Effectively
implementing these new learning strategies will require adopting equally new
staffing strategies, according to a new report, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, compiled by the Clayton Christensen Institute and Public
Impact.
The report’s
authors examined how eight district, private, and charter schools and school
networks used a variety of new arrangements to better support personalized and
blended learning. They identified a number of elements key to the success of
these endeavors:
• New
roles for educators, including teacher-leaders heading small instructional
teams, collaborative teams of teachers, support staff who tutored or mentored
students to increase one-on-one or small-group interaction, and teachers in
training who taught as part of their on-the-job learning.
• Intensive
collaboration on small teaching teams to develop instructional skills faster
and gain broader insights into the needs of individual students.
• Intensive
coaching that involved weekly or even daily observation and feedback.
• Paid
fellowships and residencies that allowed schools to establish their own
pipeline of future instructors.
Increasing
teachers’ pay was often needed to gain buy-in for their taking on added work
and new responsibilities. Some schools stretched their student-to-teacher ratios
to make teachers eligible for higher pay, while others brought lower-paid
support staffers, trainee teachers, and volunteer tutors into the classroom to shoulder
some of the duties.
“The
organizational inertia of traditional staffing arrangements may take some time
to change,” the report noted. “But as schools like these produce strong results
and then refine and codify their practices, more schools across the country will
have the will and the means to follow in their footsteps.”
