As districts nationwide experiment with strategic staffing—an attempt to use teachers’ time in different ways to free up collaboration and reduce class size—a group of California schools wants to ensure new teaching structures relieve rather than increase teacher stress.
This fall, teams in the K-8 charter New School San Francisco and four other schools in the Bay area used data on both their students’ progress and their own well-being to rethink class schedules, student grouping, and flexible roles in a new potential model for strategic staffing.
Morgan Steiner, a 1st grade teacher at New School San Francisco, which is part of the pilot, said she was dubious at first.
“I was thinking, this is just going to be a lot more work. ... more meetings, more things to do,” she said.
But in the pilot, the 1st grade team received training and time to review their students’ academic and behavior data to select a particular class period for team-teaching. They settled on 1st grade reading. The schools allowed toeachers to align their schedules during the chosen class block, in which teachers trade students, co-teach, and bring in additional support, with an eye to both speeding up student learning and reducing teachers’ paperwork.
After implementing the team period this spring, Steiner said she’s now convinced of the model’s power. Co-teaching reduced her reading class size from 31 to 26, Steiner said, and cut her workload even more. Rather than differentiating every lesson, she and her colleagues plan groups based on the most challenging skills and switch them each week. Her take-home lesson planning for reading, which previously involved differentiating lessons for six different ability levels, is now “virtually nothing.”
It took a few weeks to adapt to new routines, but teachers and students have been “really motivated by the challenge,” Steiner said. “It’s amazing to think about, compared with how they were acting before.”
Collaborative teaching models growing
Strategic staffing—in which schools give schedule flexibility and sometimes differentiated pay for teams of classroom educators—has gained ground in many states as a way to provide more professional development for young teachers and retain educators longer.
There are no national data on how many schools use strategic staffing. More than 1,100 schools across 18 states use two of the most common team models. In February, the federal Education Department released guidance for its largest teacher quality grants, encouraging districts to use Title II money to test strategic staffing models.
Now others are piloting home-grown versions, like these Bay Area schools.
The pilot is an initiative of the Bay Area Collaborative for Reimagining Teaching, a coalition of eight charter and district leaders, as well as local government and education groups.
“We want to give teachers ways to think about strategic staffing from both a structural perspective as well as a collaborative learning perspective,” said said Courtney Ochi, the senior director of Thrive, a San Diego-based nonprofit working with the pilot schools.
Beatrice Viramontes, the executive director of the Bay Area Teach For America program, which is part of the pilot, said teachers in pilot schools have reported higher morale, and the group is also tracking whether teacher collaboration reduces teacher turnover.
“There’s a lot of power in teachers feeling agency in what they’re co-designing and implementing,” Viramontes said. “They feel invested and inspired to bring in other colleagues.”
It’s been critical for teachers and administrators to keep their own well-being in mind when planning schedule or staffing changes, Viramontes said. The teacher teams adjust roles and duties both to play to teachers’ strengths and support teachers’ work-life balance, and they have received ongoing professional development in managing team dynamics.
Steiner, for example, said she has struggled to meet rising student literacy needs on her own in the last few years. This fall, a small group of students knew their letter sounds but couldn’t blend them well. Others could sound out their words but were still working towards grade-level reading fluency—reading without a lot of stopping and starting. Still others read well above grade level—and often acted out in class after completing their work faster than the rest.
Now, during the reading block, Steiner teaches all students reading at or above grade level, with students who need practice with specific skills divvied up among another teacher, a teaching assistant, an interventionist and even, once a week, a speech therapist.
“There’s an impact for teachers’ well-being and sustainability [in the profession], but there’s also then an impact for students,” Ochi said. “When your teachers are less burned out, they’re able to provide [students] with more support. When teacher roles are differentiated, it’s easier to have more personalized and more rigorous learning because someone can have more capacity to go in depth.”
