School Leadership

How can a principal support teachers? Retention is the result.

The way you support your teachers is by getting better yourself. Then the twelve strategies start to work.

Most principals reach for tactics first. New PD calendar. Updated evaluation cycle. A standing Friday check-in. The tactics aren't wrong. They're just downstream of something more important.

Teachers don't decide to stay because their principal scheduled a workshop. They decide to stay because their principal is the kind of leader they want to grow under. The numbers back this up. According to a 2023 McKinsey study, roughly 900,000 teachers in the U.S., about one-third of the teaching force, were planning to leave their current jobs, if not the profession entirely. And the same study found something most retention strategies ignore: increased compensation is not a top reason teachers stay. Meaningful work is. Belonging is. A leader they trust is.

Ruckus Makers know this. Play-It-Safe Principals run the tactics and wonder why morale doesn't move. The twelve strategies below work, but only when the leader running them has done the harder work of becoming someone worth following.

In this article

1. Promote real professional development

The most useful professional development is targeted, voluntary, and tied to a problem a teacher is actually trying to solve. That's what separates real PD from a workshop nobody asked for. Principals who get this right ask teachers what they're working on, then build PD around the answer. Compliance trainings are unavoidable. Growth-oriented PD is a choice you make.

In Retention Is the Result, this shows up as the Teacher Success Scorecard. Twelve binary questions across six dimensions. Every "no" a teacher answers becomes a personalized PD goal, owned by the teacher, not handed down by the district. The scorecard is the conversation. Honest answers are the work. (If you're a new principal building your own development plan from scratch, the Ruckus Maker Entry Plan is the companion piece.)

Three questions to pressure-test any PD plan before the year starts:

• Is this PD designed around a real teacher problem, or an administrative checkbox?
• Will teachers leave with one thing they can use Monday morning?
• Did we co-design any of it with teachers, or did we just hand them a calendar?

If you can't say yes to at least two, the PD is probably about you, not them.

2. Facilitate peer collaboration

The most underused resource in any school is the teacher down the hall. Principals support teachers by protecting time for them to actually talk to each other about practice. Professional learning communities are the most common structure. The structure matters less than the protection. If collaboration time keeps getting eaten by district mandates, you're not running PLCs. You're running meetings with a name on them.

The Ruckus Maker move: pick one weekly 45-minute block, protect it from everything, and let teachers run it. No agenda from you. No standing items. Trust that they'll use it well.

3. Provide meaningful evaluations

A meaningful teacher evaluation is one that would still be useful if you took the rubric out of it. That means specific, observation-based feedback, an honest conversation about strengths and growth areas, and a clear next step. Evaluations done well are one of the highest-leverage things a principal does. Done as a compliance exercise, they erode trust.

If you want your evaluations to actually develop your teachers, separate them from the rating. Walk classrooms weekly, give micro-feedback without a form attached, and let the formal cycle confirm what teachers already heard from you. The book's framing: walk into a meeting, point to a "no" on the scorecard, and ask what it would take to move it to a yes by the end of the quarter. That's the conversation evaluations should make possible.

4. Build feedback loops, not an open door

An open-door policy sounds supportive. In practice, it makes you reactive. You become the building's interruption desk and teachers learn to bring you problems instead of solving them. Real support is the opposite. Build structured feedback loops so teachers know exactly when and how to bring you what.

 "Teacher attrition is a sign of teacher suffering." When teachers can't bring you the truth, you find out about the suffering on the way out the door. Structured feedback loops make the truth available before it becomes a resignation.

The shift: replace the open door with a calendar. A standing 15-minute weekly check-in with each team lead. An anonymous monthly pulse survey. A walk-around schedule teachers can predict. Predictability beats availability every time.

5. Involve teachers in real decisions

Shared decision-making only counts if teachers can change the outcome. Asking for input on a decision you've already made is worse than not asking at all. Pick two or three decisions per year where teachers genuinely shape the answer: curriculum adoption, master schedule design, PD priorities, hiring panels. Then honor the input even when it slows you down.

