Hey Tappsters!
Welcome to the USA Teacher Tapp blog 🎉 Week TWELVE of tapping! Welcome to all who joined this week!
Share the app with your colleagues and help grow the community. The best link to spread the word is onelink.to/teachertapp – it takes them straight to the app store! 📲✨
Now let’s get into the data…
1. Job-Hunting Teachers
New Year… New job?
The start of a new year often inspires people to rethink their careers. Teachers are no exception. On December 27th, 8% of Teacher Tapp panellists were already browsing job adverts. And this wave may grow—16% are considering leaving their current school by the end of the academic year.
But it’s not just about switching schools: 1 in 5 of you (21%) are contemplating leaving the profession entirely within the next three years.
One major driver? Workload. While 59% of you say working hours are manageable, over a third (35%) find them unsatisfactory. Just 7% remain undecided.
This isn’t unique to the US. Across the pond in England, the picture looks similar: 51% of teachers are satisfied with their hours, while 41% are not.
Teacher workload fluctuates throughout the year, so keeping track of these trends matters. That’s why we’ll revisit this question on Teacher Tapp to monitor how opinions shift over time.
Curious about why we ask the questions we do? Check out our blog explaining the quirks of our approach here.
2. Physical Activity! 🏃
Along with new jobs, another common New Year target is to be more active – but should we also be trying harder to get young people engage in physical activity?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services produces the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which recommends that children and adolescents aged 6–17 years do 60 minutes or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily.
However, when asked how much activity you thought young people should do daily as a minimum, opinions varied!
The most common response aligned with the guidance (43% said 60 minutes), however answers were more likely to underestimate rather than overestimate. The next most common response was 30 minutes (26%) and then 45 minutes (14%).
The amount of time children must spend in school exercising and being physically active varies from state to state – almost half of teachers (46%) thought 30 minutes every day of physical activity was recommended to be facilitated by the school.
What makes it hard to ensure students do more? Do let us know via Contact Us in the settings part of the app.
3. New Year, New Teaching?
Jumping from the gym hall back to the classroom – how many Teacher Tappers have made changes to their approaches in the last year due to reading about pedagogical ideas?
The answer is – a lot! An astonishing 73% of you have made changes to classroom practice as a result of your academic reading. The most common concepts to influence change have been cognitive load theory (55%) and growth mindset (45%).
What we haven’t captured here is whether the change has been adopting the concept or dropping it from your teaching repertoire.
Perhaps a good question would be what have you stopped doing in the last 12 months that you previously used to use in the classroom?
Keep an eye on the app for more questions about what you are (and aren’t!) doing in the classroom.
➕ Which country tapped the most on Christmas Day?
You might have been surprised to see we even asked questions on Christmas Day – but this is actually something we do for a few really good reasons. One – it stops the app from breaking! And two – we get to capture really fun data like… 12% of teachers love winter vacation the most of all the breaks ❤️🎄 and 51% believe holidays were more magical when they were younger (ah, the joy of nostalgia!)
So which countries were more likely to be tapping on Christmas Day?
- A good turnout in the USA meant 53% of the USA panel answered their questions on the big day (134 out of 252).
- Serious commitment from our Dutch teachers, where 67% checked the app (1314 out of 1949).
- Over in Belgium unwrapping gifts didn’t get in the way of edu-data, with 71% joining in with our questions (1166 out of 1639).
- Top of the Christmas tree was the England panel with 74% responding on Christmas Day (10,707 out of 14,182).
Daily Reads
We know lots of teachers on Teacher Tapp LOVE the daily reads, if you have ideas of reads we could feature, get in touch by emailing usa@teachertapp.com and we will check it out!
This week our most-read blog was…how to read difficult books from Daniel Willingham.
