This Teacher Appreciation Week, Teachers Tell Us Three Things They Need.

For a brief moment, in the spring of 2020, something incredible happened for teachers: Their workplace looked like that of other professionals, with zooms and google meets. And for the first time in a long time, teachers were universally recognized as the heroes they are. Millions of people saw, in real time, the work teachers were doing and simultaneously understood the work teachers had been doing all along not only to teach their kids but to keep them mostly happy and motivated.

For teachers, the pandemic really was the great equalizer. Until it wasn’t.

By the fall, the pandemic went from being the great equalizer to something quite the opposite. As most white-collar professionals stayed at home in the covid version of a mullet (business on top, pajamas on the bottom), many teachers around the country went back to school, teaching students in classrooms while trying to still reach the students who remained at home.  

Sometimes it takes a crisis to help us see what was broken before, and sometimes in crisis we are able to make changes that previously seemed impossible but that we would do well to hold onto when the crisis abates. The greatest loss of this time would be to ignore its lessons (as this gorgeous dance/poem evokes).

In January and February 2021, my organization, 100Kin10, reached out directly to over 240 preK-12 teachers from across the country via a survey, focus groups, and interviews, with a focus on those largely serving students who face economic and racial marginalization. We asked these teachers to describe the challenges they are facing, the resources and strategies that are working well, and what they still need in order to best do their jobs and meet their students’ needs. 

Three big insights emerged. This Teacher Appreciation Week, let’s listen to teachers and make these common-sense changes they helped us see.

1. Invest in social-emotional support and mental health supports for students and teachers.

A clear theme emerged. As one teacher said: “No matter what schooling looks like in 2021 and beyond, the combination of learning loss and trauma that children and families have experienced will require more educators, not less.” This includes guidance and counseling, something schools need more resources for if they are to deliver for students.

And this support isn’t only for students. Always, but especially as the pandemic subsides and in the midst of our national and ongoing reckoning on race, teachers need social-emotional support to be able to do their jobs successfully. When we support teachers’ well-being, they are better able to support their students’ well-being. To help teachers succeed — and even more basically, to retain teachers and attract new teachers to the field, as teacher enrollment is declining nationwide, school districts can invest in supports for teachers’ social emotional well-being and mental health.

At the same time, we need to learn from the families of Black and Brown students who are continuing to opt to keep their children home. As The New York Times reported, about a large Facebook group of Blacks parents, the overwhelming majority “appreciated the way virtual learning allowed them to shield their children from anti-Black bias and protect them from the school-to-prison pipeline.” Investments in social-emotional support and mental health must be grounded in a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens that explicitly takes into account the needs of Black and Brown students.

2. Provide teachers with more time during the school day for all the non-teaching work they need to do, and provide implementation support when initiating new programs.

This sounds like it should be management 101, but teachers in the United States rarely get time during the school day for all the non-teaching tasks they need to do for their jobs, like professional development, lesson preparation, or grading. When we asked teachers what their biggest ask was, we heard a resounding theme: “to give teachers time to plan and work through [their lessons] on a regular basis, every week.” 

There is plenty of evidence, from the U.S. and abroad, that teacher collaboration and sharing of best practices is one of the most effective ways teachers (and their students) improve, but American school days rarely make time for either. Finally, teachers are often on the receiving end of changing policies. When they happen, provide teachers and other school-based staff with comprehensive implementation resources when implementing new strategies.

3. Localize Decision Making And Prioritize Responsiveness To Teacher Needs

Here’s what we heard: “There’s a huge disconnect between what the district thinks teachers need and should be necessary, and what’s actually going on in buildings with teachers and administrators and what we are asking for.” Administrators and policy-makers: Close that gap. Right away.

Teachers closed out with some words of wisdom that all of us would do well to heed in this second covid spring: “Be kind and gentle with yourself. Give yourself some grace, as this is really hard and is totally new. Things will work. Things will fail. Just keep doing your best and being open with students about it.”