The walton family foundation
The Walton Family Foundation Educator Study offers a scalable solution to foster purpose in educators across a range of academic settings. To address the challenge of integrating personal development programs into busy school environments, we implemented our purpose intervention, True North, with educators across several Connecticut K-12 school districts. Our approach, based on the principles of wise interventions, provides a practical, impactful, and scalable means to purpose cultivation by weaving True North into existing school curricula and activities rather than being delivered as a standalone curriculum.
True North uses a train-the-trainer model, focusing first on cultivating purpose and belonging among educators. This inside-out approach is both realistic and sustainable for several reasons:
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Supporting Educator Well-being: Recognizing the challenges of burnout and retention among teachers, True North addresses the need for educators to find and reconnect with their purpose. This not only improves their mental health and engagement but also positively impacts the students they teach.
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Creating a Ripple Effect: Purpose is seen as contagious. As educators rediscover their purposes, they serve as role models for their students. By training educators in purpose crafting, we hope to embed purpose as a common language and practice within the school community, creating a lasting impact.
The programming we designed around True North also aims to improve objective and subjective measures of performance, resilience, and well-being among participating educators. Research has shown that increased retention and motivation among educators is associated with improved student outcomes.
This study is guided by the following research questions:
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Does engagement in the True North intervention increase educators’ purpose and retention? Does it reduce burnout?
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How do educators experience the purpose intervention program? In what ways do they experience the program as impacting their own purpose?
We hypothesize that educators who participate in this intervention will report higher levels of purpose, retention, and lower levels of burnout. The cultivation of purpose among educators may in turn increase their ability to cultivate purpose among their students.