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Meeting the Personalization Challenge with New Roles + Blended Learning

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 24, 2018

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 about these schools compared with the norm? New staffing models combined with blended learning. In these schools, blended learning does not replace teachers. Instead, blended learning augments the ability of multiple adults to understand and meet the needs of individual students in a collaborative workplace.

Research about Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative has already shown positive student learning gains in district schools where multi-classroom leaders lead small, collaborative teaching teams, many of which use digital tools to keep track of student progress. But what about these other efforts?

[Read more…]

New Models Combine Teacher Leadership, Digital Learning

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on December 7, 2015

Teachers using blended learning need guidance to help students achieve high-growth learning consistently. Teacher-leaders and their teams need time to collaborate and learn together on the job. Students need access to personalized instruction that catalyzes consistently high growth and expands their thinking.TT plus MCL

How can schools achieve all of these goals? Combine blended learning with teacher leadership. Two new models from Public Impact explain how elementary and secondary schools can combine Time-Technology Swaps and Multi-Classroom Leadership— while paying teachers far more, sustainably.

[Read more…]

Indianapolis First to Put Opportunity Culture Into Contract

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on September 9, 2015

The Indianapolis school board and teachers union recently became the first in the country to include Opportunity Culture roles in their new contract, offering pay supplements of up to $18,300—35 percent of the district’s average salary. That comes on top of a major base pay raise—the first in five years—for teachers across the board.

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture Lessons from the First Two Years

written by Bryan and Emily Ayscue Hassel on July 23, 2015

In our companion post, Opportunity Culture Outcomes: The First Two Years, we shared student, teacher, and design outcomes from the first two years of Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative, which so far has affected more than 30 schools, 450 teachers, and 16,000 students.

The outcomes are promising—better student growth, higher pay, strong teacher satisfaction. However, some pioneering districts, schools, and teachers achieved better, faster results than others. Strengths and challenges varied across sites. Learning from these differences fast is crucial to improved outcomes as more schools and districts create their own Opportunity Cultures, extending the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to many more students, for much higher pay, within regular budgets.

These lessons we drew from these early years are based on data we collected and feedback from Opportunity Culture schools and districts, including teachers, principals, and district administrators. Implementation teams from Public Impact or its partners Education First and Education Resource Strategies solicited feedback using “exit slips” after every decision-making meeting with school and district design teams. We conducted interviews with staff and administrators at the school and district level. Implementation teams scheduled regular calls and made site visits eight to 10 times a year, during which we collected feedback and recorded our observations. With that and other data, we created the Opportunity Culture Dashboard, which contains indicators of implementation effectiveness, including student learning outcomes and teacher and staff perceptions from anonymous surveys.

[Read more…]

Op-Ed: N.C. Must Invest to Magnify Great Teachers’ Impact

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 11, 2015

“North Carolina will never make the educational strides it needs until the best educators have far greater impact for a lot more pay,” say Public Impact’s co-directors in an op-ed in Saturday’s Raleigh News and Observer.

Noting that the state’s General Assembly “rightfully added 6 percent focused primarily on early-career teachers’ base pay,” Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel point out that other states also increased salaries for teachers, and likely will again. So, they say, state leaders must complete the 10 percent average raise, and then some, just to stay on par in the region.

“Meanwhile, the pay gap with neighboring states yawns wider for experienced teachers,” the Hassels write. “Most importantly, base pay bumps for early-career teachers don’t empower or entice excellent teachers, many of whom are veterans, to lead from the classroom – reaching more students and helping peers excel.”

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture in the News: Real Clear Education, NPR

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on April 15, 2015

Looking for an overview of an Opportunity Culture, and an example of multi-classroom leadership in action? These could get you started:Churchwell team

  • Today, Public Impact co-directors Bryan and Emily Hassel kick off a monthly series of posts on Real Clear Education by Opportunity Culture educators. They explain the concepts behind an Opportunity culture as background to the series, which will be followed next month by Charlotte Multi-Classroom Leader Kristin Cubbage on her new role, which lets her extend her reach to more students by leading a team of teachers.
  • Nashville reporter Blake Farmer produced a story for NPR’s “All Things Considered” on a multi-classroom leader at Bailey STEM Middle School that continues to get attention. Farmer profiles Whitney Bradley, who is up for Tennessee Teacher of the Year, and discusses how schools using Multi-Classroom Leadership are creating a profession with room to grow and advance.

You can hear what Cubbage and other multi-classroom leaders, team teachers, and principals think about an Opportunity Culture at our Voices on Video page.

What Makes an Opportunity Culture Different?

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on March 31, 2015

When Public Impact launched the Opportunity Culture initiative, we were clear on the goal: reach as many students as possible with excellent teaching. As our team worked with teachers and principals, we committed to a second goal: provide outstanding, lasting, well-paid career opportunities to educators.

As researchers, we saw many pay and career path programs fall short of those goals–and still see too many today. Too often, pay programs fail to provide opportunities for teachers to learn from outstanding peers and others at work–to collaborate, plan with, and support one another. Too many new roles are funded with temporary or politically tenuous money. And very few pay or career path programs increase the number of students who have excellent teachers formally responsible for their learning.

So we embodied our goals and the guidance to achieve them in the five Opportunity Culture Principles. Those principles set Opportunity Culture schools apart from the other efforts.

[Read more…]

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New from Public Impact

Employment Opportunities—Opportunity Culture Consultant
Public Impact is seeking candidates for Opportunity Culture consultant positions, with a Summer 2021 start date. The deadline for applications is January 17, 2020!

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