Next Education Workforce launches first resources on workforce models

What is the Next Education Workforce? Is your school ready for a new workforce model? Those questions and others are addressed in a new set of online pedagogical and professional resources from Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. 

Developed through the college’s work with schools and other partners and backed by a Walton Family Foundation grant, the new open-access resources provide educators, organizational leaders and policymakers with tools for understanding and implementing fundamentally different ways of staffing schools.

“Sharing our learnings from the early years of our work is key to helping more schools and districts benefit — in Arizona and beyond,” says Brent Maddin, executive director of MLFTC’s Next Education Workforce.The initiative works with schools and other partners to provide all students with deeper and personalized learning by building teams of educators with distributed expertise, while empowering educators by developing new opportunities for role-based specialization and advancement.

The resources offer a closer look at one school in particular: SPARK School at Kyrene de las Manitas in Tempe, Arizona, an MLFTC partner. In the first of several case studies to be added to the resource site, educators from SPARK School describe the impact of teaming with distributed expertise on both educators and students. Team members share how SPARK School leverages project-based approaches and student choice to personalize learning. And a teacher candidate discusses the value of having community members share their expertise with students.

“The Next Education Workforce initiative was created to make schooling more personalized for students, and the job of teaching more sustainable for educators,” says Lisa Wyatt, senior program strategist of the Next Education Workforce. “At SPARK School, you can see what that looks like in action. You can see the school schedules, maps of their learning spaces and configurations, and the teams of educators they’ve put together.”

Additional case studies and resources for implementing next education workforce models will be added to the resource site as soon as June. 

 “This is a first-of-its-kind resource, which means it will be evolving,” says Chelsea Nilsson, associate director of design for the Next Education Workforce. “The collaborative nature of our work means that we’re continuously adding and updating resources in partnership with schools, community members and MLFTC faculty.”

View MLFTC’s Next Education Workforce resources. Work with MLFTC or share your feedback at edworkforce@asu.edu.