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In 2017, more than 900 ninth graders at Westwood High School in Mesa, AZ, had the traditional high school experience. They came from different junior high schools across the district and enrolled in a set of disconnected courses where their schedule was driven by efficiency and convenience. Learning was siloed. It was easy to feel like a number.

The experience wasn’t much better for their teachers. The job was isolating and inflexible and lacked professional autonomy. Many of the teachers were in their first year because most of the upper division classes had been claimed by more experienced teachers. There wasn’t time to collaborate with colleagues and consequently, teaching was siloed and disconnected. It was easy to feel like a widget in a high school machine.

Something had to change. The leadership team at Westwood abandoned the one-teacher, one-classroom model of staffing ninth grade and, instead, built educator teams that would each share a common roster of freshmen.

Centering Students

The school piloted its bold approach to ninth grade staffing in 2018. They placed learners at the center and built teams of educators with different expertise around the students. The teams included educators who taught English, math, and biology. The site leaders hypothesized that with a team-based staffing model, every student would have the support they need to succeed, and the job would be more appealing for educators.

Westwood started small. It launched three educator teams in the first year, each sharing a roster of about 90 freshmen. The shared rosters included learners who were considered more at risk based on their junior high school experience, including those with poor attendance or those who struggled academically or socially.

Most importantly, the same team of educators shared the same students during the same block of time. As such, they could easily modify their schedule, dynamically group and regroup students, and more easily create interdisciplinary learning experiences.

Of course, team members had their content area specializations, but each educator also leaned into other strengths or areas of interest. For example, one teammate could focus on family communication. Another concentrated on integrating technology into lessons, while another took the lead on interdisciplinary unit planning. Not only did the job become less isolating and more doable, but the team could focus on really knowing the students they shared.

The site leaders hypothesized that with a team-based staffing model, every student would have the support they need to succeed, and the job would be more appealing for educators.

Vatricia Harris, a member of one of those initial teams, recalls, “students who may have once been overlooked or cast aside were now at the center of everything we did. Their interests, their likes, their strengths, their essence was valued and interwoven into the curriculum. When we started teaming, our students began to see themselves as successful and they thrived.”

Evolution of Team-Based Staffing at Westwood

Westwood’s approach to team-based staffing continued to evolve. During the 2019−20 school year, leadership decided to keep the same three teams but have them focus even more on delivering deeper and more personalized learning through inquiry and interdisciplinary problem-based learning. In March 2020, when the pandemic moved learning online, team members shared the task of quickly adopting new areas of specialization (e.g., web-based teaching, encouraging online attendance).

Over the next several years, site leaders, working closely with educator teams and the larger community, continued to expand and evolve team-based staffing models at Westwood. They tested different configurations of content areas on teams. They created a new role, “lead teacher,” to organize and help support the team. They tried different master schedules to balance planning time for teams with student elective choice. They built rosters to allow full-time, embedded special educators on at least half of their teams. (See the figure below for one version of team-based staffing that focuses on the “core team”—the set of educators who are wrapped around the same group of students for several hours each day.)

By the 2021−22 school year, teaming was wall-to-wall across ninth grade at Westwood and by 2024, team-based staffing models were in place or being piloted across ninth and 10th grades.

Inspiration for the District and the Country

In 2019, inspired by Westwood, Mesa Public Schools, with support from the Next Education Workforce initiative at Arizona State University, began designing and launching team-based staffing in schools across the district. In fall 2020, despite pandemic complications, two elementary schools and one junior high school launched their first team-based staffing models. By spring 2024, 41 of Mesa’s 82 schools had launched at least one pilot team. Although they belong to the same district, each school’s staffing model looks different; the designs are informed by the students, educators, and community of each site. That said, all models share the defining elements of Next Education Workforce team-based staffing models.

District leaders were not the only ones interested in learning from Westwood. Over the 2022−23 and 2023−24 school years, nearly 900 visitors from 70 school systems across 35 states came to visit schools with team-based staffing models across the greater Phoenix metro area. (To learn more about these visits, see workforce.education.asu.edu/site-visits.) The Next Education Workforce team has supported more than 150 schools from more than 50 school systems across 15 states to design and launch team-based staffing models.

Associated Outcomes

The implementation of team-based staffing models at Westwood High School and across more than 40 schools in Mesa Public Schools has yielded notable outcomes for both educators and students.

