Teacher turnover refers to the phenomenon where teachers leave their current schools or positions and move to new ones. This can happen for a variety of reasons such as personal, professional, or financial. In many cases, high teacher turnover can have negative effects on the culture of an educational institution.
, teacher turnover is unusually high and this is a sign of failure in the education system. This means schools that are riddled with a higher teacher turnover show that there is a fissure somewhere in the school system. A school with a sound staff retention policy is likely to benefit from its current staff whom it is capable of developing professionally.
In order to understand the effects of high teacher turnover, it is important to consider both the advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages of high teacher turnover is that it can bring fresh ideas and perspectives into a school. New teachers can bring new teaching methods and approaches, which can help to revitalize the educational experience for students.
However, high teacher turnover also has several disadvantages. One of the most significant disadvantages is the disruption to the continuity of projects and programs within the school. When teachers leave, the school must spend time and resources finding and training new teachers, which can disrupt the educational experience for students. Additionally, when teachers leave, they take their knowledge, expertise, and relationships with them, which can lead to a loss of institutional memory and a decreased sense of community within the school. It is good for schools to always fight to keep their teachers wherever possible.
Another disadvantage of high teacher turnover is the potential negative impact on student achievement. Research has shown that students who have consistent, stable relationships with their teachers tend to have better academic outcomes than those who experience frequent teacher turnover (Boyd, Goldhaber, & Lankford, 2004). This is because students need time to build relationships with their teachers and establish trust, which can be difficult when teachers are constantly coming and going.
The impact of high teacher turnover can be even more pronounced in international schools. This is because these schools often serve a diverse student population and require a high degree of cultural competency from their teachers. When teachers leave, it can be difficult for the school to find replacement teachers with the same level of cultural competency, which can lead to a decrease in the quality of the educational experience for students.
Furthermore, high teacher turnover in international schools can also affect the recruitment and retention of students. When students and their families see a high teacher turnover rate, they may question the stability and quality of the school, which can lead to decreased enrollment and increased competition for new students.
In conclusion, high teacher turnover can have a significant impact on the culture of an educational institution. While it can bring fresh ideas and perspectives, it can also disrupt the continuity of projects and programs, lead to a loss of institutional memory, negatively impact student achievement, and impact the recruitment and retention of students. In order to mitigate these negative effects, it is important for schools to focus on creating supportive, stable environments for their teachers, and to invest in professional development programs that help to retain high-quality teachers.
References:
Boyd, D., Goldhaber, D., & Lankford, H. (2004). The Drawback of Teacher Mobility: Evidence from North Carolina. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 23(2), 267–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.10147
As a teacher, you are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to engage your students and help them learn effectively. With the advent of technology, there are many tools and platforms available today that make the job of a teacher easier and more efficient. Quizalise is one such platform that has been specifically designed to help teachers create and manage quizzes, assessments and surveys for their students. In this blog post, we will explore how teachers can use Quizalise as a powerful teaching tool.
Quizalise is a user-friendly and intuitive platform that allows teachers to create custom quizzes, assessments and surveys in a matter of minutes. With its easy-to-use interface, teachers can easily add questions, images, videos and audio to the quiz, making it interactive and engaging for the students. Quizalise also offers a wide range of question types including multiple choice, true/false, matching, ordering and more, allowing teachers to create quizzes that cater to different learning styles and preferences.
One of the biggest benefits of using Quizalise is that it makes it easy for teachers to track and assess their students’ performance. With the platform’s advanced reporting and analytics features, teachers can quickly see how their students are performing and identify areas where they need improvement. This helps teachers to adjust their teaching methods and provide additional support where needed, ultimately helping students achieve better results.
Quizalise also offers teachers the ability to create quizzes and assessments that are adaptive and personalised. With the platform’s AI-powered algorithms, quizzes can be automatically personalised for each student based on their previous performance, ensuring that every student is challenged and engaged at their own level. This makes the learning experience more enjoyable and effective, helping students retain information better and achieve better results.
Another great feature of Quizalise is that it is highly flexible and can be used in a variety of ways to enhance the learning experience. Teachers can use the platform to create quizzes for homework, formative assessments, revision, or to test understanding after a lesson. Quizalise can also be used to create gamified learning experiences, making the learning process more fun and engaging for students.
