher retention numbers you have, the better.

What helps teacher retention?

There are four core strategies we focus on at iAspire to help with teacher retention:

• Running a cadence of recognition and appreciation

• Pulse surveys and engagement surveys

• Stay surveys and interviews

• New teacher/staff induction

Running a cadence of recognition and appreciation:

Research shows that most employees, regardless of industry (and it's true in education as well), need more recognition than they receive. In fact, 65% said they were not recognized a single time at work in the last year.

The numbers are staggering:

• 79% of Americans who quit their job claim a lack of recognition as a leading reason into their attrition

• 60% of people claim they are more motivated by recognition than money

What's great is recognition is within our control and doesn't have to be overly complex. People want to be recognized, so let's create a cadence of recognition that allows everybody in the organization to recognize and show appreciation to others.

In iAspire, we use software to create and run this cadence for you. Each month your team will receive a quick email or text message with a call to action to recognize somebody for doing something amazing. It could be for a colleague helping with professional development, helping you with technology, or somebody answering your questions about your curriculum.

The other major consideration when creating a cadence of recognition and appreciation is to make is extremely simple to start and maintain. Do not start with a complex system that requires your staff to jump through hoops to recognize others or receive their recognition. At iAspire, we use text and/or email delivery with a link to click. Then the staff choose the person from your pre-populated staff list they want to recognize, share a quick story, and hit submit.

The person who was recognized then gets an email and/or text message with the appreciation attached. It couldn't be simpler. There is no training required, no apps to download, or logins of any kind. It's a process that's made to be as simple as possible and require as little effort, but as much impact, as possible.

It's great to celebrate the recognitions publicly whenever possible. Consider sharing internally through newsletters and in staff meetings, or you can also share the recognitions to the world via social media and your website.

Pulse surveys and engagement surveys

Many organizations are looking for ways to better understand how their people are doing, solicit their input/feedback, identify areas of concern before it's too late and people leave, and have data that provides actionable next steps.

To do this, districts and schools are looking to implement pulse surveys and engagement surveys.

A pulse survey is a short and regular set of questions that are sent to employees. The purpose is to collect your people’s views on a consistent set of topics over the course of time, including topics such as communication, the work environment, and additional supports that may be needed.

An engagement survey is a more comprehensive survey that measures how people feel in your organization. Questions in the engagement survey are meant to uncover motivation of employees, alignment with goals, morale, ways to increase satisfaction, and the general mood/sentiment of your people.

Engagement and pulse surveys typically work best when the results are collected anonymously so your colleagues have the ability to be honest without concern of any type of retaliation from district or school leaders. 75% of survey participants want their results to be anonymous as well. Data is often reported at the top organizational level and can be defined at a sub-team level. Individual names are not shared.

At iAspire, we created a 4 Principles of Connection™ model for teacher and staff engagement. In a nutshell, employees are looking for four types of connection in the workplace in order to have an environment where they are engaged and likely to say:

• Connection to self - This principle is the extent to which a person feels their organization supports them in better understanding their personal values, purpose, dreams, and how to develop into the best version of themselves.

• Connection to others - This principle is the extent to which a person feels like they're part of a cohesive team and that the organization supports them in creating and sustaining healthy interpersonal relationships at work.

• Connection to role - This principle is the extent to which a person believes their organization supports them in discovering and fulfilling the ideal role for their unique talents and strengths and realizing its impact.

• Connection to organization - This principle is the extent to which a person believes their organization supports them in being part of something bigger than themselves that makes the world, and their community, a better place.

Each of the questions in the iAspire employee engagement survey fit within one of the four connection types. A rating is provided for each Principle of Connection to make it easy to identify your biggest strengths and areas for growth as well as an overall summative employee engagement score.

Additionally an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) should be provided as part of the engagement survey. The eNPS is a score from -100 to 100 and is calculated by taking the percentage of promoters within an organization and subtracting the percentage of detractors.

Stay surveys and interviews

Stay surveys and interviews are invaluable data sources for district and school leaders to help with teacher retention.

