1. Teacher Teams: Powerful Engines of Change
Susan Moore Johnson
The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers
Harvard Graduate School of Education.
NEASC Annual Meeting, 2016

2. 6/1/2018
Finders and Keepers provides an overview of the 50, but focuses on 10 who illustrate the range. In FAK, we write about many of the experiences these teachers had in their schools.
One thing we found early on is that most of these teachers did not plan to stay in teaching for an entire career and after 4 years, we saw notable attrition: Of the 50 new teachers we interviewed only 17 planned to stay in education long-term and only 3 first-career entrants planned to remain in the classroom full-time for an entire career. As you’ll see, we’ve focused much of our subsequent work on the causes and consequences of that turnover.

3. Federal
State
District
School

4. The Egg-Crate School

5. The Problem: Isolation within the Egg-Crate School

6. Within Any School, Teachers Vary in QualityB+ C B+ C B+ B+ B+ A- B+ A-

7. Two Approaches to School Improvement
Focus on Individuals: Hire effective or promising teachers; reward and retain them, while dismissing ineffective teachers.
Focus on the Organization: Rely on formal and informal interactions among teachers and principals (e.g., hiring committees, grade-level teams, supervision and evaluation) to develop human capital throughout the school.

8. Work Environments Matter (Johnson, Kraft, & Papay, 2012)
Work environment is a stronger predictor of a teacher’s satisfaction and intention to transfer than student characteristics.
In comparing schools with similar demographics, student growth rates were higher in schools with better work environments:
Relationships with Colleagues
Leadership of Principals
School Culture (including order and discipline)

9. THE CHALLENGE: Promoting peer-to-peer interaction and development throughout the schoolB+ C B+ C B+ B+ B+ A- B+ A-

10. Teachers Gauge Their Teams’ Goodness of Fit
Teachers judged teams to be a “good fit” for their needs when:
Teams helped them teach their own students more effectively
AND
Teams helped to advance overall improvement goals of their school, grade level, or department
Individual Benefits
Organizational Benefits

11. Poor Fit: Stowe Middle School
Schoolwide Focus
Teachers’ Perceived Needs
Lack of agreement about the focus of the teams’ work
Maintaining funding for extended day versus
Supporting instruction and coordination of teachers’ work

12. Good Fit: Giovanni Elementary
Clear, agreed improvement focus
Teams supported that focus
Teachers had a voice in the work of teams and drew benefit from that work I

13. WALKER CITY
State Charters
CMO Restart
Former Turnaround
Traditional
Naylor
Rodriguez
Kincaid
Fitzgerald
Hurston
Dickinson
All 6 schools received the highest rating in the state’s accountability system.

14. Teams: Central to Improvement in 5 Schools
5 of 6 schools relied on teams for improvement
At these 5 schools, teachers said that their teams provided a “goodness of fit” with the demands of their work:
Contributing to their success in the classroom and
Contributing to a better school

15. Teacher Teams Served Two Functions
Content teams focused on curriculum, instruction, and lesson planning, also monitoring evidence of students’ learning.
Cohort teams focused on individual students, group behavior, and the culture of the cohort.

16. Factors that Contributed to Teams’ Success
Team time was inviolable.

17. Time and Format Varied Across Schools
Dickinson Elementary
Teachers’ 5 prep blocks per week, scheduled as CPT (K-1, 2-3, and 4-5)
Principal claimed 1 prep per week for grade-level meetings, addressing both content and cohort functions.
Naylor Charter
Grade-level team meetings for content (curriculum and lesson planning) one block daily, long block weekly.
Weekly grade-level team meetings for content (monitoring student performance)
Weekly cohort team meetings.

18. Factors that Contributed to Teams’ Success
Team time was inviolable.
In three schools, teacher leaders facilitated teams.
Principals remained informed and engaged, but did not micromanage the teams’ work.

19. Teams Did Not Stand Alone:
Schools had well-established systems for
Hiring
Supervision and Evaluation
Teacher Teams

20. Hiring: A Two-Way, Information-Rich Process
Application Review & Pre-Interview Screening
Courting the Candidate
Administrator Interview
Teaching Demonstration
... & Debrief
Meeting with Current Teachers
Reference Checks

21. Supervision and Evaluation: Ongoing and Focused on Improvement
Committed to developing their teachers
Frequent observations and feedback to teachers
Biweekly
5–10 times per year
1– 4 times per year

22. Systems for Improvement were Interdependent
Hiring
Evaluation
Teams T

23. Effective systems for Hiring, Teams, and Evaluation supported teachers’ and students’ development throughout the school. A+ -

24. The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers www.projectngt.harvard.edu