English teacher Vatricia Harris came to Westwood High School in Mesa, Ariz. eight years ago as an experienced—and disillusioned—educator.
“I came here because I was trying to figure out if I was going to stay in education,” Harris said. “I felt like I had plateaued.”
That changed when Harris joined one of Westwood’s first teaching teams in 2018. Sharing planning and instruction for a group of 90 students with science and math colleagues renewed her enthusiasm for teaching, she said.
“The science teacher looked at my content, I looked at her content, and we were figuring out what the bridges are and the connections—and it was like my own content came alive all over again,” Harris said.
Today, Harris, now Westwood’s assistant principal for teaching and learning, helps train other teaching teams.
Now, new research suggests that this way of organizing teachers’ work also pays dividends at large for teacher retention. The study, released this morning by the University of Pennsylvania and the Center on Reinventing Public Education suggests Harris’s experience isn’t unusual: Teachers who can work together to set the educational tone and practice for their students are more likely to stay in the classroom.
Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education led researchers at Arizona State University and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which is housed at ASU, to analyze teacher morale and turnover. They used administrative data from 2020-23 and teacher survey data from 2023 to compare the morale and job mobility of nearly 2,000 teachers from 24 schools, including more than 140 working in teams in the 50,000-student Mesa, Ariz., school district.
Mesa was one of the first districts to adopt ASU’s Next Education Workforce program. Rather than a single teacher responsible for a stand-alone classroom of 30 students, NEW teachers work in teams of two to six educators of different subject and specialty expertise—often supported by preservice teachers, career-technical instructors, and tutors—to teach groups of about 100 students. The teams collaborate on lessons, schedules, and flexible student groups each day.
Teamed teachers were more likely to be early in their careers and less likely to hold master’s degrees than their peers working solo, and they were also more likely to teach in higher-poverty schools—all characteristics generally linked to higher teacher turnover.
But the researchers found, after controlling for teacher and school characteristics, that the teamed teachers were half as likely to leave their schools as their non-teamed peers.
Why? Ingersoll and his colleagues surmise that the teachers working in the teams both developed a greater sense of ownership and accountability for their teaching practice than did teachers in stand-alone classes.
“It turns out a really key element is that teachers be given some leeway to design and shape” education and practice decisions, Ingersoll said. “If they have more autonomy, more voice, more authority, then it really makes a big, big difference in their retention.”
Through surveys, the researchers found the New Education Workforce teachers were more likely than teachers in the district working solo to feel they had a say in education decisions at their school. Teamed teachers were also more likely than solo teachers to feel control over their schedules and able to take creative approaches to instruction.
Teachers, both solo and in teams, who reported a stronger sense of autonomy in their teaching were more likely to remain in their schools. But teamed teachers who reported the strongest sense of authority in their teaching practice had the highest retention of any group—only about 6% of them left the following year, compared to 16% of solo teachers with little sense of teaching authority.
Empowering teachers to make important decisions
Brent Maddin, the executive director of ASU’s Next Education Workforce initiative, said it does take time and training to prepare teachers to work in teams. The group works with schools to determine how to structure teaching teams, and participating teachers get ongoing professional development.
The 3,300-student Westwood High was among the first in the district to adopt NEW team teaching. Each of its nine teams is responsible for around 150 students in 9th or 10th grade, and includes an English, math, science, social studies, and career-education teacher, as well as a special educator. But Harris, the principal, said teaching teams still take a while to develop healthy roles and group practices.
“Those first couple of months, it was terrible because we didn’t know what we were doing. They were like, ‘We’re going to give you some autonomy. You don’t have to stay with the bell schedule,’” Harris recalled, “but I didn’t know how to do all of the things, because I was coming from compliance, compliance, compliance. ... So it took a while to come together.”
Maddin agreed, noting that school and district leaders have an important role to play in team-teaching’s success.
“In the most effective models that we have, the school leaders are not just saying [to teachers], ‘Yes, you can do these things,’” Maddin said, “but also are actively asking, ‘So, educator team, have you flexed your schedule recently?’”
The study showed that having clear team support and accountability, coupled with flexibility for teachers within those teams, were associated with the highest teacher retention.
“The conventional model pretends that the teacher can do everything for everybody and knows it all. And no one can. It’s ridiculous. And in this [NEW] model, teachers have autonomy, but also they’re within a team so it’s not just like an individual can go run amok. Seven heads are better than one, so to speak,” Ingersoll said.