Welcome to our first resource post! We’ll be posting discussions with accompanying resources for you each week that we hope you will engage, reflect, and share your experiences with on the thread!
Earlier this week, Jasmine shared her personal story and opened up our discussion around the question. ‘Why do teachers stay?’ I have similar stories from my own classroom teaching days, as well as some excellent reading I recommend on the topic. I will say, having an administrator ask me what is working well for me, was an excellent positive frame for a conversation I was always eager to have in the classroom.
In this week’s resource, we’re sharing a Conversation Starter Kit Prompt to help you ask this question, whether you’ve been doing this all along, or you’d like a place to start. We’ll show you how to use AI to help customize your own Conversation Starter Kit. Please feel free to copy/paste the prompt below and replace the bold words with your own context in an AI tool of your choice, such as Google Gemini.
Conversation Starter Kit Prompt
Purpose: How to ask a ‘why do you stay here as a teacher’ without making it weird.
Prompt: “I am a principal at a [grade level, specialty like STEM, IB, etc.] school with [quantity or generalization like small amount, large amount, etc.] teachers. I’m looking at issues of teacher retention from the lens of what’s working [optional: insert detailed examples around your perception of what is working like teacher pay, school culture, etc.] and I’d like to make sure I do understand what is working well for our teachers. Please draft [3-5] short, casual questions I can use in conversations this week when talking with teachers. The questions should be in my authentic voice [optional: provide your authentic tone such as, academic, friendly, humorous, etc.].”
Review, Refine and Test: Review your questions. Do they sound like you? Can you see yourself having a conversation with teachers with this? Refine your prompt as needed to modify the tone or add any other talking points relevant to your context. Try asking it to add “sample language for quick hallway or duty-post check-ins” (or other location specific contexts for your school). Try out your refined conversation starters this week!
Share: Share your finalized prompts, output results and any reflections you have from this process and/or from conversations you had with teachers in the thread here!
Optional Deeper Dive: During my grad school work, I read an excellent book all about teacher recruitment and retention. I recommend the following chapter and pages for this discussion specifically:
What it Takes to Stay: Three Stories of Teacher Retention. (Chapter 5 pp. 93-116)
Rinke, C. R., & Mawhinney, L. (Eds.). (2019). Opportunities and challenges in teacher recruitment and retention: Teachers’ voices across the pipeline (Contemporary Perspectives on the Lives of Teachers). Information Age Publishing
