What is Teacher Retention

This chapter explores systems thinking through the lens of open systems within the national teacher crisis in post-pandemic schools. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated a long-standing, significant teacher shortage, and there have been several federal, state, and local initiatives to address the challenges educators are facing. Through an exploration of the literature, this chapter provides insight to the historical context of teacher shortages and provides recent measures across the nation that have been introduced to encourage teacher recruitment and retention. Additionally, this chapter presents practitioners—school leaders and teacher leaders—as voices from the field to contextualize experiences of the five federal recommendations in mitigating the teacher crisis, providing insight to the daily challenges in meeting the needs of their schools. As a concluding reflection, the authors propose a potential solution through the open systems lens to build collective capacity in addressing the post-pandemic teacher shortage crisis.