As regular readers know, I’ve spent decades wondering how we might rethink teaching. Of course, while it’s easy to talk about, the hard part is actually doing it. That’s what makes the work of the Next Education Workforce initiative, pioneered at Arizona State University, so intriguing. I spoke a couple years ago with Carole Basile, the dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, about their vision for reconfiguring how teaching works. Well, as things are a lot further along now, I wanted to check in with Executive Director Brent Maddin about where things stand, what they’ve learned, and what’s ahead. Here’s what he had to say.
—Rick
Rick: Brent, so, what is the Next Education Workforce initiative?
Brent: Think of the Next Education Workforce initiative as a fundamental change in the way we staff schools. We help schools and systems move from the one-teacher, one-classroom model of staffing schools to a team-based approach. At its most basic level, we put a group of students at the center and build a team of educators around them. Critically, the educators on that team share the same roster of students during the same block of time, which allows teams to dynamically regroup students and adjust the schedule to better meet learner needs. In elementary contexts, this might look like three 3rd grade teachers sharing 75 students all day. In high school, an algebra, biology, world history, and English teacher could share 100 students during a four-hour block. Importantly, there isn’t one Next Education Workforce model. Rather, we created a set of design elements to help educators create staffing models that make sense given their students, their curricula, and the realities of their educator workforce.
Rick: What’s the core intuition here? And what are you learning as you seek to expand and scale up the effort?
Brent: The core intuition is that a team-based approach to school staffing creates freedom for educators, school leaders, and system leaders to innovate. It’s been exciting to see all of the other innovations that schools have implemented due to this single structural change. A team-based staffing model can reduce the need for substitutes, allow for the creation of “lead teacher” positions, and let high school students be recruited as elementary tutors for several hours a week.
Rick: Can you share a couple of things you’ve learned along the way?
Brent: As we’ve grown, we continue to come back to the fundamental idea of starting small. We’ve seen many times how the first one or two teams in the first one or two schools can create momentum to drive demand from educators and families, which helps this idea scale across a school system. Oh, and teams have to have ample planning time together. Without that, nothing changes.
Rick: I spoke with your colleague, Arizona State ed. school Dean Carole Basile, a couple years ago about what you all are doing. Give me a status report: What’s changed since then, and where are you now?
Brent: The biggest difference between 2022 and today is our scale. We have partnered with more than 100 schools across 40 school systems in 15 states to launch team-based models that are impacting more than 25,000 K–12 learners. To do this, we’ve had to figure out scalable ways to support educators as they start this work. Over the last two years, we have built a cohorted experience for systems leaders to explore team-based staffing and another for school leaders to design their first teams. We’ve built a ton of open-access resources. All that said, one of the biggest difference makers in helping school systems on their journey to launching team-based staffing models has been the power of seeing the work in action. A couple of years ago, we started hosting site visits in Arizona—two-day experiences where participants can tour schools and talk with educators and learners. We’ve hosted more than 600 visitors from across the United States, and these visits are the number-one factor that school and system leaders cite in deciding to commit to changing their staffing models. Starting this fall, we’ll have a free virtual site-visit option that we hope will approximate the live, in-person visits that we’ll continue to offer.
Rick: What’s been the response of teachers?
Brent: The response from educators has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve got three headlines based on our most recent data. First, we find that educators working in team-based models have 4 percent lower turnover rates, a number that doubles for lead teachers and more than triples for early teachers. Second, educators working in team-based models report 9 percent greater levels of satisfaction and are 13 percent more likely to recommend the profession to a friend. Finally, team-based educators are 22 percent more likely to be rated highly effective in evaluations, even when controlling for previous evaluation ratings.
Rick: That certainly speaks to teacher morale. What can you tell us about impact on instructional quality or student outcomes?
