Center on School Turnaround, July 2018
This brief summarizes the information presented in the March and April 2018 forums, which addressed Opportunity Culture as a strategy to support talent development. The March presentation was by Bryan Hassel, Co-President of Public Impact. The April forum featured Denise Watts, who leads Project LIFT, a philanthropic initiative that is implementing an Opportunity Culture program in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
5 Qualities for Teacher Leaders and Those Who Hire Them
EdNC, June 22, 2018, by Marquitta Mitchell
House Bill 235 outlines credentials that mentor teachers should possess so that they can provide support for new teachers. Those credentials include being an “excellent, experienced, and qualified” teacher who has at least an “accomplished” rating on their NC Teacher Evaluation.
A Missing Key Ingredient for Widespread Personalization: Innovative School Staffing
By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on EdNext. Educators nationally are striving to incorporate more personalization: giving students what they need by adapting what, when, how, and where students learn. But personalized learning is just one of several big instructional trends—high standards, aligned curricula, teaching the whole child, improving social-emotional skills, to […]
Multi-School Leadership: Tools to Extend Excellent Principals’ Reach
An Opportunity Culture extends the reach of excellent teaching—what about doing the same for excellent schoolwide leadership? Public Impact, which founded the national Opportunity Culture initiative, today releases a set of practical materials on Multi-School Leadership: How to extend the reach of excellent principals by having them lead a small group of schools, for more […]
To Personalize Learning, Change School Staffing
Association of American Educators, June 7, 2018, by Melissa Pratt
Personalized learning is one of the buzziest education buzzwords of the moment. Teachers are urged to individualize instruction, to promote mastery learning, and to help students identify with the material. When it comes down to how a teacher should do that, especially when that teacher works in the typical K-12 school, they are often left on their own.
Teachers Shouldn’t Have to Work Alone – and Now They Don’t Have to
Forbes, May 29, 2018, by Michael Horn
With the rise of online learning in schools—what educators call “blended learning”—what teachers do daily is changing in big and small ways. A central question is what will teaching look like in the future, as online learning can increasingly help students learn knowledge personalized to their specific learning need.
Analysis: Through Co-Teaching, Team Teaching, and Collaboration, These Pioneering Schools Are Rethinking How to Best Deliver Personalized Learning for Students
The 74, May 28, 2018, by Thomas Arnett and Bryan Hassel
K-12 education is abuzz with interest in personalizing instruction and a drive to change the student experience. Yet amid this innovative fervor, the traditional classroom staffing arrangement is still an unquestioned assumption in many schools, with each teacher working largely alone, taking sole responsibility for a roster of students.
How Team Teaching (and Other Innovations) Can Impact Blended Learning
eSchool News, May 25, 2018, by Thomas Arnett
Personalized learning’s rationale has strong intuitive appeal: We can all remember feeling bored, confused, frustrated, or lost in school when our classes didn’t spark our interests or address our learning needs. But an intuitive rationale doesn’t clearly translate to effective practice.
The One-Teacher, One-Classroom Model Needs an Upgrade. Here’s What’s Next.
EdSurge, May 24, 2018, by Stephen Noonoo
Emerging school models are supposed to ease the transition to personalized and blended instruction—or at least make it possible. But new ways of teaching can hit a snag when they run up against the familiar one-teacher-one-classroom setup. According to the authors of a new report, it’s not schools that need a “rethink” as much as school staffing.
Meeting the Personalization Challenge with New Roles + Blended Learning
Amid all the buzz about personalizing learning, what can we learn from schools getting great results? In Public Impact’s new report with the Clayton Christensen Institute, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, we analyzed eight schools and school networks that are not only personalizing learning, but also getting strong learning results with disadvantaged students. What’s different […]
Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture in the News
What’s new with Opportunity Culture? Recent news coverage highlights the growth and successes of Opportunity Culture, an initiative of Public Impact: Guilford school board wants flexibility to help 9 low-performing schools: Jessie Pounds of the News & Record reported on the expansion of Opportunity Culture into nine schools in Greensboro, N.C., with the district planning […]
Teachers Kept Quitting This Indianapolis School. Here’s How the Principal Got Them to Stay
Chalkbeat, May 9, 2018, by Dylan Peers McCoy
When Jeremy Baugh took the helm as principal of School 107 three years ago, staff turnover was so high that about half the teachers were also new to the struggling elementary campus, he said. For his first two years, the trend continued — with several teachers leaving each summer.