A recent Google search for “Teacher Shortage” returned 4,630,000 results. People choose a career in teaching to fulfill their calling and they invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into their training. School leaders are responsible for making their teachers’ experiences rewarding and meaningful, so they remain in the field. Todd Whitaker argues that increased teacher morale and sense of efficacy are important components for retaining teachers. Heath and Heath argue for solving big problems using a sequence of small solutions that are actually in our control.

The year is 1999. I am sitting with my McGill University Advisor mapping out the next four years of my educational career. He looks at me with a smirk and says, “Yiddish? Why would you want to teach Yiddish? Who speaks Yiddish anymore? Now Hebrew—teach Hebrew. Study Hebrew, build your language skills, maybe an Ulpan or live on a Kibbutz. There will always be a future in Hebrew.” Hebrew, I thought? Not for me. While I learned Hebrew from Kindergarten to Grade 11, I was not connected to the Hebrew language. I had never been to Israel, I was not a regular synagogue goer, and my parents did not speak Hebrew at home. Hebrew was not a passion of mine.

This was the moment it became clear that teacher rounds had been a success: a group of teachers on rounds had just observed a second-grade literacy lesson and were offering feedback to their colleague. One teacher commented on how she really liked a technique the teacher had used. Without even a pause, the teacher who had been observed said, “Oh, I learned that from the third grade teacher when I observed her last time during rounds.” Teacher rounds had been implemented as a way to improve teacher morale, but had led to much more, including improved practice and shared conversation about instruction.

It is not to the credit of my first teaching experience that I stayed a teacher. I was hired and installed in my own silo. The eighth-grade girls were by turns friendly, motivated, disinterested, and oppositional; these behaviors often manifested in the classroom at the same time. I was tempted to explore another career but decided to follow my passion. As my coffee mug says, “To Teach is to Touch a Life Forever.”

The Great Resignation—masses of people leaving the workforce—has hit the field of Jewish education particularly hard. Even before the pandemic, organizations such as CASJE were working to understand the reasons behind the educator shortage, and since 2020, the shortage has intensified significantly. Aside from the persistent issue of relatively low salaries, at least three other factors can be seen as playing contributing roles.