Rewarding Teacher Effort
How leaders can balance effort and excellence
So much of the conversation in the education sphere focuses on "how hard" everyone is working. Indeed, while teachers fall short of the actual metrics, everyone wants their managers to recognize the amount of effort they expend. This situation, of course, poses a complex conundrum for school leaders—how can we acknowledge teachers' efforts while still holding them to a high bar for excellence?
School leaders should not encourage the demoralizing culture created by a staff that constantly complains about being overworked without obtaining tangible results. That type of culture only leads to resentment and malevolence, which undercut the school's central mission, educating children. Still, to expressly ignore the amount of hours teachers put into their work is to deny their efforts. Moreover, doing so can create an equally toxic environment where teachers feel helpless as they're forced to meet more rigorous standards without understanding how to improve their daily efforts.
I often sit with over-caffeinated teachers, operating on a scant few hours of sleep due to staying up late into the night (or early morning) lesson planning and grading. While some life-coaching around scheduling, focus, and creating a productive work environment can be helpful, that type of conversation ignores the root issue. Namely, the teacher is putting in an immense amount of effort, most of which goes to waste, and the teacher's managers do not recognize the effort. The work isn't recognized because the effort doesn't result in achievement—the teacher spends four hours a night lesson planning and still only achieves forty-percent mastery on the next day's lesson objective. This simple fact presents the problem of how school leaders can continue to motivate teachers through the grueling work necessary to succeed without bending to the desire to simply incentive working hard. School leaders cannot support a culture of hard work without results—it's untenable for the organization. Still, leaders must incentivize the type of effort that produces excellence, no matter how grueling or demanding.
Therefore, we end up with a circular issue: how do school leaders encourage teachers to work hard on the correct metrics, incentivize effort, and still demand results as the ultimate measure of success? When I'm leading a school team, I find three questions helpful in transforming the culture from one of working hard without results to one that encourages hard work to achieve excellence.
1. What are the metrics of effort?
The most common complaint I hear from staff concerning how hard they're working is about time. Either the teacher spends so many hours lesson planning, or they spend the whole weekend grading, or they spend all their free time connecting with students about behavior issues. Time becomes the focus, the currency by which teachers sell their complaints to the administration. The problem with using the number of hours worked as a complaint is that there's no solution—the school leader can't tell the teacher to reduce the hours if that's how long it takes the teacher to accomplish a task. The leader might be able to buy her teacher time during the school day—an extra fifteen minutes of prep here or there—but not in a way significant enough to transform the dynamic. Time worked on essential tasks is not a metric on which a leader or teacher can take action.
Instead, school leaders need to quantify effort into actionable metrics that can be measured, assessed, incentivized, and rewarded. Some basic metrics I like to use to reward teacher effort are:
Percentage of students completing the task accurately
Number of "at-bats" or chances to answer a question students get in class
Circulation ratio, meaning how often a teacher makes contact with each student
Number of corrective and positive phone calls made to parents each day
The ratio of teacher talk to student work time
Whether or not directions are dual coded
Whether or not thinking is made visible during the lesson
The number of essential lesson components met during a sixty-minute block as defined by our school's shared vision of excellent lesson planning
The existence of a clear standard, objective, and a central question
The quality of the teacher's exemplar and whether or not a data tracking tool is used with fidelity
While that's not an entirely inclusive list, it provides some basic metrics I can measure in a classroom that both reward teachers for their effort while keeping the focus on excellent teaching. Therein lies the key—I try not just to reward hard work but also reward the actions that the data suggests produce strong academic outcomes for students.
2. Is the teacher focused on the right effort metrics?
The second question focuses on people leadership and is vital for instituting a culture change at school. Even when leaders outline the metrics used to measure "effort" and "hard work," teachers will still come with complaints about how they didn't eat lunch that day because of how much time they spent on some other task. Though I assume the best of my teachers, the truth is that this type of complaint is an effort to derail conversations about the teacher's shortcomings. Successful and motivated teachers do not waste time (the most precious resource) complaining about how few minutes they have in the day. The best teachers are too motivated to improve their practice to waste a moment with their leader on a problem that we cannot solve. Moreover, when a teacher approaches me with complaints about missing lunch, or spending too much time grading after school, I know with certainty that they're not excelling at the effort metrics outlined above.
The purpose of codifying and quantifying what "hard work" and "effort" means at a school is to provide teachers with a way out of their spirals of helplessness. By giving concrete actions for teachers to take, rather than encouraging or allowing them to just work harder, school leaders can maintain a positive culture of expending extreme effort towards results.
Having these types of effort metrics also allows school leaders to complete one of their main tasks—removing obstacles for teachers. By setting clear metrics of what it means to work hard and holding teachers to those metrics, leaders change the conversation from one focused on being busy to one about effective productivity. For example, when our hapless teacher comes with complaints about the hours spent on lesson planning, I always return to controllable metrics related to the plan. First, I ask to see the objective and the exemplar. Then I check if the teacher meets all the criteria for an effective lesson as outlined by our school policy. After that, I confirm that there exists a simple tool for tracking student mastery. I can plan a lesson with a teacher in under thirty minutes using these measures. By focusing on our controllable metrics, I can reduce twenty hours of weekly lesson planning to two hours.
3. Is the compounding effect of the effort metrics visible?
Once school leaders establish the metrics that define "hard work," and they've used those metrics to adjust teacher mindsets, the next step is to make the impact of those efforts visible. The idea of compounding results is not necessarily new or innovative but is still the type of wisdom that most refuse to acknowledge. In Darren Hardy's book on the subject—The Compound Effect—he explains how our habits and daily efforts accelerate their impact over time and create ripple effects throughout our lives. Therefore, leaders must make it visible and clear to teachers how their continued effort and hard work produce tangible results.
With our poor teacher who was just shown how to reduce her lesson planning load by ninety-five percent, the key is to continue to push the effort metrics that make lesson planning a less grueling process. Every time the teacher complains about time spent on her lessons, the leader needs to redirect to the actionable metrics. Over time, the teacher realizes that adhering to these effort metrics produces quality lesson plans in a far shorter amount of time. From here, the teacher experiences the positive impact of compounded results, as lesson plans improve, stress reduces, and more time opens to complete the other fundamental teaching tasks.
These effort metrics allow for fundamental transformations in teacher mindset and adult culture. Effort metrics give teachers the ability to exercise control over their work. Rather than feeling helpless and overworked, teachers can take actions that create tangible change while still requiring hard work.
The process does not work magically, however. Teachers need to see that the compound effect is working, and therefore it is the leader's job to make it visible. Leaders can do so by tracking, rewarding, and incentivizing effort metrics and then connecting completion of those metrics to increased success in the teacher's class. If a teacher completes the effort metrics with fidelity repeatedly, it is impossible for their classroom effectiveness not to improve.
To transform the culture of a school from one focused on how "overwhelmed" everyone is with "how hard" their working, school leaders need to instill and track metrics that incentivize the right types of effort. This process will fundamentally improve the staff culture and teacher effectiveness.