Military services weapons Key Ingredient for Widespread Personalization: Innovative School Staffing

Kelly Pollack, who co-teaches a mixed third/fourth-grade classroom at CICS West Belden in Chicago, leads a compact group.

Educators nationally are striving to add more personalization: giving students what they already want by adapting what, when, how, where students learn. But personalized learning is truly one of several big instructional trends-high standards, aligned curricula, teaching the main child, improving social-emotional skills, for example. None has achieved its potential.

Personalization, alongside those other reforms, is missing a vital ingredient: school staffing models to bring reforms, what they have to may perhaps be, into a lot of classrooms with success.

In typical schools, teachers just not have the daily guidance, constant feedback, and support from colleagues to raise fast when attempting something totally new. It’s no surprise that instructional reforms haven’t scaled program amazing success within many individual schools, a lot less country wide.

At Vegas Verdes Elementary in the Clark County (Nevada) School District, 1 of 3 “Franchise” elementary schools under Principal John Haynal, teachers just like Deryn Cattaneo, shown here, use blended learning in a rotation model to realize more students with expert lead teachers who will be assisted by a tutor.

So what new staffing models can certainly help, and how? Innovating educators start to compromise the code.

In partnership with the Clayton Christensen Institute, we released school profiles, videos along with a report showing how eight schools are personalizing learning and having results them to attribute to new staffing models. Lead report authors Sharon Kebschull Barrett and Tom Arnett examined district, charter, as well as schools serving primarily disadvantaged students and ultizing new staffing models and blended learning.

We already knew about one innovation: multi-classroom leaders within the Opportunity Culture initiative. Third-party research within the Brookings Institution and American Institutes for Research showed their impact: Teachers who were generally at the 50th percentile in student learning gains, who then joined teams led by teacher-leaders known as multi-classroom leaders, or MCLs (who had prior high growth as teachers), produced learning gains akin to those of teachers from the 75th to 85th percentile in math, and, in six of your seven statistical models, from 66th to 72nd percentile in reading.

While more research ought to examine the connection, educators across the many schools we studied with Christensen attributed their student learning outcomes to your guidance, support, potent relationships among teachers and students catalyzed by these collaborative staffing models. Students enthusiastically touted their increased chance to work where they preferred, depending on their personal goals. Many of the schools provided tailored instruction in small groups, plus in some one-on-one. They shared stories almost daily and concern that multiple adults showed for him or her.

Two critical themes emerged: the power of relationships-within teaching teams and between teachers and students-and the power of gathering, analyzing, and quickly acting upon student learning data.

Christina Hanna, who co-teaches a third/fourth mixed-grade classroom at CICS West Belden in Chicago, works one-on-one using a student.

From adjustments engendered by new teaching roles, we found these powerful commonalities:

? Innovative roles at a profession. New roles helped multiple adults talk with students and support each other over a career path. Roles included teacher-leaders of small instructional teams, who often planned and directed team teachers’ instruction, coached the teachers, and analyzed data, upholding the school’s target high standards; collaborating teachers who worked in teams and supported the other over typically happens for classroom teachers in traditional schools; support staff who tutored or mentored students, providing more one-on-one or small-group time; and teachers-in-training, who supported other teachers and taught while learning at the job in paid fellowships or residencies, enabling schools to construct their own teacher pipelines. Importantly, the faculties largely bought these roles-including include those with higher pay-within existing budgets, leading them to be sustainable.

? AdultCstudent connection. Critically, adults in every role worked directly with students, often in small groups a treadmill using one for that percentage of per day.

? Intensive collaboration on small teaching teams. Collaboration let multiple adults share what they have to discovered each student-personal factors, interests, strengths, and barriers that could affect learning. Teachers gained insight into why students were excelling or stalling, not only what students knew, allowing teachers to personalize how they engaged each student. And collaboration helped develop their instructional skills faster.

? Cultures of intensive coaching. Weekly or even daily observations and feedback supported rapid educator improvement and consistent instruction. Schools designed roles, responsibilities, and schedules to help with openness about strengths and improvement opportunities.

? Blended learning for data and differentiation. Blended learning for portion of per day provided time for more small-group instruction, and gave teachers real-time student learning data. This helped teachers identify what students knew and the next steps for learning. Schools could actually regroup students frequently, quickly react to struggling students, and help teachers improve by pinpointing instructional planning and professional development needs.

? Deliberate and careful creation of schedules that made school-day teacher collaboration

These schools established that what sounds somewhat impossible task-getting each one teacher to try strong personalized learning for any wide variety of student developmental needs-is possible, with staffing changes and thoughtful utilization of blended learning.

Doing this at full scale with strong results may actually be possible, within charter and district schools, as they used a precious resource that exists everywhere: excellent teachers, who, as opposed to working alone, expanded their instructional impact by leading small teams and/or collaborating with colleagues. And they succeeded largely within existing budgets, after limited costs for design and, in pre-existing schools, transition on their models.

While only Multi-Classroom Leadership provides the rigorous research necessary to link it to student learning gains, each of the profiled schools illuminate promising new options. What’s most crucial: these schools have recognized that staffing models must plunge to help great number of teachers produce the big instructional shifts that system leaders want-with a genuine prospects for success.

– Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel are Co-Directors of Public Impact.