Supporting Career Growth for Teachers Who Feel Stuck

Teachers in international schools often find themselves among other keen-to-grow teachers with not enough opportunities for promotion. They want to develop but feel stuck in their roles.

If you’re a senior leader, you want your high performing teachers to keep growing. You want staff to keep developing, but the lack of roles for many competent teachers can make them feel discouraged.

What options are there to help them keep developing—and to make support for their growth tangible and meaningful? Here are a few ideas.

Help teachers connect with peers. Job-a-like workshops are brilliant, but most subjects/year levels are held in South East Asia only every few years. Instead what about helping teachers join a group of peers that meets more regularly? A good way for teachers to find peers is through TeachMeets or PeerSphere. Some subject groups also have international networks, for example, the UK Association of Teachers of Mathematics has Hong Kong and Singapore branches welcoming both primary and secondary teachers, and MathsJam (which is a meetup group not only for teachers) has KL and Singapore meetups. Ed Events is another good way to find out about upcoming events.

Senior leaders at small schools might use their own networks to help teachers connect. If your school only has one Economics teacher, for example, do you know a senior leader at a big school whose Economics team might reach out to them for professional sharing? Another option for small schools is to invite their teachers to join a PeerSphere community—a regular online meetup of like minded peers, hosted by a trained peer facilitator. There are over sixty communities for the 2024-2025 academic year and it’s possible to join mid-year.

Create a school-based reading or discussion group. A lunchtime or after-school reading group could talk about teaching and learning topics and be hosted by a senior leader or someone else. In fact, hosting the discussion group could be a project for an interested teacher. The focus of the group could be education articles, or you could watch an education video together. Or it could be a sharing group, where one or more people are asked each time to share something they have read or learned. (A model for this is the WomenEd Get Lit events, where a handful of people plan to talk about a book they have read, while the other participants go to hear the talks. No reading is necessary for most of the attendees.)

Provide individuals with resources just for them. It’s simple and cost-effective to buy professional development books for anyone who has a hankering to read. In one-on-one discussion, senior and middle leaders can ask teachers what would be interesting to them and then buy the books for them. Personalised professional development is appealing to keen teachers, and they usually know what they want. Online courses are another option that is often easy and rewarding for teachers. EduSpark is one platform created by former educators, which includes a mixture of free and paid-for courses. The courses include some guided book studies—which could be combined with a copy of the book—for example, Having Hard Conversations by Jennifer Abrams.

Provide coaching or training for keen-to-grow teachers and teams. A short series of coaching sessions would be a good support for someone who wants to grow within their current role. It was an arrangement like this that helped Sarah in her role as head of faculty—she was offered five external coaching sessions, paid for by her school’s professional development (PD) budget, as a way to strengthen her leadership. Some schools we work with agree to pay for opt-in coaching for staff from their PD budget, with an annual cap. When staff opt-in to coaching, this is an empowering choice for their own development.

A menu of training workshops can also be a cost-effective option for departments or teams. For instance, The Bright Side’s workshops are priced competitively enough that they are feasible for a department’s budget. Perhaps the student support departments would find that a cross-cultural communication workshop, for example, would enhance their work with parents from around Asia. Or a tutor (homeroom) team would benefit from a thirty-minute quick learning session about using reflective listening with their students.

💥 What would be your suggestion to support growth for keen teachers?

💥 What support would you like for your growth?