Report details how to create paid, full-time, yearlong residencies for aspiring teachers and principals, within existing budgets.
Coaching and Developing Turnaround Leader Actions: A Professional Learning Module
This professional learning module provides state and district leaders with tools to coach and develop school turnaround leaders to take key leader actions.
Coaching for Impact: Six Pillars to Create Coaching Roles That Achieve Their Potential to Improve Teaching and Learning
Report outlines six pillars essential to creating meaningful coaching roles along with recommendations for those responsible for creating and supporting results-oriented coaching programs.
ESSA Opportunities for Excellence: New Real Clear Ed Column
In a new column for Real Clear Education, Public Impact’s co-directors, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel, highlight the opportunities through ESSA for state leaders to achieve excellence: State and district leaders have a great new opportunity under the 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act: more flexibility in spending the funds they receive than in […]
ESSA—New Law, New Opportunity: A Brief Guide to Excellence for State Leaders
Brief explains four opportunities to go beyond the requirements of ESSA to achieve a culture of excellence.
How to Radically Improve Teacher & Principal Preparation
How can new teachers and principals start their jobs prepared for educational excellence, and how can the schools that hire them know they’re ready to excel? In today’s preparation systems, no one is fully getting what they need—not aspiring teachers and principals, not schools, not students. There is a better way. In Opportunity Culture schools, […]
An Excellent Principal for Every School: Transforming Schools Into Leadership Machines
Idea paper lays out a vision for how districts can reach dramatically more students with great principals, for much higher pay, within budget.
Recruit, Select, and Support: Turnaround Leader Competencies
Learning module provides state and district leaders with tools to identify and apply turnaround leader competencies to the selection and development of school turnaround leaders.
Boosting Idaho Rural Students’ College Prospects by Expanding Access to Great Teaching
Report examines the challenges that prevent rural schools from providing great teaching, and presents four strategies for increasing access to highly effective instruction in rural Idaho.
The Whole Package: 12 Factors of High-Impact Teacher-Leader Roles
District leaders love the thought of “teacher leadership” that might attract and retain teachers—especially great ones—and close student learning gaps at a time of rising teacher vacancies. But too often, teacher-leader roles fail to produce the full impact district leaders intend. They rarely dramatically improve student learning or teacher effectiveness. What are the usual pitfalls? […]
Recruiting for Hard-to-Staff Schools
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett; first published in School Administrator magazine. You know rock star teachers when you see them. They are capable of commanding attention day in and day out, and they motivate students to achieve well beyond standard expectations. They even help other teachers succeed. So how can school districts attract them, especially to […]
Free, In-depth Training Materials for Teaching-Team Leaders
With advice and feedback from the first multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) in the Opportunity Culture initiative, Public Impact has created a free set of in-depth training sessions uniquely suited to the MCL role. The sessions may also benefit other teacher-leaders who lead teams and develop colleagues on the job.
Multi-Classroom Leadership is the most popular model chosen by school design teams implementing Opportunity Culture models. Multi-classroom leaders are excellent teachers who continue teaching while leading a team of teachers, taking full accountability for the success of the team’s teachers and students—for a lot more pay. But that combination of teaching and team leadership requires new skills that few teachers—even excellent ones—have developed. Feedback from MCLs indicated that leadership programs focused on aspiring principals or traditional coach/mentor roles don’t suit the needs of the high-accountability MCL role, which requires daily instructional management and leadership to succeed.
Opportunity Culture models use teamwork, job redesign, and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets. Each school creates a design team that selects and adapts models that will suit their school best. Teachers and principals on these teams cite the importance of genuine team leadership and consistent, on-the-job feedback and development as key factors in the frequent choice to use Multi-Classroom Leadership, as well as the desire to reach as many students as possible with great teaching. In some schools, MCLs operate as a team of leaders for the school, supporting one another and the principal.
The MCL training sessions are structured to run over three summer days, followed by six shorter sessions during the school year. New and experienced MCLs can experience these sessions in formal training, study them on their own, or study them in meetings with other MCLs in their schools. District professional learning staff, principals, assistant principals, and other training providers can lead sessions using the included facilitator notes. Public Impact also organizes formal training and train-the-trainer sessions—with experienced, successful MCLs co-facilitating—and helps districts and schools establish a clear process for MCLs and principals to support one another’s success.
In 2014–15, the Opportunity Culture initiative included more than 30 schools, 450 teachers, and 16,000 students, and will include more than 60 schools in 2015–16. Early data from the initiative reveal that: