In recent years, schools across the U.S. have faced a stark reality: Classrooms are harder to staff, and teacher turnover is rising. In 2024 alone, more than 50,000 teaching positions were left unfilled. Behind every vacancy is a deeper story—of educators reevaluating their roles, struggling with burnout, or seeking environments with strong school culture and meaningful support systems.
But amid these challenges, some schools are rewriting the narrative. Heritage Middle School in Valdese, North Carolina, is one of them. Once facing the same retention hurdles as many others, Heritage now reports that 87.5% of its educators wouldn’t want to teach anywhere else—a rate nearly 20% higher than the state average. How did they achieve that? By reshaping the parts of the teacher experience that schools can actually influence: culture, leadership, growth, and purpose.
This article explores the roots of teacher retention and offers actionable insights drawn from Heritage’s transformation through the Global Leaders framework.
School leaders: Looking for sustainable ways to improve teacher retention? Download our free white paper to discover practical strategies rooted in real-world success, like Heritage Middle School’s transformation.
What Really Improves Teacher Retention?
Teacher turnover is often blamed on salary or workload, but research and experience show that it’s more nuanced. While compensation matters, schools cannot always control state budgets—but they can control how teachers experience their work every day.
Factors that influence retention include:
- School culture: A supportive, collegial culture can make or break a teacher’s experience.
- Leadership and voice: When educators are trusted as professionals and invited into decision-making, they develop a sense of ownership.
- Professional growth: Ongoing, relevant, and personalized development opportunities give teachers a pathway to grow without leaving the classroom.
- Purpose and relevance: Teachers want to feel their work matters. When they see the connection between what they teach and real-world outcomes, they stay engaged.
These are not abstract ideals—they are measurable, implementable conditions that school leaders can shape.
How Heritage Used the Global Leaders Framework to Transform Retention
Heritage Middle School’s story is one of deliberate, systemic change. Instead of focusing narrowly on compliance or test scores, the school adopted Participate Learning’s Global Leaders—a framework that weaves together career-ready education, teacher leadership, and student engagement to build a thriving, purpose-driven school culture. At the heart of this framework are four interconnected pillars:
- Career-Ready Graduates, which helps students and teachers connect learning to real-world purpose and future careers.
- Shared Leadership, which ensures that both educators and students have a meaningful voice in shaping their school experience.
- Globally Empowered School Culture, which fosters a unified focus and a set of shared values across the entire community.
- Connected Community, which strengthens relationships between schools and the wider world through local and global partnerships.
Together, these pillars helped Heritage create a thriving environment rooted in relevance, collaboration, and empowerment—key drivers in boosting both teacher and student retention. Here’s how each of the four pillars contributed to building a thriving culture of engagement and commitment—for both staff and students.
Career-Ready Graduates: Reconnecting Purpose and Improving Student Engagement
Teachers and students alike need to see that what they’re doing matters. At Heritage, the Career-Ready Graduates pillar helped reframe daily learning as a stepping stone to the future—making learning feel purposeful and forward-looking.
Teachers facilitated action-driven learning projects that connected classroom content to real-world global issues. One of the most impactful efforts was a student-led campaign to eliminate single-use plastic bags from the school’s breakfast program. Students tracked data, created public awareness materials, and presented solutions to leadership—ultimately shifting school policy. This wasn’t just a recycling initiative. It was career exploration, leadership training, and community advocacy wrapped into a single learning experience.
Steps Your School Can Take to Build Similar Success:
- Integrate global challenges—like food security—into core subjects.
- Embed career exploration into everyday learning by showing how academic skills connect to real-world careers.
- Offer real-world learning experiences that give students authentic insight into their future paths.
When students believe their learning has real-world value, they show up—and so do teachers.
Heritage’s success isn’t a one-off story. Across Participate Learning partner schools, intentional shifts in culture and leadership are driving real gains in teacher retention. Our white paper unpacks the key strategies—from elevating teacher voice to building globally connected communities. Explore the full report to see how your school can create the conditions where teachers thrive.
