Will preface this by establishing that I have a huge amount of respect for educational administrators - the principals, assistant principals, deans and other professionals who attend to the business of making education possible. Too often, these professionals are given enormous responsibilities, then forced to operate within a system so full of restraints and constraints, there’s no legitimate way to fulfill all the expectations placed upon them.
One of the constraints admins have to work with is the teachers that they manage, of which I am one. Make no mistake: we can be demanding, uncomprehending, and judgy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t have useful feedback to provide. Collaborating with other teachers, I’ve compiled the following “wish list” of teacher expectations for admins. Some are serious, some are silly, but all of them share the same refrain: the system works best when teachers and admins work in harness to maximize efficiency, respect professionalism, and prioritize students.
We can all get behind that - right?
Class size matters. If building relationships with students is as important to you as you say it is, then we need you to cap the size of our classes. When you give us too many students, we have no choice but to shift focus from individual students to classroom management, simultaneously shifting our definition of "success" from "how can I make sure each student is successful?" to "how few kids can I keep from falling through the cracks?"
Room condition matter. It’s not enough to provide classrooms; our students need to know that they are respected, valued, and prioritized. That’s why we need you to keep classrooms in good repair. We realize it can be hard to find the funding and bandwidth for things like broken furniture, missing ceiling tiles, and inadequate HVAC units, but poorly maintained rooms leave students feeling like they are being warehoused rather than respected.
Everything takes longer than you think it takes. It’s easy to add new responsibilities to teachers’ workload by justifying: “this won’t add more than 5-15 extra minutes a day.” The problem is that all those extra responsibilities, collectively, add hours to our already long days. We need you to be thinking about the impact of these requests collectively, not as one-offs and asking yourselves what responsibilities you might be willing to offload to free up time for the new ask you are implementing.
Protect our prep time! It’s not the extra duties - bus duty, cafeteria duty, chaperoning assemblies - that crush us; it’s the incredibly high opportunity cost of the time they consume. Our work/life balance already stinks; anything that takes away our prep time ends up needing to be carved out of our “life” time. Please consider this before treating us as gap-fillers.
Differentiation is possible, but only to a certain extent. Don’t get us wrong - we’re ready and willing to differentiate! Within the bell curve of "normal," differentiation is imminently do-able: add some scaffolds here, optimize "voice and choice" there. But those students who inhabit the standard deviations? The gifted ones, the ELL-1s and -2s, the ones with extreme behavior issues? The amount of differentiation they require goes far beyond what we can deliver in a classroom without either working ourselves to death or shortchanging the other students.
Analyzing data is useless if the data is incomplete, biased, or invalid. No 40-question multiple choice test can accurately assess whether a student has mastered an entire curriculum; we all need to stop pretending that it can. Factors such as literacy, focus/attention, and background knowledge inevitably taint results. If you want us to analyze data, fine - but let's all start by having an honest conversation about the limitations of the data being analyzing, and how to incorporate other types of data that minimize the influence of factors unrelated to content.
Content mastery matters. When admins treat teachers like they are interchangeable - forcing science teachers to teach finance classes or drama teachers to teach journalism classes - students lose. Effective teachers know how to shape their content to make it age-appropriate, engaging, accessible, logical, and authentic - but this feat requires a deep and genuine understanding of the content we are teaching. Otherwise we’re just teaching out of a textbook, and students don’t learn that way.
Worksheets can't replace instruction. Speaking of which, we need you to understand that worksheets can’t replace instruction. We understand that sometimes those “please send —s work home so they can complete it while they are sick/suspended/on vacation” requests are unavoidable, but we’d like to make it clear that in most cases, students are going to be missing critical content that will need to be made up.
Students with special needs don’t necessarily learn the same way. We get why you occasionally mandate that certain “best practices” be deployed building wide. Just remember that students who learn differently may not respond to best practices that work for their general education peers. Give your special ed teachers permission to exempt themselves from school-wide mandates that won’t benefit their students.
Being a special education teacher takes more time. In almost every circumstance, special education teachers are required to do much more work (extra meetings, extra paperwork) for the same pay as their general ed peers. Cut them some slack by exempting them from non-essential tasks and giving them time to fulfill their extra responsibilities.
Our biggest challenge isn't how to teach our content effectively; it's how to manage the behaviors of our students. The evidence isn't just anecdotal: psychologists, sociologists, and educational journals agree that student behaviors really are becoming harder to manage than ever before. What's the answer? I'm not sure, but I do know for sure that the answer isn't doubling down on holding teachers responsible for managing student behavior in the classroom. Teachers need admin (and school psychologists, and sociologists, and mentors, and deans) to step in and help fill in the gap, because at this point teachers have maxed out our management toolkits, and we haven't got the time to acquire degrees in psychology.
Lack of consistency kills our credibility with students. School-wide expectations are great, because they minimize student confusion and establish identifiable boundaries. But when admins allow some teachers to opt out of enforcing expectations - or when admins themselves inconsistently enforce the rules - students (understandably) start inferring that all rules are negotiable and/or situational.
Human intelligence is a bell curve. Education's biggest gorilla in the room: human intelligence is a bell curve, and no amount of growth mindset, brain-based instruction, or equity-centered best practices is going to enable someone with a 75 IQ to perform at the same level of critical thinking as someone with a 100 IQ. How about giving us the flexibility to meet these students where they are rather than refusing to acknowledge their unique needs?
Gifted kids don’t want to act as role models for unmotivated kids. Speaking of standard deviations, gifted/high achieving students don't deserve to be plopped into classes that bore them simply so that they can serve as "role models" for other students. Bored students become behavior issues, and the students they are supposed to "inspire" merely become frustrated and resentful. Help these students fulfill their potential by being willing to look for flexible ways to meet their needs rather than warehousing them in classes that can't possibly challenge them.
Relationships require time and effort. Teachers don't actually need more PD explaining why forming relationships with students is important. What we do need is for admins to understand that standing at the door greeting kids as they come in the room isn’t some sort of magic bullet. We need you to create dedicated opportunities during the day for genuine trust-building and mentoring to happen.
You can lead a horse to water .... Our students may be minors, but they're also human beings, possessed of free will. Ultimately, they decide whether to participate in learning, and sometimes even the best practices at our disposal - voice/choice, gamification, relevance/authenticity, remediation, or external/internal motivation - won't be compelling enough to coerce them into participating.
Kids don’t care about the learning objective. ... So stop making us post them in the classroom. No kid EVER walks into a classroom and says to themselves, "I wonder what state standard our lesson is going to be addressing today?"
Sometimes kids really do need to repeat grades. Yes, we're all familiar with the research that suggests that kids held back in school suffer social and emotional harm. Yes, we all know it's a hard sell to both students and their parents. But what about the social and emotional harm of setting these students up to fail the entirety of their remaining school career? Expecting three weeks of summer school to remediate an entire year of learning – expecting, for that matter, that these students will participate willingly in summer school after choosing not to learn the previous nine months – is the most reckless kind of magical thinking.
Just because you aren’t seeing stuff doesn’t mean we’re not doing it. Do teachers have learning objectives even if they're not written on the board? Are we capable of designing effective lessons without using lesson plan graphic organizers? Can we build relationships with students even if we aren't standing at the door every morning to greet them? Please evaluate us on our outcomes rather than procedures. We're professionals, not students - we shouldn't have to show our work in order to get full credit for figuring out the right answer.
We need you to have our backs when parents interfere. Parents aren't our bosses - you are. If you're giving us good performance evaluations, then there's a presumption that you're satisfied with the way we're doing our jobs. So when parents engage us in inappropriate ways, or challenge what we teach, or accuse of bias, you need to stand up for us. Reasonable feedback is always acceptable, but stop asking us to do unreasonable things because you’re afraid to tell a parent that they're wrong.
We have ideas for how to fix things. Yes, we complain about stuff you can't fix, which can be annoying. But we’re also in a position to make suggestions that may never have occurred to you, and that are imminently implementable. It would be great if you could find ways to tolerate the former in order to encourage the latter.
Group thank-yous aren’t enough. Nothing wrong with thanking the whole staff for their collective efforts, but nothing discourages teachers who are going the extra mile and achieving noteworthy achievements more than being lumped in with teachers who are just phoning it in. An email, a drop-in during our planning period, a call-out during a staff meeting - they cost you nothing but speak volumes.
We hate icebreakers. Just because we're surrounded by students all day doesn't mean we enjoy being treated like kids. Please, we beg you, allow us to retain our dignity and socialize in a way befitting adults.
Let us choose our own PD. Don't get me wrong: no one is debating the value of PD. But every teacher has their own areas of strength and weakness: information that’s new or useful to one teacher may be repetitious or irrelevant to another. Let teachers choose the PD they need and give them a way to opt out of PD that's irrelevant or redundant.
Don't give teachers a hard time when we need to take leave. We understand our shifts can be inconvenient to fill. But that doesn’t make it okay to make teachers feel guilty about the fact that they have responsibilities outside of school. If your expectation is that teachers prioritize their school obligations over legitimate family, personal and community obligations, then you need to reconsider your priorities as a human.
Stop making us feel guilty about working hard. The biggest slap on the face of all? Admins who are complicit in creating unsustainable teacher workloads, who then turn around and berate their teachers for "working too hard." Nothing could be more tone deaf, more aggravating, more condescending than admins signaling to teachers that overtime is a just punishment for not working efficiently. How can admins actually help? When you see a teacher working late, instead of remarking "Oh my goodness, go home!" try substituting "What can we do to help reduce your workload?"
