Balancing Teacher Well-Being To Accelerate Learning Gains, Part 1

Dave Edwards brings over 26 years of public education experience to his role as Education Solutions Director for PowerSchool. With expertise in edtech systems, online learning, school operations, and professional development, his current focus is as a thought leader in the development of PowerSchool’s talent and operation solutions. Dave holds a Master’s in Education with a focus on Instructional Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Business and Organizational Development.

Educators across the nation are grappling with the challenges associated with closing gaps in learning created by the pandemic. In addition to dealing with learning loss, educational leaders are also dealing with unprecedented teacher exhaustion and the need to address major concerns surrounding teacher social and emotional well-being. So, how can districts prepare to better support learning in a post-pandemic learning environment?

In our Balancing Teacher Well-Being blog series, we’ll explore three significant challenges districts face:

In this post, the first in our series, we focus on how districts can better support and accelerate student learning gains while balancing teachers’ social and emotional well-being. As district leaders work to support and coach teachers , they can consider three notable strategies to help teachers focus on accelerating learning gains:

1. Leverage the attrition due to COVID-19 to identify and recruit for talent gaps – As more students are likely to need intervention to make up for lost learning, you may need educators with expertise in areas like reading, math, and English. Consider taking advantage of staff attrition as teachers retire or move away to add capacity to deliver effective extra-time interventions without adding costs. Districts may also discover that finding and attracting the right talent will be a challenge, so a solid talent management plan is important for addressing the dwindling teacher pipeline. Districts can download Why an Integrated Talent Management System is Necessary for Student Success and learn more about how talent products from PowerSchool can help schools identify, recruit, train, and retain superior talent.
2. Provide social and emotional learning (SEL) and content-focused professional development – For subjects in which prior-year content is a foundational prerequisite to future learning, such as math, it will be critical that teachers have opportunities to learn about best practices and approaches for their content areas. Another area of need is helping teachers support the SEL needs of their students. Many schools and districts may not feel they have the time to create content-focused or SEL professional learning opportunities, so leveraging existing providers as part of your professional learning approach would be worth exploring. In addition, ensure that courses and providers support online or hybrid modalities for flexibility and just-in-time learning. By investing in ongoing, school-embedded professional learning that targets the needs of faculty and staff, teachers will be supported in their ongoing endeavors to bolster student growth for the next school year and beyond.
3. Empower teachers to succeed with data – Teachers can be empowered with accurate, real-time data to ensure they address critical student needs. If teachers have easy access to good student data, they can intervene, adjust instruction, and accelerate learning gains. District leaders cannot simply throw individual data points at teachers. Leaders can help teachers succeed in dealing with learning loss by putting integrated systems of data in place and ensuring teachers receive training, resources, and support around gathering data, analyzing data, and most importantly, acting on that data.

With ESSER funding to assist districts with addressing the learning loss, districts can now leverage much-needed funding to put systems and processes in place to support teachers as they work to accelerate learning gains. Priorities for many districts will likely be to ensure funding is focused on professional development, creating a talent management system to recruit, hire, and support much-needed subject areas, and empowering teachers with accurate, real-time data systems.

Underlying all this support, districts must design a culture of resilience that helps teachers self-reflect on their social-emotional needs. We will address teacher SEL in our next post.

Continue with Part 2 in this series.