Teacher Retention Starts with One Question: “How Are the Adults?”
by Nate Eklund
Schools are usually built around one question: How are the kids? We measure it, we debate it, we obsess over it.
And that makes sense, because the students matter most. That’s a fact in education.
But here’s the hard truth: kids don’t thrive if the adults around them are working in systems that drain them dry. No teaching philosophy is expansive enough to cover that. When the conditions of work disconnect teachers from their purpose, the costs add up. At some point, they either endure at great expense or they leave.
Teachers matter. The way their work is designed matters. Which means we need to ask a few questions that almost never make the faculty meeting agenda: How are the adults? How are our teachers? How are you doing?
It sounds simple, but in too many schools, educators feel unheard and undervalued. Decisions about schedules, curriculum, and policies are made at the top and handed down. Teachers are left to implement, often without being asked what will actually work in their classrooms. It’s no surprise that an independent survey conducted by the Winston School of Education at Merrimack College found that 77% of teachers say their input is rarely considered in school decision-making (A Profession in Crisis, 2022). That silence doesn’t just frustrate people. It pushes them out of the profession.
Simply asking How are you? opens the door to something much bigger. It tells people they’re seen. And being seen is the first step toward building trust and connection.
A single question does not solve burnout. But it signals that voice matters here.
Teachers spend their days connecting with students, listening, coaching, noticing every detail. But if no one turns that same attention back toward them, the well runs dry. Adults need structures that make connection and feedback routine. They need colleagues and leaders who create space for honest answers, and who treat those answers as essential to how the school operates.
A single question does not solve burnout. But it signals that voice matters here. It starts conversations that can reshape how work gets decided and done. And when that shift becomes embedded in the system, retention follows.
Vital helps schools take those next steps. Not with one-off gestures or surface fixes, but with resources, data, and structures that build vitality into the daily fabric of a school. When leaders act on what they hear, teachers see proof that their voice leads to real change. That’s when schools move from coping to thriving.
Here’s what happens when teacher voice moves from “optional” to “essential”:
Leaders make better choices because they’re grounded in lived reality.
Teachers see their fingerprints on how work gets done.
Vitality returns when people know they matter.
Too often, the “usual way” treats teacher feedback as secondary, if it is considered at all. But listening to adults is not extra. It is the work. When teachers feel heard, they stay. And when they stay, students gain the stable classrooms they deserve.
Try this this week: ask your staff, What’s one decision that would be better if teachers shaped it? Collect the responses, choose one, and change it. The answers will tell you how your school is really doing.