Strategic staffing—schools giving schedule flexibility and sometimes differentiated pay for teams of classroom educators—is providing more professional development for young teachers and retaining educators longer, according to an Education Week article.
Strategic staffing uses teachers’ time in different ways to free up collaboration and reduce class size. As districts experiment nationwide with this model, a group of California schools wants to ensure new teaching structures offer relief rather than increase teacher stress.
This year, teams in the K-8 charter New School San Francisco and four other schools in the Bay area used data on their students’ progress and teachers’ own well-being to rethink class schedules, student grouping, and flexible roles in a new potential model for strategic staffing.
In the pilot, Morgan Steiner, a 1st grade teacher at New School San Francisco, received training and time to review students’ academic and behavior data to select a particular class period for team-teaching–1st grade reading. Teachers were permitted to align their schedules during the chosen class block, where teachers trade students, co-teach, and bring in additional support. The goal: faster student learning and less teacher paperwork.
After implementing the team period this spring, Steiner says co-teaching reduced her reading class size from 31 to 26 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.”
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.
The pilot involving Bay Area schools 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,” says 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, says teachers in pilot schools report higher morale, and the group is tracking whether teacher collaboration reduces teacher turnover.
It’s critical for teachers and administrators to keep their own well-being in mind when planning schedules or staffing changes, Viramontes says. Teacher teams adjust roles and duties to play to teachers’ strengths and support teachers’ work-life balance. Teachers also receive ongoing professional development in managing team dynamics.
Steiner says 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 toward 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 divided among another teacher, a teaching assistant, an interventionist and once a week a speech therapist.
“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,” says Ochi.
Education Week
