It's Time for Inspiration to Drive Teacher Development

What's needed is a rigorous framework to theorize and implement it. So we built one.

I taught in a New York City high school for years. I loved the students. I loved the subject matter (English). What wore me down wasn’t any of that. It was the system. The relentless compliance. The evaluation rubrics that measured everything except whether I still felt alive in the work. The professional development that left me feeling like my time could have been better spent. The creeping sense that few people positions of power actually cared whether I was inspired, only whether I was performing.

So I left. Not the profession, but the classroom. I spent the years since trying to change the system: from the inside while working in the city’s Central offices and from the outside, as a researcher, a professor, a nonprofit leader. Somewhere in all of that, I landed on what I think is a central lesson of my career: Inspiration is more than a marketing ploy to lure people into teaching; it is the fuel that keeps teachers growing.

Seriously, Inspiration? Seriously.

That’s the idea behind the Inspiration Index—a tool we’ve been building at the Academy for Teachers, and the most ambitious effort I am aware of to put inspiration front and center in teacher development.

Here’s the problem the Inspiration Index is trying to solve, which might be described as a kind of a systemic bait and switch. Inspiration is what brings people into teaching. Ask any teacher why they chose this profession and you’ll hear some version of inspiration: a subject that lit them up, a student they believed in, a calling they couldn’t shake. But the moment teachers walk into a school building, inspiration disappears from the professional conversation entirely. No rubric measures it. No evaluation framework asks about it. No professional development session nurtures it. If we took inspiration more seriously, it might counterbalance what are disturbing trends in the profession.

Nationally, 77 percent of teachers say their work is frequently stressful. Nearly 70 percent of early-career teachers have left or seriously considered leaving. In New York City, more than 40 percent of newly hired teachers are gone within five years. And teacher turnover here in the country’s largest district surpasses $200 million a year. That’s just the measurable part. The immeasurable part is the student who loses a trusted adult mid-year. The parent who has to start over with yet another new face. The colleagues left holding the bag in an already understaffed building.

Something fractures between the inspiration that brings people into teaching and the conditions waiting for them on the other side of the classroom door. The field has known this for years. What it hasn’t done is take inspiration seriously enough to actually measure it.

We Can Measure Inspiration

But some have. Psychologists Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot established in 2003 that inspiration is a rigorous, measurable psychological state. Not a vague feeling, not a metaphor for enthusiasm, but a construct with distinct characteristics and documented consequences. Their research maps inspiration as a three-phase process I call: a Spark (something wakes you up to new possibility), an Insight (you see your work, your students, your purpose differently), and Action (you’re moved to try something, create something, stay).

The Academy for Teachers' Inspiration Index is built around that model, which we describe in a recent white paper. It combines a research-backed Matrix that maps our programming against what we know makes professional development actually work, a survey bank drawn from validated inspiration science and the NYC citywide teacher survey, and a single number that tracks the trajectory of a teacher’s inspiration over time.

It is an attempt to build something the system never had but sorely needs: a rigorous, research-grounded way to detect inspiration in teachers, track it over time, and design professional learning that deliberately produces it. Not as a nice-to-have. As the whole point.

It’s time to move inspiration where it belongs, front and center to the head of the class.