Guided Reading and Radioative Decay

We don’t make our teachers write out detailed guided reading lesson plans like we do for other lessons they teach. We don’t do that even though our lessons might be slightly better if teachers did this. The reason is radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay is the process through which atoms lose some of their energy and transform into another, lighter element. This process takes a vastly different amount of time for different elements. The half-life (which measures how long it takes half the atoms to decay) of lithium is .838 seconds. Sulfur, 87 days. For silver, 418 years. And it takes 245, 500 years for half of a pile of uranium atoms to change. Since this process happens at the atomic level virtually nothing like heat, pressure, magnetic fields or anything else can change the process. Uranium is always going to take about 245,500 years for half the atoms to decay.

This leads to a question for everyone involved in the high-performing charter world; is teacher retention more like lithium or more like uranium? How long can our teachers put in the extraordinary effort they do for their kids each day? And like radioactive decay, is teacher turnover unstoppable and even unchangeable? Or can we do better?

Teachers at KIPP are never going to be uranium (half-life 245,500 years) where most of the staff at a KIPP school has been teaching with us for 20+ years. Even if we do everything right, there are two factors that make this kind of traditional teacher stability really unlikely:

• Working at KIPP (or Achievement First, Rocketship, Mastery, etc) is really hard work. Hours are long. Lots of pressure (you know kids depend on you teaching well). High expectations for your work (mostly self-imposed). This is hard to keep up for many years. Not impossible. But hard.   

• Teachers may leave even if they are happy. Our teachers are super smart and really dedicated so they have lots of options for what to do with their lives. They are primarily under 30 and at the prime age for starting a family, which makes the bullet above trickier. Many of our teachers are from areas other than Philadelphia and may at some point want to move closer to their family. Significant others are often just as in-demand and may have to move for work or grad school. Etc.  

But we’re not lithium (half-life .838 seconds) either. There are teachers who started at KIPP Philadelphia 8 and 9 years ago still in the organization. One of the founding teachers at KIPP Academy in the Bronx has taught there ever since 1995 and just recently became the principal. I know of many teachers who have worked at KIPP in multiple cities when they have had to move because of family reasons. I’ve been with KIPP for 7 years and don’t plan on going anywhere else.

But nationwide and in Philadelphia, we know that we have to get better at retaining our best teachers for not just 3-4 years, but for 5,10, or 15 years. Teacher quality is by far and away the biggest in-school factor on how much kids learn. We have great teachers at KPEA so our kids learn a ton. And retaining great teachers is doubly important to the quality of the school as we grow a grade each year which automatically means we are adding 5-6 teachers every year.

So we’re somewhere between sulfur (half-life 87 days) and silver (half-life 418 years), but is teacher retention like radioactive decay? Can you change it? Yeah, you can, but it’s hard. For a variety of reasons (see above) some teachers are only going to be working at KIPP for a certain amount of time. It might be 3 years; or 5; or 8, but the amount of work and job intensity that someone loves at age 26 might not be what they want at 32. And that’s ok. But my job is to stretch out that half-life as long as possible.

And we’re making tons of progress on this front. KIPP Philadelphia’s teacher retention number was the highest it’s ever been last year with about 9 out of 10 teachers returning this year. What do we need to do to get that number higher and make sure we keep our great teachers as long as we can? Two pretty obvious things, that nonetheless, need to be in my mind at all times:

• Make the rewards of the job as high as possible. This means the obvious things like good pay (which we have at KIPP), good benefits (ditto), school provided laptop (tri-tto?), etc. But even more important than that are things like knowing your work matters, you work with great people, your job is fun, and you’re supported to get better at what you do every day. And it means feeling successful with your students each day. If your students are learning, if you are helping them to be nice, if you are enjoying being with your kids, you will stay at KIPP for as long as you possibly can.

• Make the demands of the job as low as possible. This means making the job easier, not easy. It means giving teachers as much planning time as possible each day. At KPEA we reduce planning responsibilities by departmentalizing the work so a kindergarten teacher is just responsible for planning reading and not reading, math, writing, and science. We try to do a good job handling difficult students so the stress is not entirely on the teacher. It means never making teachers do paperwork that has no purpose. It means never having your planning period taken away, even if the art teacher is out.  

To return to where we started, my job is to balance what will make the most immediate student impact with what is best for our teachers’ satisfaction, health, and long-term sustainability. Our teachers spend between 6-10 hours a week planning and a week’s worth of lesson plans is about 100 pages per grade. It’s so big, we can’t staple the packet together so we use giant binder clips to keep the weekly plans together. So our planning is super detailed and really strong. And because we do so much small group reading, our teachers do about 15 guided reading lessons a week. If we made teachers do highly detailed lesson plans for all 15 lessons I would be adding another 6-8 hours of planning each week and I don’t think that’s a good idea. Instead, teachers do a 3-week planning form that has them analyze the needs of their students, what objectives to focus on, and what books to use and then they write their daily plans in whatever format they find most helpful. And we do this because our teachers are the most amazing teachers I have every worked with and I want their half-life at KIPP to be as long as possible. And that is going to be what helps our kids get to college in 2023 and 2024.