How School Leaders Can Rebalance Teacher’s Time

The pandemic taught educational leaders to pare down the demands on teachers to focus on student learning. This article in Edutopia, “How School Leaders Can Teachers’ Job Demands and Resources” captures what leaders can do to help teachers. Demands on schools and teachers, in particular, are always increasing. At our school, we have the luxury of having many employees dedicated to supporting our mission. We provide free, after-school childcare for faculty until 5:00 PM.We also have personnel devoted to helping with housing issues which must take up a lot of time with teachers in US public and private schools. We can however, focus on school-related tasks that are busywork and not directly impacting student learning. Some of these demands that we started trying to streamline include ordering supplies and requesting maintenance work.We need to audit the tasks we assign teachers and ask if it is completely necessary. The other piece of advice is to emotionally support teachers and to allow them more control of their jobs, giving more decision-making authority to them.