Teacher Voice is a survey instrument that uses our Value Framework to help a school illuminate the most critical values that contribute to teacher satisfaction and effectiveness. The report that is generated from such a process is shown as a slide show here.

Teachers interview teachers non-reciprocally (a teacher interviews another who did not interview them), asking the interviewee to order the cards as if they were deciding between schools. Value cards are placed in order of having the greatest impact on the teacher's decision.
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Once the order is established, the interviewee is then asked to rate each value for the school environment in which they work. There is a further opportunity to provide some contextual narrative around the thinking of the rating.

A slideshow illustrating the Teacher Voice interview process is
here.

The Teacher Voice Survey Programme is designed to analyse and describe the current state of a school’s culture. It achieves this through a process that allows teachers to:

  • prioritise the key characteristics of the school environment
    ◦ rate their current school on these characteristics
    ◦ discuss and capture the experiences that underpin their ratings

Thus the whole programme can be completed as follows:

  • 2 sessions of about an hour each to complete all interviews
    ◦ Comments entered online
    ◦ Interview sheets sent away for processing
    ◦ Coaching of Senior Leadership Team CIAB with Teacher Voice results as input
    ◦ Results feedback to staff by school Senior Leadership Teams

What is important for teachers is very stable across schools and can be summarised into the following:

  • clear moral purpose: engaging every child in their own learning
    ◦ clarity around how to behave based on mutual respect
    ◦ interesting and challenging work

The first two of these fall immediately within the actionable area of senior leaders but do so in a way that is affected by the attitudes and behaviours that senior leaders express – to change the culture senior leaders need to change themselves.

Coaching, and training senior leaders as coaches, are effective ways of creating this change and of setting up a school to address the third issue – interesting and challenging work for teachers.

Teacher Voice should be repeated after 12 months as a way of monitoring change at a whole school level.

To view a slideshow that illustrates Group 8's research on teacher effectiveness and satisfaction go
here.