Impact Kentucky teacher survey can support school improvement

Results from Kentucky's new survey of teachers' perceptions of their working conditions, called Impact Kentucky, have now been released and are available for review at the state, co-op, district, and school level. Impact Kentucky, which was administered to all Kentucky teachers and administrators earlier this year, replaced the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) survey, which was administered biannually from 2011 to 2017. In 2018 the New Teacher Center decided to discontinue providing the TELL survey to states, and this gave Kentucky an opportunity to develop a new tool that kept the best features of TELL while making it even more relevent for the work of school improvement. 

I had the honor of serving on a committee that assisted Kentucky Department of Education personnel and representatives from Panorama, the new survey provider, in designing the Impact Kentucky instrument. It turned out to be shorter than TELL, which was an advantage, and included several new features. See more about the structure of the survey here. About 85% of Kentucky educators responded to Impact Kentucky, which is an extremely high participation rate. In summarizing the statewide results, KDE pointed out the following key findings:

• Educators report most favorably on staff-leadership relationships.
• Educators report confidence in their ability to educate all students, regardless of race or cultural background, in a data-driven manner.
• Educators report least favorably about resources.
• Lower-grade educators have more favorable views of working conditions, especially when it comes to school climate and professional learning.
• Principals and assistant principals have more favorable views of working conditions than teachers and other education professionals.
• School leaders show clear strengths in leadership effectiveness and relations with staff.

Most of these findings are unsurprising and, for the most part, consistent with results from previous administrations of the TELL Kentucky survey. Of interest to me was that the second-l0west rated domain of the survey was feedback and coaching, with only a 56% favorable rating. The questions in this section had to do with the frequency and quality of feedback teachers receive from their supervisors. Less than half of teachers (48%) indicated that they learned much from the formal evaluation process at their schools. This is yet another signal that Kentucky schools, like those in most other states, have a lot of work to do in making teacher evaluation a more meaningful and growth-building process.

Interestingly, Impact Kentucky also suggests that teachers have relatively strong relationships with their administrators (staff-leader relationships was the highest-rated domain of the survey). Giving critical feedback to teachers may be uncomfortable for many principals because they worry doing so will damage their relationships. But my previous research on coaching principals to improve their instructional leadership found that school leaders can sometimes leverage their positive relationships precisely to help teachers grow. The principal in our case study found that her strong personal connections to teachers made them more likely to receive her improvement feedback in positive ways, and to trust her guidance and help. Giving good feedback is difficult, to be sure, but principals have far more capacity than they realize, and the results are worth the risks involved.

Survey results vary considerably across schools and districts, of course, so I encourage teachers and school leaders to explore their local data for strengths and growth areas. 

Of great interest to me is the extent to which Impact Kentucky results also correlate to student achievement outcomes when controlling for demographic variables. In other words, could improving teachers' perceptions of their working conditions also have a measurable impact on student learning? The linkage from previous research is mixed. The TELL Kentucky survey was most predictive for student outcomes at the elementary level, and only for certain constructs within the survey. I believe Panorama will be generating some research reports for KDE examining this connection, and that will have the greatest utility for school leaders. If we're going to take the Impact Kentucky survey seriously, then we ought to have some reasonable confidence how doing so may actually improve student learning outcomes.

Regardless, measuring and tracking teacher perceptions of their working conditions can be useful in other practical ways. For example, my research colleagues and I used TELL Kentucky results to explore the impact of implementing school-wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. These are the kinds of applications that may also be useful to school leaders if they are willing to work with their teachers to explore their survey data, what it means, and how they can collectively respond. Panorama is offering two webinars on June 4 and 5 to assist school officials to do just that. See more here. 

I look forward to seeing how that process, and the research behind the survey itself, continues to play out.

Related posts:

• New TELLKentucky research explores differences in principal and assistant principal perceptions
• PGES and the bathwater
• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA