Changing the Current Teacher Model

In my new book from Reopen to Reinvent that comes out in July, I have an entire chapter on how it's time to rethink the role of the teacher. The chapter is called T and Teacher is for Team. And it's something that I've really come to strongly believe that we need to be thinking of co teaching and teaching really as a team sport, something that teachers get to do with other adults every day. And we really enlarge our sense of what is a teacher and what are their responsibilities and who is an educator more broadly and how do they interact with kids to really create a web of support, whether that's academic, social, emotional wellness and so forth. And really the thought leaders around this, dare I say, have been at Arizona State University at their Mary Lou Fulton College, they've been at the forefront of rethinking the role of teacher and what do they do on a day to day basis and how do they work together with students. And its dean, Carol Basile joins us today. And I'm just delighted because, you know, literally, Carol, you are with your colleagues, the thought leaders on this initiative, the next Education Workforce Initiative, it's called for those who want to look it up as we're talking. But before we get into the mechanics of what you recommend and how you're actually spreading impact on the ground and things of that nature, I just want back up a little bit and talk about your own personal journey into this realization and sort of set of decisions you've made that we need to rethink the teaching profession and how the college more broadly has come to this recognition and sense as well. So I'll turn it over to you for sort of a personal reflection of how you came to this realization.

Yeah, this isn't hard, right? This is years and years of being in teacher preparation and you know, at multiple institutions and going to multiple places and multiple meetings and multiple conferences, you know, with people saying, hey, breaking news. You know, we have a teacher shortage problem or we have a teacher retention problem, or we have a teacher recruitment problem. And everything was always about figuring out the projects and programs and activities that we were going to do to actually solve this problem. And the more that we thought about it and the more that we started looking at our students and thinking about, as you know, we think about workforce solutions for everything, everything, whether or not it's engineering or it's technology field or it's healthcare. But we never think about the educator profession, the teaching profession as a workforce development problem. And so here's years and years of saying, oh, it's recruitment, retention. Well, this isn't a recruitment and retention problem. We've never been able to figure it out. We've never been able to solve it with projects and programs, activities. It has to be a systems play. And so, you know, here we are really trying to think about the entire system and what this looks like and how we can actually change that system.

And how did you and your colleagues, not just you come to that, but, you know, there's obviously many faculty members, all have. You're at a university. Everyone has their own viewpoints, their own research and so forth. Yet you, as an. As a teacher's college, have really coalesced around this idea. I'm just curious to speak about some of the faculty members, journey alongside you to really rethinking the teacher workforce, and then we can get into the dynamics of what that looks like.

So I think, you know, ASU certainly has a reputation, right, of trying to think big, trying to think systemically. And I think that's where it begins. It begins with that sort of expectation. It also begins with our charter, where we talk about, you know, where we are, about who we include, not who we exclude. And I think that the beginning of that is really faculty and staff who are hired to think this way. And the minute that you begin to think this way and you say, okay, so who are we leaving out? What does this look like? Is it okay for the fact that we're preparing thousands, hundreds and thousands of teacher candidates who leave us and they go into the profession and they're gone within two or three years, or people that we're not getting because we've made it too hard or we've made it inflexible? And I think those are the conversations that initially we had to say, what can we. What can we do as a college of education that we have an obligation to really change things and to think about how we can create a better experience, not just for teachers, but also a learning environment for kids. And so in some ways, we thought about, you know, how do we, you know, how can we do this? How do we leverage our convening power? How can we change our teacher ed program? How do we think very differently about what we do? And so this was sort of a coming together to say, all right, what is the next big thing that we could think about instead of just continuing to say, oh, we have a teacher shortage problem. It's not a teacher disorders problem, it's symptomatic, and then diving back in and saying, well, it's Symptomatic of what?

That's interesting. So let's dig into that then. The symptomatic of what? Because I'll just. For those tuning in that don't know, Arizona State University, I will confirm every single faculty and staff member that mission around. It's about who we include and not exclude and how far we can take them and support them. That is on the lips of every single person who walks through that campus and that university. It's just remarkable, the culture around that vision. So let's dig into what is the, you know, how do you rethink that system itself and sort of, what is this next education workforce initiative itself?

