Opinion: How Team-Based Teaching Can Support Student Learning and Reduce Teacher Burnout

Schools have been dealing with a number of unique challenges over the last few years. Labor shortages. Low morale. Declining student enrollment. Meanwhile, they’re trying to re-engage students and get them back on track academically.

If I told you there was one education reform that had the potential to address all these problems at once, you might think I was crazy. But shifting away from the one-classroom, one-teacher model in favor of a team-based approach, with different roles and responsibilities for various team members, has all these benefits and more.

How can schools realize this potential? To find out, I spoke with leaders of three team-based teaching models — Kristan Van Hook from the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), Bryan Hassel from Opportunity Culture and Brent Maddin from Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce . Collectively, they have helped hundreds of schools transition away from one-classroom, one-teacher staffing plans.

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Under the traditional approach, teachers are solely and fully responsible for what goes on in their classroom. As an example, if a school has 100 fifth graders, they are divided into four classes of 25 kids, each with its own teacher. But as Maddin points out, from a student’s perspective, this division inevitably creates something of a lottery. If one of those teachers is a beginner and one of them is a highly regarded veteran, well, take a number.

This model can also be isolating from the teacher’s perspective. There’s no time to huddle with colleagues, and most schools have only one or two instructional coaches for the entire staff. Districts do employ nearly a million paraprofessionals to assist teachers and smooth over the cracks somewhat, but the system still puts one teacher in charge of one class of kids, and the job doesn’t change much from year to year. Regardless of whether they’re a rookie or a veteran, the teacher will be in charge of the same number of kids. If they want to earn more money, they need to earn a master’s degree or step out of the classroom and into a leadership role.

A team-based approach is different. Instead of each teacher being responsible for one class of kids for the full day, teams composed of teachers, paraprofessionals and instructional coaches share responsibilities for a larger group of students.

Depending on the school, these groups are typically led by a master teacher who receives extra compensation for leading mini-teams of three to eight people. (In their original concept paper for Opportunity Culture, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel called this “extending the reach” of the best teachers.) Hassel says the average teacher leader in Opportunity Culture schools receives an extra 20% in pay.

This approach has benefits for students and teachers. A student might spend some time receiving direct instruction from a master teacher, then work in small groups, or practice a skill by themselves.

From a teacher’s perspective, the teams replace isolation with collaboration and make the job more sustainable. Team members work together to identify student needs and plan instruction. This approach helps beginners transition into the classroom and gives team members time to compare notes, which can also help if the district is pursuing some large initiative such as adopting a new curriculum .

Most importantly, the team-based staffing models can boost student outcomes. External evaluations of the Opportunity Culture’s multi-classroom teacher roles found that it helped typical educators raise their performance from the 50 ^th to the 77 ^th percentile. A study last year of the TAP system found that it boosted high school graduation rates by 3.8 percentage points. Those gains also reduced criminal activity and led to fewer individuals relying on welfare between the ages of 18 and 22.

Teachers also seem to appreciate working in teams. One large study of TAP schools found a teacher retention rate of 94%, far surpassing national averages. In Opportunity Culture schools last year, 94% of teacher leaders reported a positive impact on staff collaboration, and 96% said the team approach helped improve learning.  And teachers working in Next Education Workforce schools felt more supported, had equal or lower turnover rates and were more likely to recommend teaching as a career compared with those other schools in their district.

Team-based staffing could also help address other problems schools have been facing, such as high rates of teacher absenteeism at the same time substitutes have been hard to find. This is partly because the traditional approach has no built-in redundancy: If a teacher gets sick, there is no one on staff to cover the class. Even something as mundane as going to the bathroom can be a problem. In contrast, having teams creates built-in flexibilities enabling teachers to cover for each other on a daily and hour-by-hour basis.

It also helps schools with the challenge of dealing with declining student enrollment . Maddin notes that schools that operate with fixed staffing ratios have a hard time navigating those declines — and the potential for staff layoffs — while in a team-based approach, staffing levels aren’t as strictly tied to student head counts.

Transitioning to a team-based staffing system is not a simple affair. Potential obstacles include money, teacher buy-in and regulatory barriers like licensure rules or evaluation policies.

Van Hook says leadership stipends are typically the most expensive part of the switch, but most places already have similar people in place — they’re just not integrating them fully. Van Hook, Hassel and Maddin all say it’s possible to switch to a team-based staffing model without adding any ongoing costs.

There are some transition costs, but accelerants like the federal Teacher and Leader Incentive Program and state-based policies like North Carolina’s Advanced Teaching Roles program can help more schools make the switch.

When asked about the biggest challenges and risks, all three leaders expressed concern about a “light touch” version of this work. Maddin says he can tell if a school’s culture hasn’t changed much if teachers don’t have sufficient planning time or feel responsible only for their same 25 kids, if student schedules look exactly the same every day or if a school needs to hire a substitute when a teacher has an early morning doctor’s appointment.

In other words, shifting away from the one-classroom, one-teacher model requires fundamental changes. But a true team-based approach offers a wide variety of benefits for both educators and students.