Teacher Retention & Recruitment: 5 Winning Strategies for Principals

As you approach the final weeks of the school year, chances are you’re already thinking about the next one. When we talk with new and tenured principals alike, one topic is always at the top of the list: teacher and staff retention and recruitment.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the majority of the United States’ public K-12 schools experienced difficulty hiring fully-certified teachers heading into the current academic year. While the data shows a decrease in the percentage of difficulty overall, from 79% of schools reporting to 74%, there’s certainly room for improvement. Additionally, NCES says that it’s not just teaching roles that are hard to fill, with NCES Commissioner Peggy Car saying that schools continue to report difficulty filling all non-teaching vacancies—everything from bus drivers to tutors.

Depending on what type of school you lead and where it's located, you might be having some of these same challenges. The good news is that it’s never too late to think about developing a more strategic approach to not only keeping your best educators but also attracting new talent to your school. Being proactive over these next few months can be the difference between scrambling to fill positions in August and welcoming a complete (and enthusiastic!) staff when school doors reopen.

Let's dive into the specific steps you can take this spring to ensure your school is fully staffed with talented, committed educators ready to make a difference for your students next fall:

Step #1: Assess your current staffing situation

Before diving into retention and recruitment strategy, start by taking the time to understand your school’s staffing landscape by:

• Analyzing retention patterns and where there’s risk: There’s plenty of insight hidden in your school’s historical retention data that can help you understand your most pressing staffing needs. Do certain departments experience higher turnover than others? Is there a particular point in a teacher’s career where they tend to leave? Understanding these kinds of patterns helps you direct your time and energy to where they’re most needed.
  
  
• Benchmarking against comparable schools: There’s also a lot of valuable data that can be found by researching the staffing patterns and retention rates at similar schools in your area. Knowing how your school compares can not only make it possible to identify unique challenges or advantages your school might have, but it also might be an interesting way to start a conversation about partnering on hard-to-fill roles.
  
  
• Reviewing compensation and benefits packages: We know that as a school principal, you most likely have limited control over teacher and staff salaries and benefits. However, getting a clear picture of how your compensation stacks up against neighboring districts is essential, as is identifying any benefits you can emphasize to strengthen your school’s appeal as a potential employer. 

Completing this assessment means that you’ll be positioned to develop intentional retention and recruitment strategies that address your school’s specific needs, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t hit the mark. 

Step #2: Have “stay conversations” to bolster retention 

Stay conversations are exactly what they sound like—structured, proactive discussions with your high-performing teachers to understand how they’re feeling about their work at the moment, what they’d like to see change, and whether they’re considering moving on. 

Why are these so important? Well, it’s often said that it takes more time and energy to hire and recruit an excellent employee than it does to retain one—and this is especially true of teachers and school staff. When talented educators leave their schools, there’s a staggering cost, including a noticeable loss of knowledge, expertise, experience, and ideas. That loss—especially when a large group of tenured educators leaves—can have a profound negative effect on student achievement. 

It might be tempting to say, “I don’t want to lose any of my teachers or staff—I’ll just have stay conversations with all of them.” While this is certainly an admirable goal, the truth is that it’s not very realistic, depending how many educators you have at your school. Stay interviews are specifically for the teachers and staff you feel are irreplaceable—think the top 20%. 

We wrote an entire blog all about stay conversations if you’d like to learn more, but at a glance, here’s how to think about them:

• These are intentional conversations, so they need to be more structured than a quick check-in or an informal chat you’d have in the hallway. 
• Remember to do your research beforehand. Take the time to assemble anecdotal notes about the teacher or staff member you’ll be meeting with—positive comments from other teachers, parents, or community members as well as your own experiences.
• Frame the conversation. Tell the teachers and staff you’re meeting with that it’s a discussion about the reasons they stay at your school and that you want to understand how things are going and how you can best support them.
• Ask specific questions that will get you the information you need. Some of our favorites are: What do you look forward to when you come to work every day? What do you feel would best enhance your school experience? What aspects of your role would you like to see change? What are some ways I can support you better? 
• Be sure to follow up with solutions. As you’re collecting these answers, be truthful with yourself about what you can truly change in your school. If you’re not able to make the changes a particular person wants to see, be sure to be transparent and in communication with them about what else might be possible. 

