Richard M. Ingersoll

A practical approach to strategic school-staffing reforms that benefit both educators and students In Unlocking the Potential of Team-Based Staffing, Brent W. Maddin, R. Lennon Audrain, Lisa Maresso Wyatt, and Kaycee Salmacia make a persuasive case for redesigning the education workforce to facilitate deeper and more personalized learning experiences in K– 2 schools. They advocate disrupting the traditional one-teacher, one-classroom model in favor of team-based school-staffing models in which multiple educators are responsible for rosters of students. Maddin, Audrain, Wyatt, and Salmacia show that these innovative staffing models are associated with positive outcomes for both educators and students. Based on early evidence from the Next Education Workforce team, they demonstrate that strategic team-staffing models can increase educator job satisfaction, enable schools to best utilize human capital, and make complex, sought-after pedagogical approaches such as interest-based, differentiated learning more doable in resource-limited settings. The book offers school leaders concrete actions for the successful design and launch of team-based staffing. It presents clear guidance for navigating implementation challenges, including change management, instructional scheduling, and common infrastructural issues ranging from family communication to rethinking the physical spaces within schools to better support team-based instruction.

Schools are places of learning but they are also workplaces, and teachers are employees. As such, are teachers more akin to professionals or to factory workers in the amount of control they have over their work? And what difference does it make? Drawing on large national surveys as well as wide-ranging interviews with high school teachers and administrators, Richard Ingersoll reveals the shortcomings in the two opposing viewpoints that dominate thought on this subject: that schools are too decentralized and lack adequate control and accountability; and that schools are too centralized, giving teachers too little autonomy. Both views, he shows, overlook one of the most important parts of teachers' work: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; schools and teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of our children. As a result, both views overlook the power of implicit social controls in schools that are virtually invisible to outsiders but keenly felt by insiders. Given these blind spots, this book demonstrates that reforms from either camp begin with inaccurate premises about how schools work and so are bound not only to fail, but to exacerbate the problems they propose to solve.