In conclusion, Quizalise is a powerful and versatile teaching tool that can help teachers create engaging and effective quizzes, assessments and surveys for their students. With its easy-to-use interface, advanced reporting and analytics features, and the ability to create adaptive and personalised quizzes, Quizalise offers teachers a wealth of opportunities to enhance the learning experience for their students. So why not give it a try and see for yourself just how much Quizalise can transform the way you teach and your students learn.
A school, just like a home, must be able to provide safety and security such that learning may take place without hindrance. One of the areas of concern for most educationists is the security of the learners. Learning in the 21st century requires students to collaborate and use technology in their learning among other dimensions too. Emails are a great tool for effective and formal digital communication at school and failure to enforce some security or code of conduct may end up making students vulnerable to some cyber criminal activities. To make use of all Gmail applications, the teachers and students must have an email they use. Fortunately, Google mail has some features that would require to be looked at and ensure the students' safety.
Some pundits may argue that students must never have access to emails at school and proponents of the usage of digital tools think that this thought is retrogressive and of the yesteryears. The digital world is here for everyone and instead of resisting it, we must embrace it and use it to enhance teaching and learning. The following blog post is going to look at some ideas on how one may make use of the inbuilt features of Google mail to enhance the safety of learners. Google apps for education has some inbuilt features and tools that make it possible to provide a safe working environment for teachers and students.
Organisational Units (OU)
In the Google admin console, organisational units must be created and have units according to the organisation's functional area. All students must have sub-units where there are lower primary, upper primary, and lower and upper secondary units. Organisational units are important in ensuring that certain permission is given to a certain group of individuals.
Some configurations to consider.
1. Emails are to be limited to certain individuals in the organisation. Senior students may have their emails barred from sending an email to younger students.
2. Restricting communication from outside the organisation. Emails for students must be restricted from emailing outside the school organisation. This enables them to be safe from spamming, phishing or hacking. The school may white list some domains for example if it is a sister school for collaboration purposes.
3. Bad word list- The bad word list can be enabled to quarantine, reject or modify any email that may contain words deemed bad.
4. Blocking students from sending emails to email distribution lists ensures that students do not send bad things to their peers.
5. Google vault- this can be used to retrieve and search emails from any user, especially where there may be allegations of misuse or cyber-criminal activities.
6. Email forwarding to personal accounts may be disabled too.
All these rules may be adjusted to different grades differently. Thanks to the OU feature in the google admin console. Stricter organisational rules enable the safety of our children from the marauding criminals whose modus operandi has now shifted to online.
By the end of an academic year, it is prudent for a teacher to archive his or her classes in Google classroom to ensure that the students do not have access to them. Here l am going to show you how to do the process easily.
You simply go to the home page in your google classroom and choose the class you want to archive. Look for the three dots that you will see if you let your mouse pointer hover on your classroom.
Select the three dots on the class you intend to archive
After that, you will find an option written archive and you simply click it.
Select archive
There will be an option archive again and you select that. Your class would have been archived and the students will no longer have access to it.
In case you need to use the material from an archived class in the future, here is what you do. Go to the top main menu to the left and click. If you scroll down the menu there will be an option written Archived class and you select that. You will then find all the classes that you archived. Hover your mouse pointer on the three dots again and then select Restore and another pop-up menu comes and you select restore again.
The 21st-century student has a lot of technological issues to cope with and it will be naive for a teacher to ignore the fact that the educational environment is fast changing. The students' social, psychological, and physical development is heavily influenced by their everyday usage of electronic gadgets and anything deviating from this would probably make their learning boring. The presence of electronic gadgets and computers can either be beneficial or detrimental to education in this digital era.
A 21st-century teacher would need to fuse in what these students like and experience every day, in the teaching and learning processes such that the students may find learning fun and engaging. In his book entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed(1968), Paulo Freire spoke of a banking concept in education that every educationist must endeavor to avoid and gaming can be beneficial in ensuring that learning objectives are achieved in a very exciting way. Our students are now interested more in computer games as compared to yesteryears when they would go out and play soccer and other games with family members and friends. Their friends are now in the virtual world and instead of living in denial and trying to force them to revert to the yesteryear methods of learning, educationists must be dynamic and adapt their way of teaching to the environmental, sociological, political, and technological 21st-century dictates.
