Conversations nationwide are exploring how strategic staffing can offer “wildly different” new teacher induction experiences. We also need to understand how the “strategic” in strategic staffing means intentionally placing new teachers in experienced teams with embedded mentoring for maximum support and accelerated development.
This webinar explored how strategic staffing can transform new teacher induction by embedding mentoring into team-based models. Instead of expecting new teachers to be “Day One ready,” strategic placements offer access to collective expertise and relational support, accelerating growth through everyday collaboration.
Speakers:
- Brent Maddin, Executive Director of ASU’s Next Education Workforce
- Lennon Audrain, Research Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation
- Dena Slanda, Senior TA Consultant in the Education and Instruction division at AIR
- Crystal Hall, Senior Director of Program and Partnerships at New Teacher Center
Highlights and takeaways:
What is strategic staffing?
- It’s a paradigm shift, moving away from one-teacher one-classroom models to different ways of organizing the adults serving young people in schools. The goal is to make the job more doable for educators and access to quality learning easier for kids, improving outcomes for both.
- While there are many different versions of strategic staffing, key examples include ASU’s Next Education Workforce’s team teaching approach and Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture model.
Education First’s Strategic School Staffing Solutions scan provides a good landscape overview. - The building blocks of teacher teams are not new people, but the same people organized differently to build on each individual’s strengths for collective (and cost-effective) impact — enhanced instruction for a shared roster of students. Typical models can include a lead teacher and other professional educators, special education teachers, mentors, new teachers/residents, community educators, and specialized paraeducators.
The new teacher experience in strategic staffing models
- Novice teachers are not expected to perform at the same level as the educator next door with 20+ years’ experience in their first weeks and months on the job.
- New teachers are considered to bring a “just-right” set of skills and experience to the team.
- The team structure provides opportunities for new teacher growth with intentional mentor-guided gradual release of responsibilities and support from not just one mentor but a team of mentors able to provide real-time, context-embedded feedback.
Special education example of distributed expertise
- Special education teachers play a critical role in strategic staffing. In addition to providing direct instruction to students, special educators serve as a resource and provide consultation and professional development to general educators on the team building capacity to provide specially designed instruction, modifications, and accommodations.
- Team structures optimize the expertise and reach of the special educator and extend more accessible instruction to all students.
Mentoring is an action, not a role
- Mentors in new staffing models are the people accountable for a new teacher’s growth and development and ensuring that high-quality mentoring takes place across the team.
- The mentor is not the only one with answers; their responsibility is to leverage the expertise of all team members so new teachers are accessing, observing, and learning best instructional practice from everyone.
- Mentors facilitate the connections that allow the new teacher and all the members of the team to grow.
Non-negotiables of mentoring practice
- Not everyone is automatically a good mentor. Quality mentorship is a learned skill and relationship-based professional activity.
- Quality mentors have a learner mindset and deep knowledge and practice in adult learning. This requires professional learning.
- It is the mentor’s responsibility to build mentoring capacity within a team, actively making their practice explicit and reflective.
- Great mentoring can mean different things to different people. It’s important to set expectations at the start.
Asset-based support for new teachers
- Team structures can fundamentally (and positively) shift relationships and power dynamics.
- Understanding that every individual on the team has an important role to play to meet all the various needs of our students shifts culture and makes teachers feel valued.
- Teams need time together before the year starts to talk about what they each bring to the team, which requires vulnerability and trust.
- Distributed expertise models allow novice teachers to shine; they also elevate mentoring as a skill and a strength.
- Mentorship goes beyond the 1-to-1 relationship with the mentee to facilitating connection and shared learning across the team.
System considerations with new staffing structures
- Placing novice teachers on the right teams with the right kinds of expertise is an HR consideration. Systems need to place new teachers with developmental goals in mind strategically.
- A new teacher’s first year should be seen as an “incubation” year with a reduced set of responsibilities that allows them to dynamically grow and take on more responsibility as they are ready.
Outcomes
- AIR highlighted the following benefits of strategic staffing models:
- for educators: recruitment, enhanced collaboration, school culture and connectedness; amplified/leveraged strengths, educators feel valued
- for students: access to high-quality teachers and differentiated instruction
- for schools: vacancy management, strong instructional teams, accelerated school improvement, increased effectiveness of induction/mentoring
- Emerging studies of Next Education Workforce models indicate improved teacher retention (+13 percentage points for novices) and greater (+10 percentage points) teacher job satisfaction. Student outcomes include reading growth and improved Algebra I pass rates.
Last word from ASU’s Brent Maddin
“After having spent a couple of decades+ in education trying to do the same thing better, this really feels like doing something different, and I’m excited by the positive results we’re seeing for educators, for our young learners and … for our novice teachers. I want this to be a job people fall in love with and stay in because it’s doable, because it’s rewarding.”
Resources:
Strategic Staffing
- Webinar slide deck
- Coalition to Reimagine the Teaching Role
- Strategic School Staffing Solutions (Education First’s landscape scan)
- Reaching further and learning more? Evaluating Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture Initiative
ASU
- Next Education Workforce resources
- Distributed Expertise Staffing Matrix
- Early evidence of improved educator outcomes in Next Education Workforce models
- The teaching model that’s keeping educators in schools
AIR
