Conventional approaches to school staffing make it more difficult for schools to find and keep great teachers. It’s time to innovate and transform the role of teachers to make the profession sustainable, the National Council on Teacher Quality argues in a recently published guide on strategic school staffing. Entitled “Reimagining the Teaching Role,” the guide invites state, district and education preparation program leaders and advocates to explore innovative solutions like teacher teams, state policies that help or hinder innovation and the research behind why strategic school staffing matters.
The Next Education Workforce™, developed by Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, was highlighted as one of four existing approaches to strategic school staffing that helps schools improve outcomes for both educators and students.
The guide highlights how the Next Education Workforce team-based approach to strategic school staffing leverages and encourages the distributed expertise of a core team of educators. Those educators work together to provide deeper, personalized learning to students. The model also encourages flexible scheduling and often allows teams to use physical spaces differently to better support learning.
“The National Council on Teacher Quality is a storied organization, and their work on reimagining the teaching role is a signal, I think, that we must be thinking not only about the teacher pipeline but also the larger set of working conditions and the job itself,” Brent Maddin, executive director for the Next Education Workforce, said. “It’s a testament to our work and the work of the field to address this long-standing workforce design problem.”
The National Council on Teacher Quality is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is “to ensure every child has effective teachers and every teacher has the opportunity to be effective.” Founded in 2000, the organization uses data research and policy analysis to work toward its goal of achieving a diverse teacher workforce. Additionally, the National Council on Teacher Quality provides countless resources for educators, school and system leaders and advocates, including evaluations of teacher prep and licensure and state policy databases.
“One of the best ways to get policy to change is to have some concrete examples,” Maddin said of the spotlight for the Next Education Workforce. “And it’s really exciting to have organizations like the National Council on Teacher Quality thinking about the policy conditions under which these strategic staffing models can launch and thrive.”