Quizziz is a web-based application where the teacher creates an account and then has the option of making his/her own quiz or just selecting from the existing library of quizzes created by other teachers. Besides quizzes, slides may also be created that may be fused with quiz too to make them interactive and engaging. The teacher can make the quiz be teacher-paced or student-paced depending on preferences. The student-paced mode makes students be able to go back to the questions that they might have not answered well and redo them correctly.
There is another option of giving the students the quiz as an assignment. In the end, the teacher gets a detailed report which shows which questions would have been failed and the overall performance of students.
Quizziz has now introduced a paper mode. The teacher simply prints the codes and installs a quizziz application on their mobile phone and then displays the questions using a projector. The students will raise the cards with the letter corresponding to the answer on top. The teacher will then scan the answers whose QR code is captured and go to the next question using the mobile phone.
Blooket is also one of the interactive games that my students enjoy a lot. The teacher has to also create an account and then either create the lessons or just choose from the library by going to the discovery option. The teacher will then use a keyword to search for the lesson he or she wants. After this, the teacher will have to choose the game mode he wants. My students have liked Crypto hack a lot. The fishing frenzy and battle royale have also proven popular with the students. There are options to make the games timed or points /collections-based.
Nearpod is what I would call a packed site whose versatility is quite amazing. The teacher can make slides for presentations only, have an interactive whiteboard, and add pdfs for students to read. This is a teaching tool that has everything that one needs. The simulations make the lessons very engaging etc. It has several activities like polls, fill-in blanks, time to climb, and so on. One needs to create an account and then enjoy the privileges of Nearpod. The free library has professionally made neared lessons and activities that would engage the students.
Minecraft is a subscription-based application from Microsoft and has different worlds that students can choose to solve problems. It is a very good tool for collaborations and has tonnes of activities. Games can be personalized to cater for the students' environment. While students can have individual accounts a Microsoft for education account would be ideal to use Minecraft education.
This is what students see every day and they enjoy it.
This is mostly ideal for primary school students at a lower level. The site has plenty of activities for the teacher. All subjects are catered for. These include reading, writing, spelling, puzzles, clicking games, and several activities. The free site has a lot of adverts and may be an ugly thing, especially when dealing with students. Toy theatre is highly recommended.
With centimeter, you just need to create your account and then enjoy the free components of this tool. If you subscribe to it you will be able to get more game options. There is an option for presentations where you will be able to see all the presentations that you created previously. The templates on the navigation menu enable you to choose different types and modes of your interactive games. This tool s very useful for both assessment and teaching.
Kahoot is a favorite of many teachers and students because it is very easy to use. The free version has some basic games while the paid ones come in with more options. There are many fake websites on Kahoot on the internet. Kahoot has a library of other teachers' work and the teacher can enjoy them for free. A teacher may also make his/her own quiz. Kahoot reports give you a detailed insight into what the students have done.
Word wall (https://wordwall.net), just like the others mentioned above is a very effective tool that students love a lot. When you sign up you will have a choice to make your own lessons as well as get templates from the community library. It has matches up, puzzles, balloon pop, jumbled words, group sports activities, and so on. The interactive games are very useful in all subjects and this tool may be very useful for most teachers.
Pear deck is both a web-based application and an add-on you can use with google slides to ensure that your lessons are engaging. With Peardeck, students are given a code that makes them be able to join the teacher's slides and make the lessons run smoothly. Peardeck makes students annotate, and choose answers among a host of other engaging choices during the teaching and learning process. When you are using google workspace for education your admin may disable the installation of some add-ons. There are several ways of circumventing this but talking to your workspace administrator is the most ethical thing to do.
GoFormative also known as Formative, is a web-based tool that makes teachers create digital formative assessments, tasks, or assignments that are easily accessible from any electronic device: laptop, tablet, or smartphone. A teacher may create his own task or activity or may make use of the pre-created stuff found in the library. This tool can be useful in all subjects across the curriculum. The paid version offers more capabilities as compared to the unpaid one.
By
Bothwell
[ I am an educational technology enthusiast and currently enrolled as a Ph.D. in Educational Technology with the University of Central Michigan. Besides being a math and computer science graduate, I am also a Microsoft and Google level 1 and 2 certified educator as well as trainer. With so many certifications in a wide range of applications, my passion for education has seen me being a fan of the 21st-century educational dimensions which are a must for any serious educator. ]
