Use Resources to Effectively Meet Demands

As mentioned earlier, the working conditions in the survey were broken down into two subcategories: demands and resources. Job demands refer to the “physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects that require sustained physical and/or psychological effort. In the teaching context, demands encountered by teachers may be low levels of student engagement, student misbehavior, or lack of collegial relationships” (Starrett et al., 2023). Job resources, in contrast, are those things that help teachers meet those demands in various ways.

When there is a balance between demands and resources, teachers can effectively fulfill their responsibilities. However, a lack of resources compared to the level of daily demands teachers encounter leads to stress, burnout, and attrition. (Harmsen et al., 2018). In other words, the extent of demands that teachers experience is not inherently “bad” or “good” for teacher efficacy and retention. It is the extent to which teachers experience access to supportive resources that are sufficient to meet those demands that makes a difference.

This is why SC TEACHER and its partners recommend an asset-based approach in your work with these data: thinking about how you leverage areas of strength in service of identified educator needs is what has the potential to positively change teachers’ experiences. In doing so, your school and district can improve your results and retention accordingly over time. In the next set of tools, we will take a closer look at the items within your district’s areas of strength and improvement. Your team may find this information useful as you determine how to leverage demonstrated strength to support areas of improvement. This activity— like the preceding one—is designed to be embedded in an existing meeting with a team responsible for school or district improvement. Because you will work with specific items rather than broader groups or areas of school conditions, this activity gives you a more precise way to examine patterns in your data and consider related action steps.