People and places
How satisfied are teachers? Kent M Blakeney shares the results of a test pilot survey of ‘overseas’ teachers School satisfaction or climate surveys are common in overseas schools. There are many reasons for collecting data on parents, students, and teachers. Administrators and boards use the results for a variety of reasons such as developing a strategic plan, reporting findings in their annual reports, and accreditation self-studies. In my experience, the implementation, analysis, and reporting have run the gamut from very effective and useful tools used to make real change to poorly implemented general surveys that lead to misinformation and possibly do more harm than good. As such, “The General” Overseas School Survey was developed over several years to address some of the issues commonly found in school surveys. A test-pilot was conducted in late November and early December of 2016 with 104 teachers around the world. The results below show some of the highlights of the survey. Winter
Summer |
| 2017
Who took the survey? Here is what a teacher would look like based on the mode (most common response) from each of the demographic statements. You would live in Europe (31.4%), be married or single (both have 47.1% of the responses), female (73%), expat (96%), no children (65.3%), teach pre-K through 5 (57.1%), have been teaching for 11-15 years (29.4%), but only have 1-3 years at your current school (62.4%), have to commit to next year before December (39.2%), have a good benefits package (42.9%), make between $50,000 and $59,999 after local taxes (32.7%), save less than 10% of your salary (26.5%), and get paid in the local currency (47.1%). The results The survey was conducted using 41 statements across eight categories. For each statement, teachers were asked to rate
65
