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1st Opportunity Culture Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett and Jiye Grace Han on June 17, 2013

In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. As districts and schools around the country consider implementing their own Opportunity Cultures, they want real-life examples of just how others have already done so.

Today, we begin a series of case studies that provide in-depth looks at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers’ impact on students and peer teachers. In the studies, we will describe new programs, including personal descriptions of teachers involved. We will also analyze how well the programs stack up to the five Reach Extension Principles, which call for reaching more students with excellent teaching, higher pay, sustainable funding, job-embedded development opportunity, and enhanced authority and clear accountability for great teachers.

In our first study, Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, we profile Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators’ two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers.

Leading Educators’ fellows are currently spread out over 65 schools in Kansas City and New Orleans. A fellow’s school district or CMO must commit to placing the fellow in a role in which he or she leads a team of other teachers to meet the fellow’s standards of excellence; teaches students; and facilitates a teaching team’s collaboration and planning. After intensive training and visits to schools with a record of closing the achievement gap, fellows create yearlong projects that focus on leading other teachers and raising student achievement, designed and implemented by fellows to meet their schools’ needs.

At Edwardsville Elementary, a district school, Lavely serves as the chair of her teaching team, working with a group of 60 to 80 students and two or three other teachers, covering all subjects. She leads all of her team’s planning meetings, monthly professional learning community meetings, monthly “learning walks,” and, occasionally, all-staff meetings or professional development sessions. In that, her role resembles the Opportunity Culture initiative’s Multi-Classroom Leadership model.

For Lavely, the chance to change school culture to cultivate excellence and reach high bars with all students through leading other teachers—while remaining in the classroom herself—has proved irresistible.

“I set my expectations so high, but I always think there’s more that can be done,” Lavely says. In this study, Lavely describes the leadership responsibilities she has accepted and her team’s results: A set of classrooms fully proficient in both math and reading—including students in special education and English language learners—and 70 percent of those students ranking in the top two achievement categories on the 2011–12 state math exam, up from 52 percent the previous year.

“In my first three years here, I kept hearing the words ‘pass the state assessment.’ With the rest of the school, I set that as my goal,” she says. “Last year, one of things I started realizing, and bringing back to my team, was that these are really low expectations. If you’re setting a goal, that’s what you’re going to get. That truly is what led to our 70-percent grade achieving in the top two categories.”

Overall, Leading Educators reports, students taught by teams led by Leading Educators fellows achieved five times more improvement on state standardized tests than their district counterparts in Kansas City in 2011–12, and 12 times more than their counterparts across the districts they serve in New Orleans.

Although invigorating, this program was not started as an Opportunity Culture project. Lavely’s role misses crucial pieces of the Opportunity Culture Multi-Classroom Leadership model: formal accountability for the results of all the students in her “pod,” and higher pay, within existing budgets, to match the greater number of students she reaches with excellence. Lavely discusses how the lack of pay matching her greater responsibility may ultimately push her out of the classroom, into administration—but how much she would prefer to continue teaching.

With a career path that would allow her to continue leading other teachers without leaving the classroom, and better pay, “this would be the ideal position for me,” Lavely says.

As Leading Educators expands its work, it will focus on helping schools and districts create sustainable, paid leadership opportunities for its leaders, enabling them to advance in their careers while remaining teachers.

Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams was co-authored by Sharon Kebschull Barrett and Jiye Grace Han, with contributions from Public Impact’s Joe Ableidinger, Bryan C. Hassel, and Emily Ayscue Hassel.

About Sharon Kebschull Barrett

Sharon Kebschull Barrett is a senior editor with Public Impact. She edits the Public Impact and Opportunity Culture blogs, copyedits Public Impact's reports, and provides research and writing for the firm. Her recent work focuses on extending the reach of excellent teachers, charter schools, and state policy. A former newspaper reporter and copy editor, Ms. Barrett is the author of two cookbooks, Desserts from an Herb Garden and Morning Glories (St. Martin's Press). She has a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served as editor of The Daily Tar Heel.

About Jiye Grace Han

Jiye Grace Han is a consultant with Public Impact. Her work addresses a variety of topics, including retaining and extending the reach of high-performing teachers, teacher and leader quality, finance reform, and technology in education.  Ms. Han co-authored Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation Systems, which won the 2012 “Most Actionable Research” Eddies! Award from the PIE Network. Before joining Public Impact, she served as a Teach For America corps member working in a high-poverty school.  In 2011, she was named a national finalist for the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to second-year Teach For America corps members who embody and demonstrate the leadership needed to have an exemplary level of transformational impact with students. She wrote about that teaching experience on Impatient Optimists. Ms. Han produced multiple grade levels of progress with her fifth-graders across subjects each year, as well as developing their critical thinking skills and level of learning engagement. She has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s in teaching from Dominican University. Read more...

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