he Sustainable Development Goals and Rights of the Child identify critical education indicator targets intended to ensure the quality of life for children and all learners. Among the targets are increasing the supply of qualified teachers and fostering international cooperation for teacher training and development. As we emerge from the pandemic and move closer to 2030, we have the opportunity to renew and recommit ourselves to achieving these goals, rights, and targets. To ensure progress, we recognize that key components of education systems must be transformed. Although learners will always be at the center of education, educators must be positioned alongside learners as central to education policy and systems transformations.
As education experts and practitioners, the members in this group work directly with preservice and in-service educators. Many of our schools have struggled to find qualified educators and we have witnessed the daily challenges educators face and qualified people leaving the profession. As we aim to reach UN Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 to increase the supply of qualified teachers globally, we have reflected on and identified the following challenges in our own education systems:
Attracting and preparing educators:
Recruiting highly qualified, motivated, and energized people to become effective teachers is a global challenge with regional and national variations. Furthermore, preparation programs are often incongruous with the needs of teachers in today’s environment. From the very first day of employment, educators are on a rollercoaster—often working alone in a fast-paced, brand-new context with little daily support or input.
Empowering educators:
Education systems perceive teachers as being passive players, not active leaders outside of their classrooms. Teachers, in turn, often wait for the system to give them guidance.
Retaining educators:
While some departures are inevitable, many can be linked to factors that can be managed, such as working conditions, ongoing support, professional development, and purposeful empowerment.
While many educators experience similar challenges, they may not have a common language or framework to articulate the most salient challenges to their supervisors or to each other. Given that the challenges facing educators may be context-specific, any sort of framing tool needs to encompass a broad framework while driving the conversation in specific contexts in order to empower educators with common language for professional expectations; define drivers that attract, prepare, empower, and retain educators; encourage administrators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to appreciate the value of educators.
The SHANARRI Wheel, a system-wide tool used in Scotland for mapping student wellbeing served as a model for creating our own Educator Wheel—a tool that allows educators to describe their experiences.
The SHANARRI wheel emerged in 2006 as a tool for gauging wellbeing in young people and became enshrined in Scottish law through the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act of 2014. The SHANARRI Wheel is embedded in Scottish education, and it puts learners firmly at the center of education: Caregivers, educators and young people are familiar with SHANARRI language and terminology and are encouraged to use this to consider and describe their own position. This approach has had a ripple effect throughout Scottish education and forms the basis of education policy and planning.
The Scottish experience recognizes that the SHANARRI Wheel has had a significantly positive effect on the wellbeing and success of learners. Similarly, the Educator Wheel ultimately seeks to create a landscape in which every educator feels that they are prepared, well, secure, represented, growing, valued, autonomous, and in an inclusive environment. These areas constitute the eight domains of the Educator Wheel.
Benefits and Implementation of the Educator Wheel
Educators
This tool provides a means of self-reflection and an advocacy tool for educators throughout their career. It shifts the assessment paradigm so that educators assess their professional and education environment. With common language and an understanding of what to expect as professionals, educators can advocate for transformation.
Education leaders
For school leaders, policymakers, and other stakeholders, this tool can be used to reflect upon the extent to which the education landscape is positioned to attract, prepare, empower, and retain transformative educators.
The Educator Wheel: A framework for discussion, reflection and strategic growth
A statement of expectation and guiding questions for reflection are offered below for each of the eight domains.
Growing: Educator happiness, creativity, and innovation can only take place when professional and personal growth is encouraged and cultivated.
- To what extent do educators have the autonomy, time, and resources to pursue professional growth that matches their needs?
- To what extent do educators agree that their professional and personal growth helps to cultivate their happiness, creativity, and ability to innovate for their learners?
Valued: Every educator has a recognized set of knowledge, skills, and strengths that are unique and is regularly given opportunities and encouragement to play an active role in determining the direction of their learning environment.
- To what extent do colleagues and school leaders know, understand and value what educators do?
- When decisions are being made, how are educator voices and opinions heard and taken into consideration?
- How appropriate is educator workload?
Autonomous: The professional autonomy of educators must be upheld and protected, giving them the freedom to explore and use pedagogies that promote creativity and innovation.
- To what extent do educators feel empowered to be creative and explore or implement new pedagogies in a supportive environment?
- Where and how can educators seek support in exercising their autonomy?
Included: Inclusivity refers to interacting with a heterogeneous group while respecting uniqueness in an empathetic, bias-free way. Educators have a right to work in an environment where they are truly and fully included as their authentic selves.
- How can schools and systems create more educator-focused inclusive practices in various contexts?
- What is the relationship between agency, safety, and inclusion in the context of school and education?
Represented: Representation allows educators to express their ideas and concerns and validates their role in the teaching and learning process. Represented also refers to the extent to which educators proportionally represent the community they serve.
- To what extent are educators allowed, encouraged, or expected to participate in decision making, education policy task forces and commissions at the school and district level?
- To what extent do educators at my school reflect the demographics of the community being served?
Well: Every educator has the right to be well and strengthen skills and practices related to wellbeing.
- To what extent are educators’ personal and professional emotional, psychological, physical, and relational health promoted and engaged in the learning environment?
- To what extent is wellbeing supported through ongoing and embedded professional development?
- To what extent is the culture of the learning environment one of caring, compassion, dedication to wellbeing?
Secure: Every educator must feel safe and secure in their teaching environment. Security and change are not mutually exclusive.
- To what extent do educators feel physically and emotionally safe and secure in their teaching environment and interactions with colleagues, administrators, and students?
- How dependable is the process for educators to report that someone or something is affecting their ability to feel safe and secure?
Prepared: In order to thrive, educators must be prepared to plan and instruct engaging lessons, assess progress, and authentically connect with students within their specific school context.
- How is the profession attracting new educators and making the pathways to certification easy to understand, accessible, and equitable?
- To what extent are educators—both new and experienced—welcomed, mentored, and supported for growth from their first day and beyond?
- To what extent are educators given opportunities to mentor, lead, and be celebrated?
Conclusion
The Educator Wheel can be used as a basis for discussion at multiple levels: it is a self-diagnostic as well as system diagnostic tool. For individuals, it provides a framework for self-reflection and identification of development needs. It empowers educators to articulate their attitudes and experiences by providing an accessible and collaborative framework and a recognizable common lexicon. For managers and supervisors, it can be helpful for tracking not only the position and progress of individuals, but also the gaps and emerging trends within the wider organization. While it might not be possible to make all necessary changes in one year, the Educator Wheel can be used to identify priority areas for improvement. Regular use is recommended to ensure that educators’ voices are central to the educational landscape and decision-making processes.
The Educator Wheel promotes the transformation of education systems into mutually beneficial teaching and learning environments that function cohesively and effectively for educators at all stages of their careers. Thereby, the Educator Wheel contributes to increasing the number of high-quality educators who enter and remain in the profession and provides systems with information about how to create education environments where both educators and learners can be successful.
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Educators Are Also Key to Transforming Education Policy and Systems
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng via Unsplash.
September 20, 2022
To ensure progress, key components of education systems must be transformed. Although learners will always be at the center of education, educators must be positioned alongside learners as central to education policy and systems transformations.
T
he Sustainable Development Goals and Rights of the Child identify critical education indicator targets intended to ensure the quality of life for children and all learners. Among the targets are increasing the supply of qualified teachers and fostering international cooperation for teacher training and development. As we emerge from the pandemic and move closer to 2030, we have the opportunity to renew and recommit ourselves to achieving these goals, rights, and targets. To ensure progress, we recognize that key components of education systems must be transformed. Although learners will always be at the center of education, educators must be positioned alongside learners as central to education policy and systems transformations.
As education experts and practitioners, the members in this group work directly with preservice and in-service educators. Many of our schools have struggled to find qualified educators and we have witnessed the daily challenges educators face and qualified people leaving the profession. As we aim to reach UN Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 to increase the supply of qualified teachers globally, we have reflected on and identified the following challenges in our own education systems:
Attracting and preparing educators:
Recruiting highly qualified, motivated, and energized people to become effective teachers is a global challenge with regional and national variations. Furthermore, preparation programs are often incongruous with the needs of teachers in today’s environment. From the very first day of employment, educators are on a rollercoaster—often working alone in a fast-paced, brand-new context with little daily support or input.
Empowering educators:
Education systems perceive teachers as being passive players, not active leaders outside of their classrooms. Teachers, in turn, often wait for the system to give them guidance.
Retaining educators:
While some departures are inevitable, many can be linked to factors that can be managed, such as working conditions, ongoing support, professional development, and purposeful empowerment.
While many educators experience similar challenges, they may not have a common language or framework to articulate the most salient challenges to their supervisors or to each other. Given that the challenges facing educators may be context-specific, any sort of framing tool needs to encompass a broad framework while driving the conversation in specific contexts in order to empower educators with common language for professional expectations; define drivers that attract, prepare, empower, and retain educators; encourage administrators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to appreciate the value of educators.
The SHANARRI Wheel, a system-wide tool used in Scotland for mapping student wellbeing served as a model for creating our own Educator Wheel—a tool that allows educators to describe their experiences.
The SHANARRI wheel emerged in 2006 as a tool for gauging wellbeing in young people and became enshrined in Scottish law through the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act of 2014. The SHANARRI Wheel is embedded in Scottish education, and it puts learners firmly at the center of education: Caregivers, educators and young people are familiar with SHANARRI language and terminology and are encouraged to use this to consider and describe their own position. This approach has had a ripple effect throughout Scottish education and forms the basis of education policy and planning.
