In a lecture I heard from the John Danner, CEO of Rocketship Schools, in one of my graduate school classes, he related the current state of the teaching profession to what the medical profession previously looked like. As it turns out that like the current teaching profession, doctors were primarily generalists. They would go door to door for little pay trying to provide their services. Given that they faced so many different situations and lacked the technology, medical outcomes were unsurprisingly not very good. However, given advances in science, pharmaceuticals, technology, and city infrastructure, the profession shifted towards greater specialization and medical outcomes improved.
Education is faced with a similar opportunity. With technology tools developing that will help individualize education for students, there is an opportunity to rethink our approach to the roles we utilize in staffing a school. Given that this development will likely change how much of a curriculum is delivered and how students are assessed, there will be an opportunity to have educators move from being generalists to focus their energy on going deep across a limited set of skills.
While there are a growing number of schools that are implementing new models that are starting to personalize education for students, these new approaches are still quite new. Yet, there are already new focused roles that are starting to develop in schools. I’ve presented a few examples below and cite the skills (full list in my last blog post) that they emphasize.
- Small group facilitator: This role is responsible for taking small groups of kids and helping them tackle specific skills in small pull-out groups. This person must have strong content knowledge and be able to think creatively on the fly to meet kids where they are and guide them to understanding. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a performer and expert.
- Master teachers: This role is responsible for the outcomes of a larger group of kids as well as managing junior teachers. They create a plan of execution and manage teachers towards these goals. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a manager and designer.
- Data analyst: This role is responsible for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing student data. This person may group students and deciding who gets pulled when but they may actually not teach kids themselves. This role emphasizes skills associated with being an analyzer.
- Lab coach: These folks are responsible for motivating and managing a large group of kids at one time as they work through personalized computerized curriculum but don’t actually need to have a strong content knowledge because the content is largely delivered electronically. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a performer and manager.
Thus, these new roles allow for a more focused approach to jobs as an educator. There are a number of potential positive impacts from rethinking human capital. First and foremost, students have the potential to be served more effectively. By catering what adults do to the personalization of curriculum delivery, there is a much better chance that students won’t be left behind. Second, specialization has the potential to further professionalize teaching. Teachers will be able to more effectively differentiate themselves based on their particular skills and abilities. If the trend continues towards schools having more budgetary and hiring control, this should allow wages to become more differentiated based on the value teachers are adding towards gaining student outcomes. Thus, stronger performers will be rewarded for their achievements. Finally, it should help teachers remain in the profession longer. If teachers are able to focus on developing a narrower set of skills early on, they are more likely to feel successful and there will be less likelihood of burnout.
While it is clear that it will take some time for these new models to develop and establish a definitive sense of what ultimately works, it is important to not think of human capital as an afterthought. By rethinking and reconstructing how schools are staffed, there is a great opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in educating students with these
Teachers do a lot! And they need to be good a lot of different things to be effective. In fact, when you breakdown the traditional teacher role, you see that teachers must perform a laundry list of skills in their daily routine. In many other professions, an entire job might be primarily designed around performing just one of these skills.
The following is a list of just some of the things that the traditional teacher role encompasses on a given day:
Teachers are managers: they must motivate, influence, and control a large group of students. Managers in large companies rarely have more than 7-10 direct reports. Teachers typically manage between 20-30 people at any given time and secondary teachers have as many as 200 under their direct supervision in a given day.
Teachers are designers: they must create interesting lessons to engage students. Teachers frequently teach multiple classes so they must develop these concepts on a daily basis. Yet, most of the day must be spent executing the lessons they designed the night before. Designers at a company like Apple spend their entire day just creating great products
Teachers are performers: beyond just developing interesting lessons, teachers must captivate their students. Teachers are essentially on ”stage” 5-7 hours a day. However, unlike most professions associated with performing, they don’t get to practice before each performance.
Teachers are analyzers: like a good scientist, they must determine ways to collect evidence, interrupt the results, and change course as necessary. Although, unlike a scientist, this process must be completed in between a teachers primary duties.
Teachers are experts: teachers must know their content area and must be nimble enough to answer questions on the subject as they come up in real time.
Given the breadth and depth of skills that we expect from teachers combined with other challenges like low pay and limited resources, is it any wonder that we see 50% of teachers exiting the profession by year 5? The teachers that are able to develop their craft over years by mastering all these skills are truly extraordinary professionals.
While it is amazing to see what remarkable teachers can accomplish, what if things were structured differently so that we didn't need every teacher to perform every skill at a very high level to produce student results. What if the teacher role was broken down into sub-roles? What if teachers were specialists?
In our next post, Haystack EDU will explore a developing opportunity to change the teacher role to make teachers more effective, to make the teaching role more sustainable, and to make teaching into more of a profession.