Educator Outcomes

  • Lower Turnover Rates: On average, team-based educators have lower turnover rates compared to traditionally staffed educators. Lead teachers and novices are retained at even higher rates.
  • Greater Satisfaction: Team-based educators report greater satisfaction than educators in traditional classroom models and are also more likely to recommend the profession to a friend.
  • Educator Effectiveness: Team-based educators are more likely to be rated highly effective in evaluations, even when controlling for years of experience and previous evaluation ratings.
  • Collaboration and Support: According to a qualitative study, “Teachers [in Mesa Public Schools] expressed a sense of relief due to being part of a team.” Team-based educators at Westwood emphasized the importance of a collaborative environment, which allowed them to share experiences and enhance their teaching practices.

Student Outcomes

  • Engagement and connection: At Westwood, site leaders reported greater engagement levels and feelings of connection to the school among students supported by educator teams. Students highlighted relationships with teachers and inquiry-based learning as reasons they felt more involved and connected.
  • Self-efficacy: Site leaders also reported an increase in students’ confidence in their school-related abilities and belief they could succeed academically among students served by educator teams.
  • Algebra I passing rates: Early data that suggest ninth grade Algebra I students in team-based models at Westwood passed at rates that were four to seven percentage points higher than demographically similar students in other non-team-based high schools in the district.

Looking to the future, Westwood’s leadership team is conducting longitudinal studies to investigate the long-term effects of team-based staffing on student outcomes, including academic performance, college readiness, and career success. The Class of 2025 will be the first to graduate under the full implementation of the teaming model.

Lessons for Secondary School Leaders

With 3,500 students, Westwood is one of the largest high schools in Arizona. Before assuming that the school’s ability to build successful team-based staffing models is a function of size or geography, it is important to know that there are more than 70 secondary schools across the country that have partnered with the Next Education Workforce Initiative to design team-based staffing models for their schools. Those school enrollments range from thousands of students to dozens. They are in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Some have strong teachers’ unions, and some are in right-to-work states. A few have beautiful, flexible learning spaces, but most are implementing team-based staffing in typical classroom set-ups.

This national perspective, combined with the insights from Westwood, suggest four key points secondary school leaders should consider when thinking about implementing team-based staffing:

  1. Same students + same educators + same time = innovative teaming: This simple equation captures the core innovation. By allowing the same educators to serve the same students during the same (ideally extended) block of time, you unlock degrees of innovative freedom for the team.
  2. Time to team: Team-based staffing is successful only when educator teams have sufficient time to plan and work together. Without adequate collaborative planning time, educators cannot effectively shift schedules, create student groupings, or design interdisciplinary units. The master schedule must support team planning time.
  3. Provide real autonomy and flexibility: Give educator teams the autonomy to make decisions that are right for their students. For example, Westwood turned off their bells and allowed teams to create weekly schedules that make sense given the curriculum, which educators are present, and what students need.
  4. Authentically involve educators, families, and the community: Involving educators, families, and community members from the very beginning makes team-based staffing personalized to your community and more likely to succeed. Families in particular play a crucial role in this change. By listening to them and involving them in the process, we ensure that the innovation benefits not only their children but the entire community.

As students, educators, community members, and leaders at Westwood High School will tell you, implementing team-based staffing is complex, iterative work. That work, however, is worth it because they all have come to realize that they are better together.

Chris Gilmore, EdD, is the principal of Westwood High School in Mesa, AZ, where Vatricia Harris is assistant principal for teaching and learning and a former teamed educator. Brent Maddin, EdD, is executive director of the Next Education Workforce initiative at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, where R. Lennon Audrain, PhD, is a research assistant professor and education professions PLC lead in Mesa Public Schools.

References

C. Gilmore, personal communication, August 1, 2024.

Ingersoll, R., & Audrain, L. (2024). What the data tell us about Next Education Workforce teachers in TSL schools and beyond. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ECzwfetc738ARaOQqSY2C2GlYQOJnDzq/edit#slide=id.p1

Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy. (2022, July). Results from the year one survey of Next Education Workforce (NEW) teachers. Johns Hopkins University. crpe.org/early-evidence-of-improved-educator-outcomes-in-next-education-workforcetm-models/

Laski, M. (2024, May). Early evidence of improved educator outcomes in Next Education Workforce models. Center for Reinventing Public Education. crpe.org/early-evidence-of-improved-educator-outcomes-in-next-education-workforcetm-models/

Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. (2024, May). Next Education Workforce research headlines. Arizona State University. docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KskW8yVDb_o4qFoG4O82YPLenIOQwAHoDbKqgznmXjM/edit#slide=id.g2c93b8c2acc_0_0 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KskW8yVDb_o4qFoG4O82YPLenIOQwAHoDbKqgznmXjM/edit#slide=id.g2c93b8c2acc_0_0