Giving Compass' Take:

• Pairin analyzed survey results revealing that motivation, independence, and ability to correct others are all behavioral traits of high-performing teachers. 

• Although it makes sense that high performing teachers work in high performing schools, how can districts encourage more teacher development to master these useful behavioral traits and have high performing teachers in all types of schools? 

• Learn about why teacher burnout is so common and how much extra time teachers spend on outside school-related activities. 

When asked about my education in a traditional public high school, I always talk about Mr. Gebler’s pre-calculus class. I remember it well for two reasons. One, I struggled to earn a C. Two, his standards — like his eccentric behavior and dedication to students — were so exceptional that I actually retained the content after the school year ended.

A draft research report by workplace survey company Pairin confirms what I’d always known: Mr. Gebler was a top-tier teacher.

Pairin recently analyzed survey results from 9,359 teachers in traditional public schools and 390 in public charter schools. It found that certain behavioral attributes — motivation, independence, and the ability to correct others — correlate with high performance. Mr. Gebler had all of these.

Today, however, many educators who share these behavioral qualities aren’t working in our nation’s traditional public schools. They’re working in charter schools.

High-performing schools have to attract and retain high-performing teachers; the report indicates that schools designed to encourage teacher leadership and empower educators to take initiative do just that.

Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what most of America’s traditional public schools do.

The biggest disparity in behavioral attributes between top-performing teachers and others is that they have much higher intensity for the “ability to correct others.” Overall, traditional public school teachers surveyed had lower intensity for “correcting others” than charter school teachers surveyed.

The traditional model for school districts, like all hierarchical bureaucracies, disempowers employees, ties them up in rules and red tape, and treats them all the same. To attract top-performing teachers, we need to change traditional public education from a bureaucratic system that prioritizes stability — “don’t rock the boat” — to one that embraces innovation, empowers its teachers to take initiative, and supports those willing to demand more from their students.

Read the full article about teacher traits by Emily Langhorne at The 74.