So the minute that you begin to think about this as a design problem and not, you know, it's a workforce design problem, not just let's create a new project, program, or activity, then I think you start thinking about what is the, you know, what's the normative default right now, right, of education. And that is the one teacher, one classroom model. And so the minute that you start to think differently and you go, what if, right? You could say, here's what we do today, right? We say, here's a group of kids and here's your 25 kids and your 25 kids and your 25 kids or 30 kids, or in some countries, 60 kids. And you have to be the end all. Be all. You have to know everything there is to know to support every single one of those kids. The minute you say, hmm, let's look at who the kids are, let's think about a group of kids and how we actually could build the right kinds of adults and the right kind of expertise around those kids. Now you have a design challenge that actually takes shape in a whole different way. So now you start thinking about, well, then, what are the roles of teachers and how do they need to be upskilled and what do they need to specialize in? And how do you create teams with distributed expertise? So we said as an anchor statement, we want to personalize and deepen learning for kids by creating teams of educators with distributed expertise. And we want to be able to think about how we provide flexible entry and specialization and advancement pathways for teachers. So we had to think of an idea, right? We had to design this in a way, good for kids, good for teachers.

So I want to dig in on a few of those strands. Just out of my curiosity, you're hitting a lot of the things that I've said as well, that the problem with the movie Waiting for Superman was the title, like, Expecting Teachers to be these superheroes that do all these different things that individuals need. How do you start to unpack that role? What do you see as the variety of roles that kids need in their lives from educators? And then how has that changed how you're actually preparing teachers? Because I imagine I want to get into like what you all are actually doing to change the profession. One very tangible piece that is you're preparing a large part of the workforce that's coming in at various times. So I'm curious how that's changed the teacher preparation.

So there's a lot of levers to this, right? So you have to begin thinking about this as systemic change. And you have to. The minute that you say that professional teachers, we want to make sure that we continue to professionalize the profession. We don't want to deprofessionalize the profession along the way. We also have to think about this as cost neutral. So, so we began to think about design, right? So we said to schools and to districts, you've got X amount of dollars, you've got a grade level of kids. Today you have four professional teachers. One has been a teacher for 12 years. They're terrific in teaching math and reading. They're okay around science. They don't particularly like teaching science, right? You have another one who just came in a couple years ago who was an ex engineer who came in as a, you know, in an alternative pathway. You have another one that was hired because you needed somebody. And you know, they've got a degree, but you needed somebody. They really don't have teaching experience. They've done some work with kids. And you've got somebody somewhere in the middle, right, that's good at, you know, pretty good at teaching math and reading. And you go, okay, so who do you want your kid to be? And they go, well, let's see, that would be all of them, right? Because all of them have different kinds of expertise. So then you start to think about what expertise do they bring. How do we then think about what other specializations? How do we look at a group of kids and say, well, I got a group of kids. There's a high number of kids that have special needs. There's a high number of kids who are second language learners. I got a couple kids who, you know, whatever the case may be, you start to look at the data around these kids and who these kids are and what they need, right, in terms of socio emotional learning and all of that. And you say, all right, so then let's look at these teachers. Let's see what their strengths are. Then let's look at the paras, right, that we probably have. We've got a couple of those, but they've been under prepared. So can we upskill them in some ways around literacy, around special ed, around, so that they come in now in sort of technician roles. Then you think about who in the community do you need? So there are people who have, maybe they're educated, maybe they're under educated, but they have skills, right, in teaching literacy and culture and things like that. But we upskill them in some ways and we bring them into the team. Now you've got a team of people around 100 kids that are all now working together in this dynamic way. They're grouping, they're regrouping, they're thinking about what kids need. That then changes schedules, right? So then that pushes on how schedules begin to change. So no more, oh, we got, you know, 50 minutes here and 50 minutes here and 50 minutes of the next thing. We've been seeing this in elementary, at middle school and at high school. So we've been testing this like in different places. And so, you know, in the 30 schools in which have started this, we're seeing different ways that people are beginning to think about the roles that people have, how they play those roles, the dynamic nature of what that looks like, cross team roles. So there's just a whole new set, right? A teacher is not a teacher, is not a teacher anymore. And so we start thinking about educators, right? We think broadly about who educators are and the kinds of opportunity that they have and that they bring to a group of kids.

It sounds like you're thinking about specialization not just in terms of the academic subjects like it traditionally would have been thought of, but maybe I'm really skilled in facilitating projects that are interdisciplinary from my engineering background. Maybe someone else is really good at that, that Parapro is really good with tutoring small groups of students and with a little bit more literacy expertise, can go deep on, you know, maybe some foundational concepts that I didn't get when in earlier grades, whatever it might be. It sounds like you're thinking about specialization more broadly than has been typically thought of, if I'm getting it right, and maybe more community specific. But I'm curious how you figure out or the schools that you've been working with, how do they figure out what are the different specializations and how they help educators find those different pathways.

