Teacher morale is a major problem in public and private schools. Low morale lowers engagement with colleagues and students, lowers productivity, reduces student learning, and creates cynicism. On the other hand, when morale is high and the faculty culture is healthy, students excel socially and academically, teachers are productive and collaborative, and the school environment is dynamic and engaging. Given the important role that teacher morale plays, schools must continually work to improve teacher morale.
The main factors affecting morale are school leadership, workload, compensation, student behavior, and professional development. Effective and caring leaders contribute significantly to high morale, while weak leaders and low morale go hand in hand. Clearly, the teaching is intensive, relentless, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically demanding. In addition to teaching, teachers have many other responsibilities, such as curriculum development, supervision of recess, extracurricular activities, marketing, fundraising, and administrative paperwork. Feeling overloaded with so many responsibilities contributes to low morale. Naturally, being overworked and underpaid is a recipe for moral disaster. Student behavior problems are another major reason for low teacher morale, especially when teachers don’t have the tools to address problems. And finally, access to professional development plays an important role in determining morale.
School leadership: School leaders have extremely demanding and complex jobs. Many enter leadership positions without proper training. Even with excellent training and experience, school leaders face extremely difficult challenges on a daily basis. Ongoing leadership training, executive coaching, and professional development are critical to enabling school leaders to provide powerful leadership and ensure high teacher morale.
Teacher workload: There may be no way around the fact that a teacher’s workload is heavy. However, when the faculty is pushing and pushing, hard work is a lot more fun. In fact, in my experience as a school principal, teacher morale was at the top of the table when the faculty was heavily involved in major initiatives that required extensive work. Involving teachers in decision-making, planning and problem solving, and creating collaborative teams to share the workload goes a long way toward nurturing high morale.
Compensation: Competitive compensation is important. However, the key to compensation as it affects morale is the system for determining wages and raises. If teachers feel the system is unfair, compensation, regardless of amount, will hurt morale. Fairness is largely judged on the perceived congruence between a person’s value to the school and that person’s compensation. To compensate fairly, schools must abandon traditional systems of “steps” and implement systems that link compensation and performance.
Student Behavior: Teachers face increasingly complex demands to meet the needs of their students in public and private schools. From antisocial behavior to special needs and apathy across the socioeconomic spectrum, teachers are experiencing increasing problems with behavior management. Two major school initiatives will help address this problem. First, providing behavior management training to teachers struggling with discipline is essential. Second, faculty and staff must work together as a school-wide team to address behavior challenges.
Professional development: Professional development is directly related to student performance and teacher satisfaction is directly related to student performance. Teachers and schools that value professional development or adult learning create the conditions for students to value learning as well. When students are making excellent academic and social progress, teachers feel the rewards of their profession. Providing teachers with meaningful and effective professional development is critical to successful schools and high teacher morale.