2. Shared Leadership: Elevating Voice to Retain Teachers
Retention improves when people feel heard, valued, and included. At Heritage, Shared Leadership wasn’t reserved for administrators—it extended to teachers, PLCs, and even students.
Teachers were empowered to shape the school’s direction, from designing professional development to developing the School Improvement Plan. This same ethos extended to students, who were given opportunities to lead learning, organize events, and collaborate with teachers on inquiry-based projects.
Steps Your School Can Take to Build Similar Success:
- Form a teacher advisory or global committee with real decision-making power.
- Create a student leadership committee to provide input on school initiatives and policies.
- Promote student-led learning experiences that position students as collaborators, not just participants.
When leadership is shared, ownership increases—and both staff and students are more likely to stay engaged and committed.
3. Globally Empowered School Culture: Building Strong School Culture with Global Competencies
At Heritage, culture wasn’t left to chance—it was intentionally built. Through the Globally Empowered School Culture pillar, the school focused on cultivating a common set of global skills that helped everyone—from students to staff—connect learning to life.
Central to this work was the intentional, schoolwide development of Participate Learning’s 10 global competencies: communication, empathy, curiosity, flexibility, intercultural understanding, valuing differences, self-awareness, global connection, critical thinking, and understanding global issues.
By embedding these skills across lessons, routines, and conversations, Heritage created a unified language and vision for what success looked like—not just academically, but socially and emotionally as well. Teachers and students could name the competencies, reflect on their development, and see their relevance to real-world challenges and career readiness.
Steps Your School Can Take to Build Similar Success:
- Embed global competencies into existing initiatives like SEL, PBIS, or academic improvement plans. Use morning meetings or shout-outs to highlight these skills in action.
- Create a yearlong roadmap that emphasizes one competency each month to build shared language and routines schoolwide.
- Provide professional development and planning time so teachers can explore how these competencies show up across subjects and how to assess them authentically.
By grounding culture in shared competencies, schools foster a deep sense of belonging, consistency, and personal growth—conditions that increase both teacher satisfaction and student engagement.
4. Connected Community: Building Community Connections Through Global Learning
The final pillar—Connected Community—ensured that learning at Heritage wasn’t confined to the classroom. Students engaged in projects that linked local issues to global challenges, and partnerships with community organizations provided opportunities for authentic service and impact.
This sense of relevance extended beyond students. Teachers worked across disciplines, partnered with local experts, and saw their efforts reflected in real change—whether in school policy or student empowerment. That shared purpose anchored everyone more deeply to the school.
Steps Your School Can Take to Build Similar Success:
- Develop global partnerships for collaborative projects that span communities or continents.
- Tie learning to local service—whether through environmental cleanup, hunger relief, or community interviews.
- Involve families and community members in global education events, projects, and panels.
When school feels connected to something bigger, it becomes a place of meaning, not just routine—and that’s what keeps people coming back.
Building What’s Possible—Together
The story of Heritage Middle School shows what’s possible when a school commits to creating the conditions where teachers and students feel connected, valued, and inspired. Through intentional leadership, meaningful learning, and a culture grounded in global competencies, they didn’t just improve retention—they built a place where people want to stay and grow.
Whether your school is already working on similar goals or looking to sharpen its focus, the strategies outlined here can be adapted to fit your unique context. Every school’s journey is different, but we all share the same challenge: building environments where people thrive.
Download Our White Paper on Teacher Retention Today
If you’re looking to improve teacher retention and build a strong school culture, our new white paper, “Supporting Teacher Retention and Teacher Leadership with the Global Leaders Framework,” dives deeper into these actionable strategies. It includes tools for integrating global competencies, fostering shared leadership, and aligning professional development with career-ready learning. Download it for free to explore how shared leadership, global learning, and career-ready practices can support your retention efforts—starting from where you are.