While pulse and engagement surveys can help you collect data at the organizational or sub-team level, stay surveys are meant to collect data at the individual-person level. Employee names are typically collected and shared with stay surveys as the purpose is to identify individual employees who need additional assistance or could become a flight risk if there is not intervention of some sort quickly.

Because names are collected, stay survey results are typically best shared with the HR department of the organization or somebody that is not the employee's direct supervisor/evaluator. Some employees have concern about sharing open and honest feedback with a person who evaluates them.

Sharing the employees' names and ratings with HR gives a non-supervisor the opportunity to schedule a stay interview with the employee to learn more. This stay interview is a chance for HR and the employee to discuss any outstanding issues, concerns, or problems that could result in the employee leaving the organization.

It's important to remember that feedback collected during pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay surveys, and stay interviews is a data point and to show appreciation to the organization and individuals for participating. When looking through the reports, it would be easy to become emotional and/or angry with your team's responses. You must fight this and understand it took a lot of courage for many of your people to engage in the data collection. It's up to you as a leader to take ownership for the data and decide on the most appropriate next step(s) after receiving the data.

At iAspire, we work with school leaders after they receive their data to help answer the question of "now what?" The iAspire platform provides many ways of engaging with your staff and increasing each of the 4 Principles of Connection™ outlined above.

New teacher/staff induction

Nearly 50% of new teachers leave within their first five years, so new hires should be a huge focus of an effective teacher retention strategy.

Research shows new hires are more likely to stay at an organization if they have a great onboarding experience. However, onboarding can't be thought of as a few days at the beginning of the year and then be complete. Instead, we recommend district and schools think of onboarding as an all-year (or multiple year) process with varying levels of support integrated throughout.

Many organizations have processes for their induction, but most are doomed to fail because they require human intervention to run them with fidelity. The urgency of the now takes over, and the new-hire processes fall apart. Building level administrators forget to check in with their new hires, coaches get busy, and even mentors start to fade with their supports over time.

At iAspire, we provide a customized new-teacher induction process that includes ongoing check-ins (think very quick pulse surveys) with the new hire with a series of evolving questions throughout the school year and beyond. The answers to these questions are delivered automatically to the building administration and even a new-teacher induction leader at the district level if that exists.

We also typically plan for an ongoing cadence of administrator and new-hire 1:1s, mentorships, continued core values reinforcement, and opportunities for ongoing recognition both from the new hire and to the new hire.

Because iAspire is a software product, we're able to run the process with and for you automatically so nothing falls through the cracks. There is no more remembering what to do for each new-hire and when. iAspire simply reaches out to you (or your new hire, mentor, etc) with the next step of the induction program at the right time. Simple reminders are sent as needed.

The key is to create and run a sustained process that includes a myriad of the supports your new-hires need to be successful, and to be able to run this process with fidelity....each and every time a new hire onboards.

Continuous Leadership Development

Teachers are amazing, and it’s time we start treating them this way.

School leaders, including principals and assistant/associate principals, walk a tightrope each day. They’re constantly balancing student achievement, parent and community support, student behaviors, and teacher effectiveness. As somebody who lived this world, this is extremely difficult!

Now, more than ever, leaders need to focus on their leadership skills to help create an environment where their people feel valued and supported. This includes being aware of signs of burnout, being aware of what causes burnout, and doing as much as possible to support their staff first and foremost.

To improve leadership, and therefore reduce burnout and turnover, provide continuous development to your leaders on topics such as:

• Effective communication

• Emotional intelligence

• Psychological safety

• Crucial conversations

• Setting clear expectations

• Empathy

• Recognition

iAspire helps you decrease burnout and turnover by automatically running processes to help you celebrate, engage, and retain your team. Every interaction is sent via text or email and requires just a few minutes at a time. No apps, logins, or passwords required.

To learn more about how iAspire helps districts and schools with teacher retention, request a demo by clicking the button below and scheduling a time to talk!