Planning for a new school year should include considering how to support and engage teachers, too.
Otherwise, low teacher morale can create a self-perpetuating cycle, as students of disaffected teachers exhibit lower academic growth and more behavior problems—which in turn can lead to higher teacher burnout.
Education Week’s annual State of Teaching project finds that more support from administrators on things like student discipline and lesson planning can make a big difference in educators’ motivation.
During an interview at Education Week’s K-12 Essentials Forum on June 26, Pennsylvania English/language arts teacher Ashlie Crosson, the 2025 National Teacher of the Year, recommended eight ways to boost teacher morale throughout the school year.
(Crosson’s comments, below, have been edited for length and clarity.
Watch a video of the full discussion here.)
1. Do ‘pulse checks’ of teacher morale.
It’s difficult to have a genuine pulse on what’s going on because [administrators] are being pulled in so many different directions. That being said—how do I know what the morale is in my building? I look at how quickly the parking lot clears out at the end of the day.
I say that carefully because I don’t think that teachers should have to feel like they have to stay past their contract hours. ... But that being said, in any job, people who are happy doing the work that they’re doing often don’t say: “What do you know, it’s 4 o’clock; I guess I should go home.” If they’re walking out when the bell rings, that tells you something.
2. Do little things to make teachers feel valued.
I had an administrator one year who would just try every couple of weeks to pop in for like five, six minutes, and she would write on a Post-It note, “I just really love the line of questioning you asked here.” Or, “That was a really great use of the one-to-one laptops.” She would just pick something to compliment.
That was 10 years ago, and I still have those Post-Its in my desk. It’s that small. It’s just something that says, “I recognize the effort that you’re putting in. I recognize that you’re doing a good job today. You’re trying to do a better job tomorrow.” That goes a long way.
3. Be open to teachers’ ideas.
We are the boots on the ground. We’re the ones who see a problem in real time, [and] we’re like, “Well, what if we tried it this way?” But when we don’t have a way to take that idea to a person who can actually implement it, then we feel stifled and silenced.
If you find ways, through committees or instructional coaching positions, to develop teacher leadership, you’re also going to make the administrative side of the job have some delegation to it—which might make the administrator side of the job a little bit more manageable, too. And that can boost everybody’s morale.
4. Give teachers protected opportunities to collaborate.
We’ve all learned in education that the more ideas and the more dialogue and the more collaboration that you have, the better your solutions and your ideas become.
You see that in the way that we plan a unit. ... You start to bounce ideas off each other, and 15 minutes later, you have a better project. Spending some time facilitating that collaboration, that dialogue, can get your teachers excited ... and you might come up with better solutions.
On our professional development days, we have an opportunity to sit down and collaborate thoroughly, for hours of really good conversations: What do we want to peel back? What data do we want to look at? What curricular alignment do we want to pay attention to?
That’s rejuvenating for us, because it’s a chance to look at the bigger picture, and so often we have to focus on the day to day.
5. Identify and address toxic staff members
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, toxicity is going to exist because we’re all humans, and we have different personalities, different goals, and different things that we want out of our job.
You might come across a teacher who’s just really bitter or really disengaged. I feel like, more often than not, when I sit down and have a conversation with them, it’s because they have a really big heart and they’re frustrated that they want to see school or their classroom or their students be in a better place than they are.
I think some of that toxicity can be diluted when you find avenues for teacher leadership, and you give these people an opportunity to have an influence and get an idea out there that makes a big difference.
There’s no way you continue doing this job year in and year out if you don’t actually have heart for it because there are many other things that you can do with your talent. And so if that’s the case, then there is a core piece of them that wants to be the best teacher they can be—but you have to figure out how to tap into it, or you have to figure out what the barrier is.
6. Reduce chronic absenteeism
There aren’t as many students with attendance issues as there were the year or two after the pandemic, but now I have students with chronic attendance issues and more of them than I had pre-pandemic.
Logistically speaking, that’s a big frustration for teachers. In a high school classroom, ... I’m used to managing a class of 18 to 26 kids. But that means when you have a kid who’s missed multiple days or when you have a class [in which] six kids were absent yesterday, suddenly you’re trying to teach a lot of different lessons at one time. ... It’s just a lot of plates to spin, and it interrupts the cohesion of the class.
7. Make it easier for teachers to get to the roots of behavior problems.
The most success that I have with any kind of student behavior management, whether it’s discipline, attendance, or mental health, is when teachers and administrators and preferably family are involved together.
The times my administrator has been able to say, “Hey, this student and the parent are coming in for a conference at 11 a.m.; do you want coverage for your class?” my answer is always yes.
If you get to take that time out of the classroom ... in a space where you’re saying, “I’m choosing to talk to you because I’m worried about you, ... and this is what I really need from you, and this is why I need it"—that has made more difference than any number of [disciplinary] referrals that I’ve made, or any number of phone calls.
8. Reframe why teachers should be in the profession
It’s harder now to interest as many young adults in entering teaching, because they look at a job and they say, “I want a hybrid. I want a job that has unlimited vacation time.” We don’t have that.
I think we have to do a little bit of reframing in terms of the benefits, the tangible things that you get out of teaching that would make a young person want to come into the profession.
Every other industry has learned how to market itself and realized that they have to compete with other professions and other sectors. I don’t know that education sees itself that way because we see ourselves as a public good, so we don’t see ourselves as naturally competitive.