Brent: We are waiting on a huge set of student-outcomes data from last school year, but what we’ve seen from previous years is encouraging. Third graders taught by educator teams see an extra 1.4 months of reading growth, on average, compared with those in one-teacher, one-classroom models. We have some very early data that suggest 9th grade Algebra 1 students in team-based models passed at rates that were 4 percentage points to 7 percentage points higher than demographically similar students in other nonteam-based high schools in the same district. Qualitatively, we are seeing students more engaged across all grade levels. When asked what they think about having a team of teachers, elementary students often say things like, “All of my teachers are good, but I feel like Ms. X really has my back” or “I like having multiple teachers. If I’m not getting it from one teacher, I go to a different one.”
Rick: Obviously, as you and I have discussed previously, a lot of reforms over the years have featured team teaching or career ladders. The results haven’t been inspiring. What’s different here?
Brent: I’m not sure that I’d say that the results haven’t been inspiring as much as the research has been incredibly thin—at least on the team-teaching front. As educational historian Larry Cuban wrote, “Team teaching in K–12 classrooms flew like a shooting star across the educational sky in the 1960s and disappeared by the mid-1970s. …” In that same piece, Cuban shares that teachers were anecdotally more satisfied and academic results were mixed—but mostly that these efforts were not well studied. Fast-forward to today, and we’re heartened by the results from Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture model, which finds about an extra half-year’s worth of reading and math growth in models that are similar to ours. More to the point, today’s teaching and learning cultures are fundamentally different from what they were in previous decades: Educators are not staying in the profession as long, learning can happen in more ways and places and has the potential to be much more personalized, and everyone wants more flexibility. A team-based approach to staffing schools acknowledges these realities and creates the conditions for a more strategic response.
Rick: There are obviously big implications here for both policy and practice. Can you talk about a few of those and what you’ve seen?
Brent: At the level of the educator teams, it is essential that they have ample time to meet and plan together. To create that time, other changes to policy and practice are sometimes necessary. For example, we’ve had educators vote to increase the number of students served by the team to double the planning time they have each day. Other schools have contracted with community-based organizations like local chess clubs or dance studios to hire regular “substitutes.” This also creates more planning time for educator teams. Basically, we have found that the team-based models work best with more autonomy and flexibility—not only for the teams themselves but also for schools and even school systems. That could take the form of more site-based budgetary control or the creation of “innovation zones” where systems have more flexibility around accountability, certification, and time use as they adopt creative approaches to staffing.
Rick: What are a few of the key bottlenecks and obstacles you’ve encountered?
Brent: Most of the things that people think would be roadblocks—certification requirements, facilities, union contracts—often aren’t an impediment to starting this work. Take contracts, for example. As Rob Weil of the American Federation of Teachers points out, there is almost never a union contract that can’t accommodate small-scale, innovative pilots. We’ve found that the idea starts to sell itself, and educators and families end up being the biggest advocates for change when educators are involved from the beginning, the work starts at a small scale, and people can choose to participate in early models. Clearly, newer and more dynamic learning spaces and greater flexibility in certification requirements would make the work of team-based staffing easier, but they aren’t necessary to the work. One of the biggest challenges that our school partners face is the existing educational infrastructure, which was built for the one-teacher, one-classroom paradigm. This includes everything from scheduling software and student-information systems to teacher-evaluation rubrics. We’ve been impressed by the workarounds that our partners have created, but everyone would like systems and structures that “just worked” for team-based staffing models. We are finding solutions in new products and providers and, as a network, we can put more pressure on existing providers to change their systems in order to meet the needs of new ways of staffing schools.
Rick: OK, last question. For educators who aren’t necessarily in a position to embrace the whole Next Education Workforce model, what are one or two ideas that they might find useful?
Brent: Find an educator friend and form a team. At its most basic level, we define a Next Education Workforce model as at least two professional educators sharing the same roster of students during the same period of time. Based on that definition, two teachers could partner up for just a couple of hours a day or for a couple of weeks during a year. At the elementary level, this could look like a couple of 2nd grade teachers sharing students during just the math block. In high school, maybe a biology and English teacher could work with the scheduler to ensure the same 50 learners had those classes during the first two periods of the day. In both of these examples, the educators would benefit from the ability to plan together, share insights about the learners, create more dynamic groupings, and even do interdisciplinary work. The beauty of starting this small is that educators can try out teaming in a very low-risk way.
