Job Design: An Integrated Approach to Creating Effective Teacher and Principal Leadership Roles
Details:
- Resource Type: Issue Brief
- Estimated time: 1-3 hours of reading and meetings time
Purpose:
Learn the foundational principles for job design and why they are crucial to both supporting the people in the job, as well as program success
Directions:
- Convene a sub-set of your HCMS Alignment Team focused on career ladder roles for educators (e.g., Master Teachers or Principals, Mentors, Coaches).
- Read Job Design: An Integrated Approach to Creating Effective Teacher and Principal Leadership Roles and reflect on how career ladder roles or jobs are currently designed, and how they might be improved to become more balanced.
- Refer to your grant program logic model as you read the paper and identify which grant strategies focus on career ladder roles.
- Hold a meeting to discuss the reflection questions and plan next steps.
Reflection Questions:
- Why do poorly designed jobs lead to stress, burnout, and attrition?
- Which job characteristic stood out to you as one that might contribute to burnout and stress in the career ladder roles or jobs in your grant? Why?
- What is one job characteristic that you might focus on to improve the job design of the career ladder role/job?
- Convene a diverse focus group of educators currently in the career ladder role. Ask questions, based on table of job characteristics and associated questions on pages 6-8 (modify questions as needed per your context) and gather their input on how the job design of their position might be improved. Use their insights to re-design their career ladder positions, such as increasing job autonomy, reducing task load, or increasing supervisory support.
- Compare and contrast your focus group results to the findings in “A Tale of Two Types of Schools” in the next resource.
