Giving classroom educators time to observe and learn from colleagues, addressing student discipline concerns and encouraging educators to discuss where their schools are headed are ways of boosting teacher morale, according to an Education Week article.
For a project on improving teacher job satisfaction, the EdWeek Research Center measured job satisfaction on the Teacher Morale Index. In 2026, the national index stood at +13 on a scale of -100 to +100. That’s a slight decline from last year’s score of +18, but it suggests that teachers overall view their jobs more positively than negatively.
At a related event, educators spoke about how disruptive student behavior and a lack of support from administrators can lower teacher morale — and how those factors can hurt student academic achievement.
Administrators need to validate the work teachers do as a skilled, specialized occupation, not just a calling, said panelists.
“I see my job as a profession, and I want to be treated as a professional,” said Eric Lewis, a science teacher in the San Francisco Unified District, who was one of the panelists.
Lewis said administrators can treat teachers as professionals by providing clarity on what their work should entail and a school’s mission.
Alicia Simba, a transitional kindergarten teacher in the Oakland Unified School District, said administrators must take teachers’ concerns about bad student behavior seriously.
“It’s very exhausting being kicked or screamed at … and then going to families, and them being like, ‘Well, they never do that.’ Or administrators being like, ‘Well, have you tried relationship-building?’” Simba said.
Vito Chiala, the principal of William Overfelt High School in the East Side Union High School District in San Jose seeks to help teachers manage the biggest practical challenges they face on the job. He heard them say they didn’t have time to complete grading, read Individualized Education Programs for students in special education and prepare lessons for English learners.
In response, his school built a schedule with a prep period and an open period for teachers to get work done.
It’s about “holding teachers in high regard at the administrative level and allowing them access to power on top of that foundation of doing meaningful work collectively,” he said.
Being an effective teacher requires hard work, and if a teacher has low morale, they are less likely to put in the extra effort required to do their job well.
That leads to a cycle in which the quality of students’ education suffers, the morale across a school suffers, and problems emerge with student behavior, the panelists said.
“If you’re not a happy teacher, your students are going to pick up on it,” Lewis said.
Some of the more detailed strategies the panelists suggested for improving teacher job satisfaction included allowing teachers, especially newer ones, to learn from their colleagues through observation.
Teacher morale also hinges on teachers receiving support to improve their classroom practices.
Professional improvement can be accomplished by providing practical, district-level training. For example, to better enact restorative justice practices (a less punitive approach to student discipline with the goal of getting ahead of bad behavior), one district took about three years to train all educators in understanding what restorative practices are.
Educators also were given time to examine their own belief systems about restorative practices and provided skill sets, so when educators saw student behaviors they needed to address, they knew how to respond.
Teachers also need more opportunities to learn about how to improve in their profession while getting paid to do that work, Lewis said.
“If you’re not learning more as a teacher, you’re falling behind,” Lewis said, “because your students are new, the technology is new, the content is new, so we need to be constantly learning and building that in.”
Education Week
