Three consecutive days this week we taught our BUILDING FACULTY ENGAGEMENT Workshop on three different campuses. Talented, energized, and engaged educators change the world, which is why we do what we do at School Growth and it's why we designed this unique professional development experience.

Gallup has conducted numerous research studies on the factors that influence school quality, and faculty engagement has consistently been the most reliable and important predictor. An engaged teacher is defined as one who is, "involved with, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work." That is, they are emotionally and energetically invested in the mission, culture, and strategies of the school. 

An unengaged teacher, on the other hand, is content with just working for a paycheck. In performing her/his duties, this person is less likely to seek out opportunities for professional growth and improving the team. She/he doesn't feel emotionally connected to the leadership and community of the school, which causes a loss of energy across the school culture rather than positively contributing to it. 

Arnold Anderson has a reputation--he's actually notorious. He's a math teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in New Brunswick, NJ, who was tardy over 110 times in the last two school years. As reported in the Courier News ("Teacher keeps $90K job after being late 111 times"), due to his 14 years of experience and the local public school compensation schedule, Mr. Anderson is very well paid at over $90,000 in salary and benefits.

Have you heard the one about the Superintendent who became a pirate? It's a scary tale, but the lessons learned must be shared for the benefit of others like yourself.

"When an experienced school principal comes to us, we have to retrain them from the foundation--very little of what they learned in previous positions will help them succeed within our framework of innovation."-- Charter School Board Chair

Getting the Talent Right

Through our experience in implementing personalized, blended learning in schools over the last few years, we have learned at least a few best practices for implementing such a technology-enabled learning platform in a way that provides a higher degree of faculty and parent engagement, as well as achieving student growth and improved performance.

A survey of school websites produced this wordle image. The size of each word is indicative of the frequency of its usage on each page. As you can see, "Excellence" is used consistently and persistently as a means of communicating the high standards and quality of the program. But how does the school leader support this statement? What evidence can the faculty offer to support the school's "Excellence" claim?

In a blended learning classroom teacher quality is still the number one strategy to improve student growth. This week I shared a post regarding blended learning and implementation strategies, and included our finding that age is not a reliable predictor of success in such a technology-enabled classroom.

The Global Teacher Status Index is a research project funded by the Varkey GEMS Foundation to compare the "status" of teachers across 21 nations. It attempts to measure how teachers are respected and esteemed based on compensation, student and parent perceptions, etc in the form of a teacher respect index. The following four specific indicators were identified as most useful for the goals of this study: