Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the findings of the second annual Educator Confidence Report, which examines educator sentiment on a range of issues, including technology use in classrooms, professional learning opportunities, and overall comfort and familiarity with digital learning tools.
Key takeaways from the report include:
- Deeper family engagement and professional learning top priorities for educators: 58% of educators reported a desire for more parent and family engagement while an overwhelming 84% spend their own money on professional development.
- Educators are turning to social media to interact with their communities: Facebook was the most popular social media tool used by educators as a whole to communicate with families, although district administrators showed a slight preference for Twitter.
- Decrease in concerns about meeting standards and accountability requirements: Concern by educators about teacher accountability requirements dropped by 13 percentage points year-over-year (from 63% to 50%), while concern about meeting the requirements of Common Core/state standards assessments dropped 11 percentage points (from 58% to 47%).
- State assessments being delivered digitally: Over one third of educators (39%) are administering end-of-year state assessments in a digital format.
- Digital paradoxes revealed: Newer teachers (ten or fewer years of experience) use social media more often to engage with students than more experienced educators. More experienced teachers (11+ years), however, use other digital tools, such as digital white boards and online assessments, with greater frequency.
The Educator Confidence Report is an independent survey that was conducted by the market research agency MDR on behalf of HMH. This was the second administration of the survey to a diverse national cross-section of 1,047 educators.
