Team-based staffing models can make schools work better for both learners and educators

The challenge

Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College's Next Education Workforce initiative addresses challenges of workforce design in traditional education models. The current education system does not deliver quality learning outcomes for enough people and communities. The one-teacher, one-classroom model is an unsustainable system linked to fewer people entering the education profession and more people leaving or retiring early. Meeting this challenge head-on, the Next Education Workforce initiative works with schools and other partners to 1) provide all students with deeper and personalized learning by building teams of educators with distributed expertise, and 2) empower educators by developing new opportunities to enter the profession, specialize and advance.

MLFTC first implemented a team-based model in 2019 with one team of three teachers at one school, impacting 85 students. Three years later, the implementation has grown to include approximately 100 educator teams, in 45 schools, across 10 school systems, impacting nearly 485 educators and 9,854 students. Currently, this impact is in Arizona and California; however, support, interest and momentum for this initiative are growing nationally, in particular through a partnership with the national School Superintendents Association, or AASA. Additionally, state departments of education, national charter management organizations, and regional nonprofits that support schools are interested in partnering around this work. 

To meet the growing demand both across Arizona and nationally, the Next Education Workforce team and Executive Director Brent Maddin, identified five strategic priorities: 1) Deepen initial proofs of concept and leverage them to create more resources and scalable learning opportunities; 2) Build a national network of those designing and supporting Next Education Workforce models; 3) Collaborate with colleges of education to prepare educators for Next Education Workforce models; 4) Build a research and evidence base associated with Next Education Workforce modes; and 5) Study and propose policies that catalyze Next Education Workforce models at the local, regional, state and national levels.

The approach

In 2022 Next Education Workforce team created a learning cohort for school systems interested in exploring what team-based staffing models could look like in their contexts. The cohort meets monthly to explore topics ranging from readiness conditions to support this work, where to build local proofs of concept, stakeholder engagement, budget implications and anticipated impact on existing policies and systems. 

To increase the likelihood of school systems in future cohorts, the team must codify and share what is working in the more than 40 schools across 10 school systems in which they are already working. This requires both staff from ASU’s Next Education Workforce team, as well as consultants who can capture video and insights from systems-level leaders, educators, students and families experiencing these models. Additionally, the team will prepare a subset of existing schools to serve as “demonstration sites” which would be the cornerstone of site visits for a national audience interested in designing team-based staffing models in their local contexts. 

Technical assistance is needed in helping systems design innovative staffing models and creating a set of systems and structures to support this work nationally, through the design of a hub-and-spoke strategy. The team would build a network of intermediaries, or spokes, that would support localized design and implementation of team-based staffing models. The spokes may belong to one of three categories: higher education institutions, local and regional support organizations or a dedicated team within a large school system. 

MLFTC would host monthly meetings and create two-way channels of communication and resource sharing. MFTC would continue to build professional learning and resources as the hub; the spokes would run local educator networks and provide specific technical assistance to school and systems leaders designing team-based staffing models. The hub-and-spoke support strategy intends to increase local capacity to support innovative staffing models by networking local organizations together and with the central team at MLFTC. Hopefully, large portions of the work can be centralized and particular aspects can be customized, given unique contexts and existing relationships. This strategy of “franchising” an innovation is relatively untested in the K–12 educational space, but could be a plausible solution to the challenge of scaling innovation with quality.