NewsChannel5 profiles the paid student teachers program at Robert Churchwell Museum Magnet Elementary, one of the Opportunity Culture pilot schools in the Metro Nashville Public Schools’ iZone. Hailey Hunt, one of 12 “aspiring teachers,” discusses why this model for student teaching pleases her.
recruitment and retention
Why ALL Teachers Need an Opportunity Culture®–A Refreshed Vision
After decades of reform efforts, have any of the players in education really gotten what they want? Teachers still don’t get the respect and substantial rewards they deserve, and students haven’t seen big leaps in achievement. Public Impact Co-Directors Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel see a new way forward–one that focuses on excellent teachers, but takes us to a brighter future for everyone. In An Opportunity Culture for All: Making Teaching a Highly Paid, High-Impact Profession, the Hassels update their vision of an Opportunity Culture, showing how extending the reach of great teachers can start a virtuous cycle of excellence and higher pay for all teachers.
Strong Results at New Higher-Paying, Reach-Extending Charter
What do you get when you combine an experienced charter school leader with a new model that mixes multi-classroom leaders and blended learning in a high-need school? At charter management organization Touchstone Education, you get nimble teachers, quick to adjust their models as needed, and some great student results.
“We have learned that the one most important thing we can do to positively impact the learning of a child is to consistently provide them with a great teacher,” says Ben Rayer, Touchstone’s founder and CEO, and former president of Mastery Charter Schools. “In our model, we have reframed what teachers do and how they are developed.”
Touchstone opened its first site in fall 2012, Merit Preparatory Charter School in Newark, N.J. The school started small, with 84 sixth-graders, so it could quickly adjust and learn from its efforts. In its first year, with a student population that is 90 percent low-income and was generally several years behind grade level, Merit Prep Newark showed great growth in reading and science: By March 2013 tests, students already demonstrated two years of growth in reading and 1.25 years of growth in science.
Case Study: How Charlotte Zone Planned Opportunity Culture® Schools
In late 2011, Denise Watts, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg zone superintendent, approached Public Impact for help meeting the goals she had as executive director for the new Project L.I.F.T., a $55 million public-private partnership to improve academics at historically low-performing, high-need schools in western Charlotte, N.C.
“If we didn’t try something truly different to change education, many of my students were not going to graduate,” Watts says.
Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools, explains the “truly different” things that L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles. The study details the steps these schools took and the challenges they faced as they prepared to kick off their Opportunity Culture schools at the beginning of the 2013–14 school year. An accompanying study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: One Teacher’s View of Becoming a Paid Teacher-Leader, offers a Q&A with an excellent teacher on one design team, now set to take on one of the redesigned jobs as a multi-classroom leader.
1st Opportunity Culture® Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach
In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. As districts and schools around the country consider implementing their own Opportunity Cultures, they want real-life examples of just how others have already done so.
Today, we begin a series of case studies that provide in-depth looks at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers’ impact on students and peer teachers. In the studies, we will describe new programs, including personal descriptions of teachers involved. We will also analyze how well the programs stack up to the five Reach Extension Principles, which call for reaching more students with excellent teaching, higher pay, sustainable funding, job-embedded development opportunity, and enhanced authority and clear accountability for great teachers.
In our first study, Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, we profile Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators’ two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers.
Q&A: Meet an Opportunity Culture® Excellent Teacher
Meet Romain Bertrand: middle school math teacher and Opportunity Culture enthusiast. As this school year winds down, he’s already thoroughly looking forward to the next—when he will become a Multi-Classroom Leader at Ranson IB Middle School, taking accountability for the learning results of 700 students. At Ranson, a Project L.I.F.T. school in Charlotte, N.C., Bertrand sees the opportunities of its new Opportunity Culture—to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, and develop other teachers—giving him and others exactly the sort of recognition and respect he says teachers now sorely lack.
Bertrand grew up in Avignon, in the south of France, the son of teachers who both went on to become principals. After teaching middle school math in France for five years, he came to the U.S. through the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based VIF International Education, which placed him in Charlotte, teaching seventh- and eighth-grade math for five years. “It became obvious after 10 years of teaching that I finally found my groove, and I saw that I could consistently get my students to enjoy math and become passionate about it, and to grow,” says Bertrand (relaxing at right with his children).
Bertrand began working with Teach Charlotte, a six-week summer teaching academy, where he coached teachers, which prepared him for his current job at Ranson IB Middle School as a facilitator. That led to his role on the school design team at Ranson, tasked with redesigning the school to implement an Opportunity Culture in the 2013-14 year. Put a charming French accent in your head, and read what he said to Public Impact’s Grace Han in a May 28 interview:
3 Nashville Schools Create Paid Student Teacher Role
In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, we envision roles for a variety of support staff who help excellent teachers and teams extend their reach to more students. Examples include learning coaches, digital lab monitors, assistant teachers, and tutors. These staff members don’t work in isolation, but as critical parts of their teams.
These positions typically have shorter workweeks than teachers (40 hours or less versus teachers’ actual average of 50 to 55) and are narrower in scope, making pay lower. The pay differential allows a district to provide substantially higher pay for teacher-leaders—proven excellent teachers who take full responsibility for leading their teams. Under the leadership of these excellent teachers, other teachers and support staff can learn and succeed.
If you think that sounds like a great environment for student teachers to learn great teaching from the start, the iZone initiative of Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) agrees. Beginning in 2013–14, MNPS is creating a paid one-year “aspiring teacher” role targeting student teachers, available at three schools in the iZone.