Teacher Retention Is a Teacher-Development Problem

Teacher retention is a teacher development problem because if we cannot support the growth of a teacher, why should they stay? To combat this problem, the question we need to be asking is “where does teacher learning live in the workday?”

Schools say they value teacher learning in ways such as teachers collaborating, analyzing student work, learning new instructional practices, observing peers, meeting with instructional coaches, reflecting on lessons, planning responsively, participating in professional learning communities [PLC’s], studying data. and refining their craft.

There is just one problem, though. When are teachers supposed to do all of that? New international data from the OECD give school leaders a reason to take that question seriously. Education Week’s examination of the data found that teacher shortages are affecting countries around the world—not just the United States. But the international comparisons also highlight something important about how the teaching profession is structured.

U.S. teachers spend particularly large amounts of their working time actually teaching. OECD data show U.S. lower-secondary teachers reporting approximately 28.1 hours of classroom teaching per week, placing the United States fourth among 55 participating education systems on that measure.

At the same time, teachers are expected to accomplish an increasingly complex list of professional responsibilities beyond delivering lessons. The issue isn’t that American teachers never collaborate. In fact, U.S. teachers report roughly three hours per week of teamwork and professional dialogue, and collaborative professional learning has increased in recent years.

The more important question is this: “Where does teacher learning actually live in the workday?” Because teacher development requires more than access to a coach, a PLC, or professional development [PD]. It requires time to learn. And if teacher learning happens only after everything else gets done, it will always compete with everything else.

Having Professional Learning Is Not the Same as Having Conditions for Professional Learning

A school can technically have all the right structures: A PLC,  an instructional coach, common planning. professional development days, data meetings, peer observations, teacher leaders. And they can still struggle to develop teacher expertise.

Having the structure does not guarantee teachers have the capacity to use it well. A teacher’s planning period is a block of time that might theoretically be available for instructional planning and professional growth. But during that same period, the teacher may need to: respond to parent emails, prepare materials, grade assignments, enter data, make copies, complete paperwork, attend an IEP meeting, meet with a colleague, solve a student issue, adjust tomorrow’s lesson, and eat lunch.

The coaching itself isn’t the problem. The conditions around the coaching are. When professional learning continually gets layered on top of an already-full workload, development starts feeling like another obligation rather than part of the profession.

Professional Learning Should Be Part of the Work—Not Extra Work

One comment from OECD education director Andreas Schleicher in the Education Week report captures the challenge well. He argued that systems need to think differently about how they use time, people, and space so teachers can focus on their most important work. That’s a very different question from: “What PD should we offer teachers?” Instead, ask: “How have we structured teachers’ jobs so professional learning can actually occur?”

The shift matters. Schools don’t develop expertise simply by exposing teachers to information. Expertise develops through cycles like: LEARN → TRY → NOTICE → REFLECT → ADJUST → TRY AGAIN. Every part of that cycle requires time.

Five Actions Schools Can Take

Schools probably cannot immediately redesign teacher contracts or create hours of new planning time. But leaders often have more influence over teachers’ existing time than they realize.

Here are five places to start.

1. Audit Where Teacher Time Actually Goes– Before adding another professional-learning structure, study the current workday. For one week, ask teachers to roughly categorize where their non-instructional time goes. It does not need to be minute-by-minute, but just enough to identify patterns.

Look for time spent on:

• • instructional planning
  • analyzing student evidence
  • collaboration
  • coaching
  • grading
  • administrative tasks
  • meetings
  • communication
  • supervision
  • paperwork
  • unexpected student needs

Then ask, “which of these tasks genuinely requires a teacher’s instructional expertise? Schools often try to improve teacher effectiveness by adding professional learning before examining whether low-value tasks could first be removed, streamlined, automated, delegated, or redesigned.

Don’t start by asking: “What else do teachers need?” Start with: “What is consuming the time they already have?”

2. Protect Some Planning Time From Becoming Catch-All Time – Calling something a planning period does not mean planning happens during it. Create boundaries around at least some teacher planning time. For example, a school might designate one planning block each week as protected instructional-development time. That block could be used for: PLAN → STUDY EVIDENCE → COLLABORATE → COACH → REFLECT, not miscellaneous meetings or administrative tasks.

This does not mean every planning period needs to be protected. But if every planning period is available for everything, instructional development will continually lose to whatever feels most urgent. Protected time signals priority.

3. Stop Adding Every Initiative to Every Teacher’s Plate – Professional learning becomes unsustainable when every important priority becomes an additional priority. There are a lot of focus areas to grow in, such as literacy, math, artificial intelligence, engagement, differentiation, data, classroom management, student ownership, assessment, social emotional learning, technology and curriculum implementation.