So part of it is liberating our content. So colleges of education, who I think have held their content very, very Closely for so long, like you can only get it if you come in to be a professional teacher. And today what we're saying is, so how do we offer what we have in smaller bite sized pizza pieces? So we've created something called a community educator platform and that, you know, was creating these sort of small backpacks for people to come to grab around typical things like reading, around math instruction, but also now thinking about, you know, other, other ways that people can come in and support kids or support, you know, teachers around data literacy, other other things. As we look even across the university to things that we think may be important and as districts come to us and say we need support around trauma or we need support around socio emotional learning or you know, mental health kinds of things for kids, or even, you know, physical health for kids, we've, we've been, you know, talking to a number of people, including the McCain Institute, right around some of the things that they're doing to keep kids safe, right around media literacy and things like that, you know, around social media. So and then in teacher preparation, we now have created electives for our students, which is unheard of in teacher preparation. But now they also like, they may, they may take those electives in special ed or ESL or some of the endorsement areas. But again now we're looking across the university to say are there things that districts really need from them in terms of, you know, it might be something in engineering, but it may also be in data analytics. It might be something coming out of social work. Right. Or counseling that we start to build these sort of specializations for people so that there are things coming out. So it's a, it's a back and forth with our districts that inform what they need and then us kind of looking to see what do we have that we could offer that we think makes some sense for students.

It seems to me that this approach actually could be a real answer to. Some people have worried that we're going to thrust teachers into roles with mental health counseling and the like for which they're not trained and could actually exacerbate problems. It seems like this could be an answer to the challenge that there aren't enough mental health workers in this conventional system, but they could be more on the ground. Now I'm curious if the vision also seems to push on a couple other fronts. And I'll start with one of them, which is physical layout of the schools. I imagine that you want, you know, if you have 100 kids with say three or four educators, if I'm doing the math, right. Maybe it's five. If you have some paras you want maybe very different looking spaces. What does that look like? How hard is it to reconfigure? Is it necessary?

Yeah, space has been an interesting challenge, I think, for schools, but I think that they're, you know, different. People have been, have been thinking about it in different ways. Some of them have just cut holes in walls, some of them have just opened doors and you know, they send the messages, right, that every teacher owns that roster of kids. And so, you know, that just. It looks different. And I do want to say, look, this is nascent. We don't have all this figured out. We certainly are not being prescriptive about this. I think, you know, we'll see. We certainly. There's a long history of this work. I mean the 60s and 70s, this was open classrooms and.

Yeah, this was open classrooms and all of that.

Right. This was a big thing until accountability came along and like closed all the doors, I think. But I think that the difference is that one, I think that the time has come. We have to think about this differently. There's just too many things now that we've put on teachers plates. And I do think it's irresponsible to ask teachers to do things they're not really prepared to do. So they're just too spread out. It's just too much. But I do think that the other thing is technology and how technology also supports all of this now that we're seeing the integration, more of AI, but also of remote learning in how people come in from outside to remote, in how do we bring the community in to do certain things, to work with small groups of kids. And so, you know, space is a challenge just given the way space is. But I think it will be interesting to see how teachers, and we're beginning to see how teachers are actually pretty creative about that.

No, that makes sense. And I think that'll be an interesting evolution of the schoolhouse toward open classrooms away and then maybe back toward. In many ways. And to your point, the technology has

changed and in newer schools, right. I mean, you've got more, you know, you've got accordion doors. You now schools are being built with glass doors. We still have a lot of very traditional, you know, schools.

Infrastructure. Yeah, no, no, no question about it.

Change overnight. But we do have to think more.

Well, so the other barrier that it seems to me that could be there, and I'm curious how you all are working with the schools on this one as well, is from a public policy regulatory perspective of who we consider to be a teacher and how we think about certification and licensure of educators. Has that reared its head? What is. What's the latest and greatest thinking around how to tackle those questions?

