Finding, Developing, and Supporting Teachers: Challenges for Today’s School Leaders

The Winter 2024-25 issue of the AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice is focused on teachers. The impact of their work can be profound, leaving indelible impressions on generations of students that influence all of society. Their teaching often goes beyond the formal stated curriculum, embedded with tacit lessons on civility, morality, ethics, and fairness - life lessons that can shape character, ideally for the advancement of a civil and just society.

Yet in recent times teachers and school leaders have faced resistance from those opposed to any classroom discussion of topics pertaining to social or emotional development, arguing that these should remain the purview of the parent. Instruction should be bound to the basics, not topics that examine content that can present as ambiguous, requiring critical interrogation and introspection, sometimes in contrast with parental understanding or beliefs.

The assumption of the “stick to the basics” argument is that what “should” be left to the parent is indeed being addressed in the home, yet this does not always happen. For many students, the school becomes a surrogate for the family. For 10 months out of the year, children and adolescents spend more than half of their waking day in school; relationships develop organically as does learning.