But teachers cannot deeply improve twelve dimensions of instruction simultaneously. Ask: “What instructional practice matters most right now?” Then organize coaching, PLC conversations, observations, and professional learning around that shared focus.

Depth beats accumulation. Instead of: PD + PLC + coaching + walkthroughs + data meetings all operating independently, aim for one instructional priority. Then the PD teaches it, PLC’s plan for it, teachers try it, coaches support it, walkthroughs notice it, and student evidence helps teams refine it.  Now multiple structures reinforce one another instead of competing for teachers’ attention.

4. Put Coaching Inside the Work Teachers Are Already Doing-  Coaching becomes difficult to sustain when it is another appointment teachers have to fit into the week. Instead, bring coaching closer to existing instructional work. A coach might join a planning conversation, study an upcoming lesson with the teacher, analyze student work together, observe one specific part of a lesson, co-plan a check for learning, help interpret assessment evidence, model a short instructional move, or debrief something the teacher is already trying.

That changes coaching from feeling like another meeting to: “Let’s make the work you’re already doing easier and stronger.” The best coaching doesn’t always require more teacher time. Sometimes it requires using existing teacher time more intelligently.

5. Measure Professional Learning by What Changes in Practice- OECD’s TALIS data contain another finding worth noticing: while nearly all teachers participate in ongoing professional learning, only about 55% report that their recent professional-learning experiences positively affected their teaching.

Participation is not impact. Attendance is not implementation. And completing professional-development hours is not teacher development.

After professional learning, leaders should ask:

• • What are teachers trying differently?
  • Is there evidence they are learning?
  • What is becoming easier or more sophisticated in their practice?
  • Do teachers need something next?

The success measure shifts from providing PD to developing teacher practice.

Conduct a Teacher-Learning Time Audit

At your next leadership meeting, take the major professional-learning structures in your school and put them on the table.

• PLC- Where does it happen? What competes with that time? What are teachers actually doing during it
• Coaching-  When does it happen? Does it require teachers to give up planning time? Is the work connected to an instructional priority?
• PD-  What happens after the session? Where is time provided to practice what was learned
• Collaborative Planning-  Is the time truly collaborative and instructional? Or does operational business consume most of it?
• Peer Observation-  Can teachers realistically leave their classrooms to observe one another? If not, calling peer observation a priority doesn’t make it possible.

Then ask one question across all five: “Have we created actual time for this—or simply communicated that we value it?”

Make Teacher Learning Visible on the Schedule

A school’s schedule reveals its priorities. If collaboration matters, find it on the schedule. When coaching matters, find it on the schedule. If instructional planning matters, find it on the schedule. When teacher reflection matters, find it on the schedule. If none of those things have protected space, we should not be surprised when they happen inconsistently.

You don’t have to immediately find hours. Start smaller. Imagine a school protecting 30 minutes each week for focused instructional learning. Across a 36-week school year, that’s 18 hours.

Now imagine those 18 hours following one coherent improvement cycle instead of 18 unrelated meetings.

That could become learn something, try something, bring back evidence, discuss what happened, adjust, try again. That’s professional learning embedded into practice.

Teacher Learning Is Part of Student Learning

It can be tempting to view time spent away from direct instruction as time taken away from students. But there is another way to look at it. Time spent helping teachers improve instruction is an investment in every future lesson those teachers teach.

A teacher who becomes better at checking for learning may make stronger instructional decisions hundreds of times throughout the year. One who becomes better at designing cognitively demanding tasks may improve thousands of student learning experiences. A teacher who receives effective coaching may develop practices they use for the rest of their career.

Teacher learning is not separate from student learning. Teacher learning is one of the mechanisms through which student learning improves.

The Leadership Question Is Not “Do We Have PD?”

Most schools do provide PD to their teachers.  The better questions to ask are:

• Where does teacher learning live?
• What protects it?
• What competes with it?
• Are teachers doing something with it afterwards?
• And what evidence tells us their practice is actually developing?

Because a school can have a coach, a PLC, professional development, common planning, teacher leaders. and still fail to create meaningful opportunities for teachers to improve.

The resource is only the beginning. The conditions determine the impact. So perhaps the next time a leadership team says: “We need teachers to…” the next sentence should be: “Where in their workday have we created the time for them to learn how?”

Recommended Resources

If this post helped you think differently about instruction, here are a few ways to keep learning and put the ideas into practice:

• Always A Lesson: Teacher Essentials for Classroom and Career Success: Learn the foundations of high-quality instruction and the practices that help teachers strengthen both classroom impact and career longevity.
• The Instructional Leader’s Library: Lead the learning with ready-to-use professional development sessions, facilitation tools, coaching resources, and practical implementation supports.
• Teacher Leader Mastermind: Strengthen your leadership and coaching practice through a supportive virtual cohort focused on implementation, problem-solving, accountability, and impact.

GO BE GREAT!