Need more to be thankful for this year? Add these committed, enthusiastic, deeply determined teacher-leaders to your list! I recently interviewed multi-classroom leaders in in three Metro Nashville schools that use Opportunity Culture models. Videographer Beverley Tyndall and I couldn’t wait to share at least a few bits of these inspiring interviews, and we’ll soon be posting more videos from Opportunity Culture team teachers and principals–for whom we’re also quite thankful! For now, enjoy hearing just a bit about why these teacher-leaders love what they do!
How the STEM Teacher Shortage Fails Kids–and How to Fix It
In the U.S., STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) get a lot of press lately. But it’s still hard for leaders to connect the dots: Too few skilled STEM teachers lead to too few students embracing STEM subjects, leading to too few STEM-trained workers to fill available jobs. The consequences for students-turned-job-seekers, businesses, and the U.S. economy—where STEM jobs are an economic growth multiplier—are enormous.
The statistics are grim. In Reaching All Students with Excellent STEM Teachers: Education Leaders’ Brief and the accompanying slide deck, Public Impact lays them out and then explains how Opportunity Culture school models can help. These models extend teachers’ reach to more students, for more pay, within budget, by saving teachers time and letting them lead peers while teaching in new career paths.
This report is part of Public Impact’s commitment to 100Kin10, a national network of more than 150 partners responding to the national imperative to train 100,000 excellent STEM teachers in 10 years and keep our best STEM teachers in the classroom.
5 Steps to Design Highly Paid Teacher Career Paths
To help all students reach their potential, district leaders must ensure that every student has consistent access to excellent teaching. Opportunity Culture compensation and career path structures help make that possible, and the new guide out today from Public Impact shows how.
Teacher Pay and Career Paths in an Opportunity Culture: A Practical Policy Guide shows how districts can design teacher career paths that will keep excellent teachers in the classroom and extend their reach to more students, for more pay, within budget. When districts design these paths, they create opportunities:
- for excellent teachers to reach more students directly and by leading teaching teams,
- for solid teachers to contribute to excellence immediately, and
- for all teachers to receive the support and development they deserve.
The full guide walks a district through the organizing steps and details of designing Opportunity Culture pay and career paths that fit its needs and values. It includes an overview of key Opportunity Culture concepts, graphics and explanations detailing new school models and roles, and assistance for evaluating the impact of different compensation design choices. The steps guide districts to ensuring financial sustainability and designing a complete career lattice.
State Leaders: Set These Policies to Enable an Opportunity Culture
What students want—
great teachers every year–and what teachers want–career advancement without leaving teaching, on-the-job professional learning and collaboration, and the chance to help more students succeed–come together in an Opportunity Culture. What’s the missing piece? State policies to back up schools and districts and their educators committed to reaching many more students with excellent teachers and their teams, for more pay, within budget and without forcing class-size increases.
In the just-released Seizing Opportunity at the Top II policymakers’ checklist and full report, Public Impact takes the lessons we’ve learned in working with teachers and leaders in districts in four states and distills them into the “urgent” and “optimal” policies a state needs to enable pilot and statewide Opportunity Cultures. See the two-page checklist for a quick policy overview, then use the full brief for details on crafting new policies.
New Website: Resources on Teacher-Led Professional Learning
Short-term. Sporadic. Disconnected: Just a few of the words used to describe current professional development for teachers. School leaders are stretched too thin to provide routine feedback and coaching – and they aren’t in the classroom with teachers day to day.
Without more guidance and support, too many teachers are being robbed of the opportunity to achieve the higher level of success with students of which they are capable.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. TeacherLedProfessionalLearning.org aims to catalyze changes to ensure that all teachers have the chance to learn on the job and that great teachers can lead on the job.
“Our nation’s best teachers must lead the way to excellence for all students. To do that, they must be able to help their peers learn and pursue excellence, too, while teaching,” said Emily Ayscue Hassel, co-director of Public Impact and a member of the team of Pahara-Aspen Teacher-Leader Fellows who created the website. “This is not a political issue–it’s a practical one. On-the-job teacher leadership and on-the-job teacher learning are inextricably connected.”
Being a Multi-Classroom Leader: “It Is My Dream Job”
“I glance at my computer clock; it is already time for the next block and I forgot to eat lunch. When a Frenchman forgets about eating, this is a sign that he loves what he does.”
So says Romain Bertrand, the first multi-classroom leader (MCL) at Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., today in “Expand Your Reach: New-world role combines coaching teachers and teaching students” on Education Next. Walking readers through a piece of a typical day, Bertrand explains how he leads two pods of three teachers and one learning coach (or teaching assistant) each–and is responsible for the learning outcomes of 800 sixth- and seventh-graders.
In an Opportunity Culture, MCLs earn significantly higher pay; in the Project L.I.F.T. schools within Charlotte-Mecklenburg, that means up to $23,000 more, or 50 percent more than average teacher pay in North Carolina. MCLs get to continue teaching while providing on-the-job professional learning for their teams, planning, coaching, and collaborating with them.
Leadership Keys: How to Get Great Principals, Use Teacher-Leaders
Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, which Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, put a needed focus on the importance of finding the best principal for each school. By getting an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country, Doyle and Locke highlighted how far short those processes fall, even in districts they deem “ahead of the curve.”
