Motivated Teachers!

There’s been a lot of  research on what motivates highly professional people. In a youtube TEDtalk that’s now been watched over seven millions times, Daniel Pink summarizes this research in a compelling, interesting way:

This is very good news for us in Catholic education!   A big salary, it turns out, is not a motivator for adults engaged in highly complex tasks, such as teaching. We must do more for our teachers out of justice, but it's not ultimately what motivates them to do their jobs well (I've written about practical ways to pay teachers more here, here and here). Nor do extrinsic “if-then” reward systems (like merit pay) work. I’ve tried merit pay as a principal, and found out that Pink is right. I found it to be destructive to the cohesiveness and morale of our faculty, so much so that I abandoned the idea after trying to tweak and improve it for three years. Live and learn!

Instead, Pink tells us, we should focus on three things—all of which help build the intrinsic motivation of our employees. These are 1) Purpose 2) Mastery and 3) Autonomy

“Purpose”, he says, is the desire to be part of something important, to know that the work you’re doing matters.  “Mastery” is the desire to get better and better at things that matter. And “Autonomy” is the urge for employees to direct their own lives. Cultivate these three things, the research suggests, and we’ll generally have happy, productive employees. 

This is really important information for those of us in leadership in Catholic education, charged with building a culture of optimism and excellence in our schools!  

I think we’re strong on Purpose. It’s all about the mission! But it’s easy to forget the mission, swamped by the exigencies of the given moment! Even our best teachers need “good news” stories to remind them. I believe one of our most important functions as principals is to seek out good news stories and connect our various constituencies to them. They are most compelling when they are personal, focusing on a specific student or a small group of students, rather than abstract statistics. How has our school made a difference in this particular student's life? Better to detail how a struggling junior in our school increased his ACT score by X points than to to brag about the “average ACT score increase” of the junior class, even though the statistical increase says more about us. Though we are immersed in these stories each day, we have to be very intentional in making these stories public and explicit. Everyone is elevated when we do.   

My sense is that we’re not as strong in supporting teachers’ “Mastery.” For one, I believe we’re ambivalent about investing in their professional development—it takes too much money, and worse, it often means they will miss school time. But even within our own building, are we prioritizing mastery? Do we find ways for teachers to teach each other? Visit a classroom of a colleague? Invite “idea-sharing” as part of a faculty meeting? Recognize a teacher when they’ve done something really well? Do we give teachers enough time, enough “free” periods, to develop good lessons? Or are they busy from the opening bell to closing with duties that are ‘time suckers” away from reflective practice? Worthy questions, I think, for self-reflection. 

In the past, we’ve been relatively strong on “Autonomy,” partly due to the fact there’s not enough of us to monitor teachers and curriculum too closely. The ratio of  “teachers” to "administrators" in Catholic schools is relatively large compared to our public school counterparts,  and our “organizational hierarchies” are still fairly flat.  That gibes nicely with our Catholic social teaching tradition,  which stresses “subsidiarity,” that things are best handled at the most local level possible. In other words, we really do rely on the professionalism of our teachers, borne out of both philosophy and necessity! Pink would say the autonomy teachers feel as a result energizes them. 

But over the 30+ years I’ve been in Catholic education, it feels like the “autonomy” of teachers (and building administrators) is slipping rather precipitously. Due to lawsuits, diocesan lawyers are now having more direct say in shaping how we operate. Whereas we talked previously about “policies” that were understood as “broad parameters” within which we exercised discretion,  we are now more likely to focus on “practices,” which are a euphemisms for “scripts” of things we must say or do when X happens. A colleague of mine, talking about his diocese, told me if a parent alleges a bullying incident with his school, he must send the accuser a specifically worded email, already pre-approved by the diocesan attorney. He is then handed a step by step “playbook” of what to do next. Child protection policies in Catholic schools across the nation are hyper-specific about the kinds of things teachers can or cannot do with students, even though the vast majority of abuse incidents in our Church have had nothing to do with teachers. I could go on, but let's not. 

I’m not a naive idealist, and I don’t really begrudge the lawyers, who are doing their jobs to protect us from large lawsuits that would threaten the very viability of our schools. But it is quite easy for us in administration to begin to think and operate like lawyers, surrendering pastoral judgment and discretion for the sake of minimizing liability and risk. The pessimistic culture that results from “template thinking” and “playing it safe” throws a wet blanket on the creativity and intrinsic motivation of our employees.   

If we want to keep employees who are highly motivated, we can’t relate to them using scripts. We must fight against a culture that slowly persuades us to think legalistically, even while applying the insights of lawyers to protect our schools. Teachers must know they are trusted. The research indicates it’s relationships founded on trust and respect, not rules founded on authority, which causes them to be happy, creative and pro-active. 

May God give us the wisdom and grace to find and keep such teachers!