I think it's a good question, I think, and I think states are wrestling with it. I think they are trying to figure out how to open the doors to more things without, you know, to think about different layers and levels. I compare this to health care a lot of times where I think about, we used to have LPNs and RNs, and today you have lots of certified technicians who play different roles as we think about how people serve a group of patients. But you also have RNs who now specialize. You have nurse practitioners, you have physician's assistants. In the same way, we're thinking about paraprofessionals and the roles. And you go, could paraprofessionals now become technicians? And could we certify around that? We're seeing states that are moving to, you know, assistant or associate teacher roles, particularly for teacher candidates coming in. But for those who want some kind of advancement, progression. And then I think there is opportunity, right? We've been preparing teachers who get master's degrees and or who specialize in all kinds of things, but they're still in their classroom. They never really get to use that specialization. So if your kid is lucky enough to get that teacher and you need that particular, you know, there are reading specialists, good for you. Your kid gets the teacher with the reading specialist, and nobody else gets that kid, you know, gets that teacher. And so this is this opportunity too, right? Then around, you know, diversity writ large of kids getting exposure and access to more people, more people who look like them, more people who have specialization, more people who have different kinds of experience. And that's across that continuum. And I think that from a policy standpoint, we're going to have to think about that and allow people to actually get certified or specialized in a variety of different areas and then build the human resource systems, right? That then allow us to build those kinds of teams in a strategic way. And so that's a whole nother lever that we're trying to push on too, is around those human resource systems.

Fascinating. It reminds me of when Clay Christensen and his colleagues wrote the Innovators prescription and they made the observation, to your point that, you know, you should have pharma technicians being able to practice to the top of their crafts, nurse practitioners being able to do things that primary care physicians used to do. Primary care physicians take the technology and do things that specialists used to do. And specialists get to work on those really, really thorny problems at the, at the uppermost of the craft. And you kind of wanted all the different guilds, if you will, working together to keep lifting the ceilings for each of those. I want to go to a question mark. Schneiderman asks about how does something like flipped classroom complement this concept? So I think we could enlarge this. There's a lot of innovative pedagogical models that we've seen enter in terms of blended learning, in terms of project based learning, things of that nature. How does it fit in to. To the vision and the work?

Yeah, so I think it all fits, right? I mean, I don't. This is not prescriptive around what curricular models are instructional models. Good instruction, good curriculum is still good instruction and good curriculum. And these models need that probably more than ever. I think this just gives an opportunity for people to work together in different ways, but actually to refine those systems and have more people who have eyes on kids, eyes on assessment, thinking about bias and all those kinds of things. But I think it's just more people coming together. And I think flipped classrooms, they're part of that. They're part and parcel of what we think today is really good instruction. So we can actually do more small groups and classrooms. But now you have more adults to manage the work that actually happens during that classroom time and begin to think again about what schedules look like. We're seeing many more schedules that are now allowing, right, for kids to have more time to do what they need to do. So a kid needs more time in math, they get more time because now you've got more adults and you're thinking about, you know, around kids and you're able to group and regroup in different ways. So all of that is still part and parcel of the work.

No, that makes total sense. So let's shift as we sort of the last part of this conversation, which is what's happening on the ground, what's the work you all are doing? You have a number of partnerships. You mentioned 30 schools you're working with. Give us a flavor of what that looks like and what the vision is to actually make this a reality in schools, certainly, I imagine, in Arizona, but across the country.

So We've got about 30 schools here. Many of those schools are in Mesa Public Schools. That's our probably largest district. Superintendent Andy Forless, who said, put a flag in the sand and said, you know, we want 50% of our schools. It's a district of about 75 schools to be next education, workforce schools within two years. They're about halfway there. They'll probably get there in two years. And that's elementary, middle school, high schools that are moving. We've got four other districts here in Arizona and then others that are joining us in launching and learning through a bigger network with aasa, the Superintendents Association. We've been thrilled to partner with them. We're also working with aacte, so that's American association for College Teacher Educators thinking now about what does this mean for teacher preparation? Because we think we've got to push on that lever. And so they also partner with us. We're trying to bring on other universities and colleges of ed that would be interested in helping us think about this. And so we're, you know, we're gathering, we've talked to both unions, we've talked to, you know, all of the sort of national players. We've got a number of sort of consultants that have been doing some of this work, you know, including folks at Public Impact and others that are thinking about this. We've got partnerships with, you know, folks that are thinking now about, you know, on the, on the sort of tutoring side, you know, all those kinds of things that are happening and how does that, you know, how does that begin to fit into this? And we've got all of those people who are out there, as we think about National Tutoring Corps. So there's a number of partners that we have been working with and trying to figure out all the pieces of this very large, complex system. And so again, this is not just, you know, flash in the pan. It's a program. Here's a prescription. Go do this. It's something we've all got to figure out together. And it's got to be context. You know, context matters here and community based. And so we're, I think we're providing the sort of framework for this and trying to build an infrastructure. Because teachers haven't learned to work on teams. They need to understand what that, what that means, what that looks like, how to design this. We need to start thinking about what does it mean to be a team lead. What does it mean then to be a leader of a school with teams. Right. So all of that work that I think didn't happen when we just opened, you know, we did open classrooms. We're trying to build that infrastructure. So again, we just, we got a Department of Ed grant to work with the human resources systems in Mesa Public Schools to start shifting and thinking about salary structures, evaluation how do we think now about teacher evaluation to be more team based, not just individual. So lots of things on that side. And then building this community educator platform to try to liberate our content to provide more access to people so that we can start to see what that begins to look like as people really learn how, how to teach and that there really is something here. And as I say, get the public back into public education.

