Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College is working with local schools on an effort to find new solutions for the state’s persistent teacher shortage.
Over the years, efforts to solve Arizona’s teacher shortage have focused on recruitment. But Brent Maddin with ASU’s teachers college thinks the problem isn’t a supply issue, but rather workforce design issue.
“We've created the need to have one person in a box with a group of students every single day," he said. "I'm not convinced that it’s a) job that is sustainable for educators, or b) really good at delivering the truly deep and personalized learning that our students, especially our students with the greatest needs deserve.”
Maddin is hoping to combat this through an initiative called Next Education Workforce that’s helping schools move away from the traditional one-teacher, one-classroom model and shift to a team-based approach. Already, there are 30 schools in the Phoenix-area, including about 20 in the Mesa Public Schools district, that are testing this idea.
"What we're seeing in the classrooms that are starting to organize around teams of educators with distributed expertise is that the building level administrators or principals are giving a little more autonomy to the teachers to design schedules that meet the needs of their particular learners," he said.
That’s a crucial outcome because lack of autonomy is one of the reasons that drives teachers out of the profession, Maddin said.
As a second-year teacher, Mesa high school teacher Shaun Reedy said it's been helpful having four other teachers to lean on.
“When I have questions about curriculum, or standards, or even little things like classroom management, it really allows me an opportunity to have people I can fall back on and pull from their experience and their expertise," Reedy said. "So it's been really, really good.”
Maddin is partnering on this initiative with more schools, including some outside of the state.
