As the COVID-19 pandemic waned in 2022, data surfaced in journals and news reports about the extraordinary number of teachers considering or actually leaving the profession. In fact, 2021–22 would prove to have the highest teacher attrition rate in a ten-year time frame (Nguyen 2022). Given that a significant number of states do not report this data, a conservative estimate is that over 300,000 teaching positions nationally are vacant or filled by underqualified individuals (Franco and Kemper Patrick 2023).

Over the course of thirty years as a teacher and school leader, I became a devoted observer of the education world and was both alarmed by and curious about this unfolding story. Some schools were not experiencing this upheaval—why? What conditions foster the environments where teachers are tending to stay?

This question prompted an idea, a term for what I’d been formulating during my years of working in and visiting schools. Resilient teaching community captured the cohesiveness, continuity, community, and a deep sense of belonging for adults and kids in some schools. Through my writing and ruminations on this idea, I found I wanted to test and define it. Thus, I embarked on a journey that included school visits, conversations with teachers and school leaders, explorations of literature within and beyond the educational domain—and found that resilient teaching community is a novel term encompassing long-understood but infrequently practiced community-building approaches. The writing that emerged from this process is the proposed book, When Teachers Belong: Cultivating Resilient Teaching Communities.