It's amazing breadth of activity as you're describing it. It's not just, as you said, a research initiative with maybe some changes in a couple classes that teachers or educators are at the Mary Luton Lou Fulton College are taking, but all these interactions with a lot of different groups to, as you said, move the system. It also occurs to me that as you're talking to unions and so forth, this could be a real answer for them in terms of keeping their memberships bigger because, and again, I write this in the book From Reopen to Reinvent that we have ignored all the research around employee motivation in education for decades now in terms of the importance around advancement, responsibility, the intrinsic work itself, things of that nature. And instead we've sort of said, hey, advancement, okay, go out of teaching to be an administrator and things like that. And so it seems to me that you're incorporating a lot of those motivators into the design which, which hopefully will be incredibly fruitful. But it goes to the question that I'm curious about is the teachers that have enacted this, that have started to move to these models, what do they say? What are you hearing from them?

The happiness quotient is huge, right? So this is working, right? It's huge. And I mean, everything that we've done. So we're working with Johns Hopkins around some, some work that they're doing, their policy institute, we're also working now. The center for Reinventing Public Education is now part of our college at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and asu. So they have been working with us and will continue to work with us on really looking at evaluation and research. But I mean, the first thing we did with the district said if the teachers are happy, we're going to keep doing this. And that has been just absolutely tremendous. There's a video on our website and I think it's, I don't know, 23 seconds in, and this teacher says, I will never go back. And it's the most powerful piece in the whole video. It's a great video, but the most powerful piece of it, right, is this teacher saying, I will never go back.

That's huge and a huge part of this. So take us home. As you think about where this goes, what are the goals over the next few years? What do you want to see in place? What's the bigger vision of how you move this system as you start to coalesce these partnerships and proof points across the country?

Well, I think we need more of them, right? This isn't just an Arizona thing. We have one context. I'd love to see this across the country where we've got, we keep talking about a hub and spoke model where we can continue to be thought leaders around this, provide some infrastructure, but we're going to need everybody. This is not something we're going to do as ASU or the teachers college here. It's going to take lots of spokes then of people to say, yeah, we want to be our own little mini hubs for this and start to move this within their school systems and within partnerships, real university school partnerships that we've talked about for a very long. This is definitely a systems play. And so, you know, we're going to keep pushing on everything and everybody that we possibly can and, you know, and see where it takes us. But we're not going to come out of this thing called teacher shortage. If we continue to look at it as teacher shortage or as a recruitment retention, it's got to be more than, oh, we're going to do more high school programs, we're going to create more pipelines. It's not going to happen until the fundamental role of a teacher changes. We cannot keep asking people to be everything to everyone all the time. And so this normative structure of a one teacher, one classroom model is going to have to fundamentally change. And so that's what we're pushing on.

So, yeah, that makes a ton of sense and you said it so well there. And it strikes me that there's some work to help us move forward in that direction. But it also strikes me that there's going to be a lot of schools that watch this and get really excited and want to know how they can be part of this. So what's the best way for them to get involved in the next education workforce initiative?

They can contact me. They can get on our website around next education workforce at ASU and just let us know you're interested and we'll get you signed up and registered. We have both a learning and a lunching cohort. So people that are just ready to learn more because there's a lot more to learn and we're trying to figure it out. We'll spend a year just spending time with people, kind of learning, watching, and seeing other people who are launching. Those of you who want to stand up and go, yeah, I'm ready to go. We got to start moving. I got the right leader, and all it takes is one leader and one school team to get started. So it doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to feel like this is a monumental shift, but there is a way to kind of dip your toe in and see whether or not this will work. Just contact us.

Beautiful. And keep up the good work. I'm tremendously appreciative. I know that amidst the pandemic, people have realized just how unsustainable this is for teachers. So I think it's the right time for this as well. You're entering the right window and giving people a real solution. So I'm deeply appreciative, deeply excited about it. And if you're watching this, reading this, get in touch with Carol so you can help change the future of education. And so with that, we'll leave this conversation there, but more to come as we continue to track and follow it. Thanks for being here.

Thanks so much.