Looking Backward, Inward, and Forward: The Genealogy of, and Conceptual and Empirical Evidence for, the Next Education Workforce

In this three-article dissertation, I explore three aspects of the Next Education Workforce initiative (NEW), an education reform effort hailing from Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Through the initiative, NEW seeks to change schools and schooling, breaking down the physical and metaphorical walls of the predominant one-teacher, one-classroom staffing model. Instead, NEW argues that schools should employ team-based staffing models, where teams of educators with unique and distributed expertise can deepen and personalize learning for all students. At the time of the defense of this dissertation, 485 educators in 122 teams from 45 schools in 10 school systems work in NEW’s team-based staffing models. Almost 10,000 students are taught in NEW’s team-based staffing models. Each article in this dissertation was written to be published separately and can be read independently. However, these articles act as a foundational trilogy of evidence for NEW when read together. The first article explores the genealogical origins of NEW. Team-based staffing models’ roots can be traced back to the 1950s. This article asks, “Where did team-based staffing models come from?” Additionally, given the one-teacher, one-classroom staffing model is the predominant model of schooling today, it also asks, “Why did team-based staffing models not stick the first time?” The answers to these two genealogical questions set up the second article well. After an exploration of the reasons why team-based staffing models declined, this article asks, “What evidence from education research and research from other fields has been generated that supports the transition to team-based based staffing models?” This conceptual article summarizes the evidence for the identified team-level elements of NEW models. Finally, given the genealogical and conceptual evidence, this third article explores what educators experience when they work in team-based staffing models. Using an already existing dataset, the third article explores the experiences of teachers of color in NEW models. In particular, this article explores their satisfaction, self-efficacy, collaboration, teacher-student interactions, and commitment to the profession. It also compares their experiences to the experiences of teachers of color in one-teacher, one-classroom models and White teachers in NEW and one-teacher, one-classroom models.