The Scottish experience recognizes that the SHANARRI Wheel has had a significantly positive effect on the wellbeing and success of learners. Similarly, the Educator Wheel ultimately seeks to create a landscape in which every educator feels that they are prepared, well, secure, represented, growing, valued, autonomous, and in an inclusive environment. These areas constitute the eight domains of the Educator Wheel.
Benefits and Implementation of the Educator Wheel
Educators
This tool provides a means of self-reflection and an advocacy tool for educators throughout their career. It shifts the assessment paradigm so that educators assess their professional and education environment. With common language and an understanding of what to expect as professionals, educators can advocate for transformation.
Education leaders
For school leaders, policymakers, and other stakeholders, this tool can be used to reflect upon the extent to which the education landscape is positioned to attract, prepare, empower, and retain transformative educators.
The Educator Wheel: A framework for discussion, reflection and strategic growth
A statement of expectation and guiding questions for reflection are offered below for each of the eight domains.
Growing: Educator happiness, creativity, and innovation can only take place when professional and personal growth is encouraged and cultivated.
- To what extent do educators have the autonomy, time, and resources to pursue professional growth that matches their needs?
- To what extent do educators agree that their professional and personal growth helps to cultivate their happiness, creativity, and ability to innovate for their learners?
Valued: Every educator has a recognized set of knowledge, skills, and strengths that are unique and is regularly given opportunities and encouragement to play an active role in determining the direction of their learning environment.
- To what extent do colleagues and school leaders know, understand and value what educators do?
- When decisions are being made, how are educator voices and opinions heard and taken into consideration?
- How appropriate is educator workload?
Autonomous: The professional autonomy of educators must be upheld and protected, giving them the freedom to explore and use pedagogies that promote creativity and innovation.
- To what extent do educators feel empowered to be creative and explore or implement new pedagogies in a supportive environment?
- Where and how can educators seek support in exercising their autonomy?
Included: Inclusivity refers to interacting with a heterogeneous group while respecting uniqueness in an empathetic, bias-free way. Educators have a right to work in an environment where they are truly and fully included as their authentic selves.
- How can schools and systems create more educator-focused inclusive practices in various contexts?
- What is the relationship between agency, safety, and inclusion in the context of school and education?
Represented: Representation allows educators to express their ideas and concerns and validates their role in the teaching and learning process. Represented also refers to the extent to which educators proportionally represent the community they serve.
- To what extent are educators allowed, encouraged, or expected to participate in decision making, education policy task forces and commissions at the school and district level?
- To what extent do educators at my school reflect the demographics of the community being served?
Well: Every educator has the right to be well and strengthen skills and practices related to wellbeing.
- To what extent are educators’ personal and professional emotional, psychological, physical, and relational health promoted and engaged in the learning environment?
- To what extent is wellbeing supported through ongoing and embedded professional development?
- To what extent is the culture of the learning environment one of caring, compassion, dedication to wellbeing?
Secure: Every educator must feel safe and secure in their teaching environment. Security and change are not mutually exclusive.
- To what extent do educators feel physically and emotionally safe and secure in their teaching environment and interactions with colleagues, administrators, and students?
- How dependable is the process for educators to report that someone or something is affecting their ability to feel safe and secure?
Prepared: In order to thrive, educators must be prepared to plan and instruct engaging lessons, assess progress, and authentically connect with students within their specific school context.
- How is the profession attracting new educators and making the pathways to certification easy to understand, accessible, and equitable?
- To what extent are educators—both new and experienced—welcomed, mentored, and supported for growth from their first day and beyond?
- To what extent are educators given opportunities to mentor, lead, and be celebrated?
Conclusion
The Educator Wheel can be used as a basis for discussion at multiple levels: it is a self-diagnostic as well as system diagnostic tool. For individuals, it provides a framework for self-reflection and identification of development needs. It empowers educators to articulate their attitudes and experiences by providing an accessible and collaborative framework and a recognizable common lexicon. For managers and supervisors, it can be helpful for tracking not only the position and progress of individuals, but also the gaps and emerging trends within the wider organization. While it might not be possible to make all necessary changes in one year, the Educator Wheel can be used to identify priority areas for improvement. Regular use is recommended to ensure that educators’ voices are central to the educational landscape and decision-making processes.
The Educator Wheel promotes the transformation of education systems into mutually beneficial teaching and learning environments that function cohesively and effectively for educators at all stages of their careers. Thereby, the Educator Wheel contributes to increasing the number of high-quality educators who enter and remain in the profession and provides systems with information about how to create education environments where both educators and learners can be successful.
