Spotlight On Evidence: Reimagining the Teaching Role by Investing in Strategic Staffing

Across the U.S., schools are grappling with a dual crisis: historically low teacher satisfaction and stagnant student achievement. In response, a growing number of districts are embracing strategic staffing—a reimagining of how adults are deployed to support student learning.

Strategic staffing refers to models that rethink the traditional “one teacher, one classroom” paradigm by creating team-based teaching structures where educators with varied expertise collaborate to support a shared group of students. These models can involve teacher leaders, resident teachers-in-training, paraprofessionals, and instructional coaches working together in clearly defined, mutually reinforcing roles. This could look like a fifth-grade teacher specializing in reading instruction while another focuses on math, supported by a team that includes a resident teacher-in-training or instructional aide with expertise in supporting multilingual learners. Or it could include a highly effective educator stepping into an on-the-job coaching role and creating teaching teams that reach more students with excellent teaching.

The goal of strategic staffing structures is to both improve student access to effective teaching and create more supportive, sustainable roles for educators. At a time when teacher burnout and attrition are at historic highs, strategic staffing offers educators the opportunity to collaborate in teams, learn from one another, and share responsibilities.

But does it work? Evidence from the landmark national Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) experiment found that reallocating teachers based on effectiveness, without additional resources, could lead to significant improvements in student achievement. Yet, other than this study, the evidence base remains nascent, and the field has little hard evidence on whether this approach is effective at improving outcomes for both teachers and students.

Impact on educators

To better understand the impact of strategic staffing on educators, Overdeck Family Foundation funding supported the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) to conduct a more rigorous study of Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce (NEW), which uses a team-based staffing approach to rethink teacher roles based on their particular strengths. The study compared outcomes for teamed and non-teamed teachers in Mesa, Arizona, and found that teamed teachers were about 10 percentage points less likely to leave their position than non-teamed teachers. These findings build on earlier descriptive research reporting that teamed teachers were 15 percentage points more likely to report staying in the teaching profession and 22 percentage points more likely to be rated as highly effective by their principal.

Impact on students

One reason that strategic staffing models may improve retention is that they allow teachers to focus on their strengths, reduce the burden of “doing it all,” and create pathways for leadership and growth. But does that retention lead to better student outcomes? Although rigorous experimental evidence is limited, studies of Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative, in which multi-classroom leaders coach and support small teams of teachers while maintaining some teaching responsibilities themselves, have found some effects on student achievement.

In one multi-state study using a rigorous quantitative methodology, researchers from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) found that schools adopting the Opportunity Culture approach both elevated their most effective teachers to multi-classroom leader roles (as intended) and significantly improved participating students’ performance in math. The impacts on students were equivalent to moving them from a classroom led by an average teacher to a classroom led by a teacher in the top 25 percent of effectiveness. The study pointed to the multi-classroom leader model, which relies on instructional coaching from an effective classroom teacher to help average or weak teachers improve their practice, as the key factor driving those gains. Further work from researchers at Texas Tech University used a more descriptive and less rigorous methodology but found a similar pattern of findings, suggesting that the multi-classroom leader model was associated with approximately two to three additional months of learning in reading and math.

Upcoming research

While the initial findings on teacher and student impact are promising, the evidence base for strategic staffing remains sparse. Most models are relatively early, current studies are correlational or quasi-experimental at most, and the field has not yet launched any randomized controlled trials that are considered the “gold standard” for evidence in education. There are also unanswered questions about which elements of strategic staffing models are most critical for success and how results vary by school context.

Recognizing this significant gap in the evidence, Overdeck Family Foundation recently funded an ambitious new impact study of ASU’s NEW model, led by researchers at CRPE and the American Institutes for Research. The study will use a rigorous quasi-experimental event design to estimate impacts of NEW on instructional quality and student achievement. It will also identify which components of the model are most predictive of success, offering valuable insights for implementation and scaling.

To grow field knowledge about how strategic staffing affects different students, Overdeck Family Foundation also helped fund the launch of the Inspired Teaching and Exceptional Learning (ITEL) initiative, designed to support personalized, collaborative instruction across multiple public school districts by implementing strategic staffing alongside high-quality instructional materials and aligned professional learning. ITEL includes a built-in research agenda, with a multi-year evaluation conducted by Mathematica that will assess impacts on teacher experience, instructional quality, and student learning. This work will provide the field with more insight into how strategic staffing affects different student subgroups, such as multilingual learners or students with disabilities, and identify the implementation conditions needed for success.

The challenges facing public education today—staffing shortages, constrained budgets, and widespread lack of proficiency in math and reading—demand bold, creative solutions. Strategic staffing could be one such solution, and early evidence suggests it could both help improve the teaching profession and deliver better outcomes for students.

But more evidence is needed. As more schools rethink traditional staffing models, it’s essential that the field has access to rigorous, transparent research to guide decisions on policy and practice. Overdeck Family Foundation is proud to support both the organizations bringing strategic staffing to more schools and the researchers focused on studying this work. As always, we remain committed to sharing the findings of any research we fund, regardless of outcome, to help the field make evidence-informed decisions that best serve all students.

Thank you to Jessica Fredston-Hermann for your contributions to this blog post.

Header image courtesy of Arizona State University