Step #3: Conduct exit interviews with departing staff

Exit interviews are discussions with the educators you know for sure are departing your school. Feedback is the ultimate goal of exit interviews—you know that these teachers and staff are off to other schools or careers, so these conversations are really about improving school culture and addressing concerns in the future. 

These interviews also have another benefit: giving a double dose of closure. When teachers and staff are allowed to express their concerns or grievances, it goes a long way to wrap up what might have been a significant part of their career. You also may remember a few times where you’ve been blindsided by the resignation of a teacher. Making time for these conversations can give you some peace of mind, too. 

If you’re a new principal who hasn’t had to conduct very many exit interviews at this point in your career, here are a few questions to get you started (this is also a great list of exit interview questions that you can tailor to your specific school):

• What influenced your decision to leave our school? If you’ve accepted a new position, will it be the same type of work? If not, can you tell us what you’ll be doing?
• What does this new position offer that the one you’re leaving does not?
• How would you describe your workload in your current role?
• How would you describe the professional development opportunities you received in your role? 
• What did you like about your position? What did you dislike?
• Have you made these suggestions before? How did you feel they’ve been handled in the past? 

Step #4: Create professional development & leadership opportunities

Professional development is an important retention strategy. When teachers and staff are provided with the meaningful, intentional, and targeted PD they’re looking for, it’s one more way that school leaders can ensure their teams feel supported. And, when people feel supported, they’re more likely to stay in their roles. 

Right before the end of this school year is the perfect time to have conversations about the professional growth of your teachers and staff—specifically, how to give them a degree of autonomy and agency when it comes to their own PD. For example, when you meet with your teachers about their PD goals, ask about what they may want to achieve through the lens of student learning AND what they’d like to enhance or learn more about in their own careers. How can you create a plan where both of those needs can be met?

These conversations also are important for helping you identify potential teacher leaders—or those who might have future school leadership aspirations. If there are teachers in your school who’d love to take the reins on a specific initiative—such as creating stronger school-community partnerships, strengthening parent relationships, or being part of your school’s next strategic planning process—this is a great way to allow ambitious teachers and staff to grow professionally without leaving your school. 

Step #5: Take a look at your new hire onboarding processes

At first glance, onboarding new teachers and staff might sound like a one-time event—a way to provide your new team members with the knowledge and tools they need at the beginning of a school year to be successful in their roles. And yet, onboarding can be so much more. When planned intentionally and continued throughout the year, quality onboarding is the foundation of teacher and staff retention. 

If you’re thinking about restructuring your own onboarding, start with your school’s own “Hierarchy of Needs.” Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory that suggests that a number of basic needs must be met for people to achieve all they can be. Consider this hierarchy through the lens of your new hires. What are the categories of information they need as a foundation? Think about their basic needs—knowing how to get an ID badge, understanding the dress code, signing up for health insurance—in addition to what they need to know about the culture and community of the school, your expectations of them, and what the expectations also are for curriculum and instruction. 

Second, onboarding to any new role requires building in time for new hires to connect with the people they’ll be working with—or even just the people they’ll see in the halls. One idea might be to host a series of teacher & staff speed meetings throughout the next school year where new and veteran team members can get to know each other. Another thought is to develop a mentor or check-in program, where experienced teachers and staff help those new to your school navigate their first few months—or maybe even the entire year. 

By implementing this strategic approach to teacher retention and recruitment this spring, you're setting yourself up for staffing success come fall. Remember that every interaction with your current staff is a retention opportunity, and the culture you nurture now becomes your strongest recruitment tool.

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