Mastery, Purpose, and Autonomy As Keys to Teacher Retention

(Originally titled “Teachers with DRIVE”)

In this article in Educational Leadership, Celine Coggins (Teach Plus) and PK Diffenbaugh (Garden Grove Schools, California) cite the grim statistics on U.S. teacher attrition: half of all urban teachers leave the profession within their first 3-5 years and half of the “irreplaceables” (the most-successful 20 percent of all teachers) leave within five years. “Failure to retain effective teachers is not only costing our school systems billions of dollars,” they say, “but is also negatively affecting student achievement.” 

Drawing on the work of Daniel Pink, Coggins and Diffenbaugh suggest three ways to increase the number of teachers who continue working effectively in classrooms for more than a few years:

• Mastery – People thrive when they feel good at their work, but three factors in schools have a perverse impact: (a) Many rookie teachers are thrown into the most difficult classrooms with inadequate support, leading them to quit, while many veteran teachers plateau because they aren’t given appropriately challenging work, leading them to seek more challenging work outside of education; (b) The profession is still fuzzy on the definition of mastery in teaching, and the new idea of defining success in terms of test scores is controversial; (c) The way most teachers are evaluated is weak, with infrequent, often superficial feedback. “A mastery-focused professional must provide frequent quality feedback to the practitioner,” say Coggins and Diffenbaugh.

• Purpose – Most teachers are in the classroom because they want to improve the lives of students and leave the world a better place. Stage-two teachers (those with 3-10 years of experience) want opportunities to improve student outcomes on a broader scale – for example, working with a team of teachers to affect 150 rather than just 30 students. At this stage in their careers, teachers aren’t comfortable simply implementing other people’s ideas; they want to have a say in school policies. Another avenue for broader impact is helping colleagues who are struggling with significant challenges. Coggins and Diffenbaugh describe how two Chicago teachers convened 2,500 educators for Saturday workshops on implementing the Common Core. They also tout Teach Plus’s Turnaround Teacher Teams program, which sends a group of high-performing teachers into a struggling school to work closely with the faculty and administrators to improve the school. 

• Autonomy – Does the new push for accountability mean that teachers will have less freedom? Must they endure scripted curriculums, rigid pacing guides, and mandatory test prep? No, say Coggins and Diffenbaugh. Teachers can join in pursuing common curriculum standards while maintaining significant choice in how to implement them. “A teaching profession that values autonomy,” they say, “rejects both the notion that teachers should be left alone to do as they please and the belief that teachers are pawns who must be controlled.” 

“Teachers with DRIVE” by Celine Coggins and PK Diffenbaugh in Educational Leadership, October 2013 (Vol. 71, #2, p. 42-45), www.ascd.org; Coggins can be reached at ccoggins@teachplus.org. 

From the Marshall Memo #505