Teachers: What Do You Need Your Colleagues to Be Held Accountable For?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder asks teachers what professional standards they need their colleagues — and their principals — to uphold.
Key Takeaways
- Accountability matters among peers - Teachers want colleagues who do their fair share and maintain professional standards
- Principals must enforce standards - When administrators don't hold all staff to the same expectations, resentment builds
- This is a community question - What a school expects of its staff defines its culture
Transcript
Teachers, what do you need your principal to do about colleagues who may be a bit of a problem?
I primarily work with school administrators, principals, assistant principals, district administrators.
And one of the unfun parts of being an administrator is dealing with people who in various ways are not doing their jobs or doing things that are harmful or inappropriate.
And I want to be very clear that I think overwhelmingly teachers need support.
Teachers need to have things taken off their plates.
They need better working conditions.
You need a safe environment, free from violence as we've been talking about quite a bit.
But I also recognize that sometimes we have to deal with things that are caused by inappropriate collegial behavior or just the other people not doing their jobs.
So I wanted to ask you from your perspective as a teacher, What do you need your principal to take care of regarding colleagues who are not living up to the professional norms and professional expectations that it takes to really succeed in this work?
Let me know.
And I would love to have your thoughts on how principals can do that in a way that respects you, that doesn't punish you for the kind of bad behavior of your colleagues.
So let me know what you think.