New from Public Impact and the Center on Reinventing Public Education:
How could the best aspects of learning pod staffing be scaled up?
“Pandemic pods” created new opportunities for adults interested in supporting children’s education. In these pods—established by families, school districts, and microschools—teachers had the chance to work with much smaller groups of students than usual, specialize in specific aspects of the broader teaching role, work a part-time schedule, and play a lead role in deciding or even creating curriculum. Other adults without formal teaching credentials gained the opportunity to play critical roles, as well, such as providing academic tutoring and social and emotional support to students during a time of great need. Many pod staff members found these new roles appealing.
Pods revealed that teachers and other adults want to play more varied roles in students’ education. And some pod-like staffing arrangements may continue to exist and grow in out-of-school settings, such as after-school programs. But in a new report for the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Public Impact Co-President Bryan Hassel examines another potential development: Is it possible that the experiences staff had in pods could become much more common in the day-to-day operations of U.S. public schools, at scale?
The answer is a qualified “yes.” Pre-Covid, some public schools were already creating new staffing arrangements that hit many of the same themes as pods, such as Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative, which has already shown positive impacts on student learning and educator satisfaction and is described in more detail in the report.
The vast majority of public schools still operate with a standard one-teacher-one classroom staffing model. Pod-inspired interest in new employee arrangements alone will not shift these long-standing patterns. As the report highlights, though, this interest could contribute to the policy and practice changes needed to usher in a new era in which the personalized, relationship-rich arrangements that staff enjoyed in pods become widespread and lasting.
Some of the features of staffing that most flourished in pandemic pods were:
- Advanced roles for expert teachers, both to reach larger numbers of students with their lessons (remotely or in person) and to expand their impact by leading teams of other teachers and staff.
- Differentiated roles among teachers and staff, enabling adults to play different roles in line with their strengths, whether via a subject focus, such as an elementary teacher specializing in math; a concentration on particular roles that contribute to student learning and well-being, such as conveying new content, leading project-based exploration, fostering discussions, or assisting small groups of students in achieving mastery; or forming deep relationships with students through mentoring.
- Creating new pipelines of talent into schools—bringing in teacher candidates through paid residencies, hiring tutors and “success coaches” from the ranks of recent graduates, and giving paraprofessionals already in schools the chance to play new roles and (if desired) get on a path to teacher certification.
Through innovative staffing arrangements, such as those in Opportunity Culture schools, these pandemic pod features could spread throughout public education.
Delving into the specifics of the Opportunity Culture initiative can shed light on what is possible in public schools. Several features of Opportunity Culture models reflect the kinds of arrangements that garnered such interest among educators in pandemic pods:
- Proven excellent teachers reach students in new ways
- Teams make specialization and collaboration a reality
- New roles for adults open up new pathways for educators and targeted support for students
Opportunity Culture designs were in over 600 schools (93 percent Title I) in 2021–22, a significant increase from the model’s first schools in 2013–14 but still a fraction of schools nationally. Other models profiled in a 2018 Christensen Institute and Public Impact report on innovative staffing collectively appeared in nine schools at the time of the report. To read more about what it would take for alternative models to become more widespread, see the full report.