At a time when school districts continue grappling with teacher turnover in areas like math, science and special education, new research confirms that team-based staffing models dramatically reduce vacancies. Here’s why.
A new approach to address teacher turnover
Teachers working within teams are only 11.7% likely to leave their positions compared to their peers working in traditional classrooms (21%), according to a study from Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation in collaboration with the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
“The old single teacher classroom model is conducted in isolation from colleagues, which creates a ‘sink or swim’ approach that is particularly hard on new teachers—who depart the profession in costly numbers in their early years,” said Richard Ingersoll, one of the study’s lead researchers.
Another strategy for reducing turnover is to give teachers more authority in the classroom and throughout their schools. The research suggests that when teachers have greater decision-making power, they are less likely to leave.
Above all, the combination of collaborative team teaching and having the authority to make crucial decisions resulted in the lowest turnover rates observed by the researchers (6.6% vs. 22% for members with lower authority). Teachers who experienced both benefits were far more likely to stay in their schools and districts.
“Rather than primarily focusing on trying to force the existing arrangement to work better, this alternative suggests that we view teacher quality issues as a design problem: the need for a different arrangement, better built for those who do the work of teaching,” the researchers conclude.
“From this perspective, to improve the quality of teachers and teaching, it will be necessary to improve the quality of the job and the career of teaching.”
Read the full research report here.
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