The district owns the floor. You own the ceiling. Inside that, teachers should help draw the room.

6. Foster a positive school climate

A positive school climate is built from a hundred small acts of attention. Knowing names. Remembering details. Greeting people before you ask them for something. Modeling respect in the moments nobody is watching. As Todd Whitaker famously put it: "When a principal sneezes, the entire school catches a cold." Your tone sets the tone.

The principal who has time to walk the building, talk to kids, and check in on a teacher having a hard week is doing strategic work. It looks like wandering. It builds the conditions every other strategy on this list depends on.

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7. Support classroom management

New teachers and struggling veterans need classroom management support more than they need another framework. Connect them with a mentor who actually teaches well. Sit in for 20 minutes and offer one specific suggestion. Back them up on referrals when the call is reasonable. Don't punish a teacher for needing help in the area schools are least equipped to teach.

The fastest way to lose a strong teacher is to send a difficult student back to their room with no support and a smile.

8. Celebrate teacher success

Recognition is a tool, not a vibe. Make it specific, public, and tied to behavior you want repeated. A handwritten card naming exactly what a teacher did. A 30-second shoutout in a staff meeting with a real example. A short newsletter blurb that says what happened and why it mattered. Generic "thanks for all you do" emails are noise. Specific recognition is signal.

The principle: people repeat what gets noticed. Notice the right things, out loud, on purpose.

9. Model self-care and balance

You cannot tell teachers to take care of themselves while you answer emails at 10pm. They hear you, but they watch what you do. Model the boundaries you want them to keep. Take your weekends. Use your vacation. Don't send Sunday-night emails. If you preach balance and live in chaos, you've trained them to feel guilty for resting.

This is also the most direct way to prevent burnout, including your own. A regulated principal builds a regulated building.

10. Build an inclusive workplace

An inclusive workplace is one where every adult feels seen, fairly treated, and able to bring real disagreement without consequence. Address prejudice and bias when you see them. Pay attention to who gets opportunities and who gets overlooked. Make sure the staff member who never asks for anything is on your radar as much as the one who always does.

Inclusion is a daily habit of attention, not a quarterly initiative.

11. Open the door to teacher leadership

Strong teachers want to grow. If the only growth path you offer is "leave the classroom to become an administrator," your best teachers will eventually leave or check out. Open up real leadership opportunities inside teaching: committee chairs, instructional coaches, new-teacher mentors, district-level subject leads, family engagement leads.

The Ruckus Maker principle: develop people past the role they're in. Some will stay because of it. Some will leave because of it. Both are wins.

12. Stay in close, honest contact

Frequent, honest communication is the foundation of every strong principal-teacher relationship. Weekly newsletters. Monthly faculty meetings that don't waste time. Walkaround check-ins that aren't agenda-driven. Email updates that say "here's what's coming" before teachers have to ask.

The test: would your teachers describe your communication as "clear and ahead of time" or "last-minute and reactive"? The first builds trust. The second drains it.

"Retention is not a strategy; it is the result of how you lead and the culture you create."

Danny Bauer · Retention Is the Result

The real answer to "how can a principal support teachers?"

Run the twelve strategies and you'll be in the top quartile of principals nationally. That's not nothing. But the principals whose teachers stay for a decade, who get nominated for awards by their own staff, who get followed when they move districts, they're not running better tactics. They're running a different operating system.

They're committed to their own growth. They get coached. They reflect daily. They started the year with a clear plan and they've been refining it. When you get better, everyone in the building wins. The twelve strategies are how you express that. The growth underneath them is what makes them land.

That growth is what Retention Is the Result is built to teach. And the offer below is how you put it on your campus.

Retention Series

Get the book. Get the system. Keep your teachers.

Retention Is the Result is the new book on why teachers leave and how to create schools where they want to stay. Three ways to read it, implement it, and get coached through it.

Built by Danny Bauer. 10+ years coaching top-performing school leaders.

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How principals actually support teachers

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Danny