CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new slide deck from Public Impact provides considerations and recommendations for Opportunity Culture schools to continue achieving high-growth student learning, developing students’ critical social-emotional skills, and providing strong support to teaching teams while both students and teachers at home.
The national Opportunity Culture initiative—currently composed of 90 percent Title I-eligible schools—extends the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within schools’ recurring budgets. Multi-Classroom Leadership is the foundation of an Opportunity Culture. Each school’s design and implementation team, which includes teachers, determines how to use Multi-Classroom Leadership and other roles to reach more of their students with high-standards, personalized instruction—one hallmark of great teachers. Multi-classroom leaders are teachers with a record of strong student learning growth who lead a small teaching team, ensuring strong lessons and teaching methods through frequent, on-the-job development, while continuing to teach part of the time in various ways.
Multi-classroom leaders and their teaching teams want to continue high-connection learning as they plan for an extended and unexpected period of at-home “school.” This deck provides guidance on how, based on research and Opportunity Culture experience, plus advice for lower-connection approaches when technology access limits schools' options.
Multi-classroom leaders aim to maintain continuity as much as possible, continuing to fully lead their teams and team instruction. The recommendations in the slide deck support that, but there are varied challenges each student and teacher will face. Students may be limited in their access to live interactions with teachers, for example, by a shortage of at-home technology and family needs (such as supervising younger siblings). The recommendations in the slide deck are intended to help the most students possible learn and thrive.
An optimal at-home design involves:
--Some face-to-face time for teachers and students to engage on-screen
--Limits on total screen time
--Ongoing use of the elements of excellent instruction
The deck briefly reviews the basics of Multi-Classroom Leadership, the research on its efficacy, and the research on all-online (no-face-no-face) teaching. It suggests high-connection and lower-connection learning options, and reviews the shifts needed in technology, roles, instruction, and schedules. It provides a basic action planner for making plans for your team. View the slide deck here.
###
About Public Impact
Public Impact’s mission is to improve education dramatically for all students, especially low-income students, students of color, and other students whose needs historically have not been well met. We are a team of professionals from many backgrounds, including former teachers and principals. We are researchers, thought leaders, tool-builders, and on-the-ground consultants who work with leading education reformers.
Learn more about an Opportunity Culture on the OpportunityCulture.org website, which provides free Opportunity Culture tools, educator videos and columns, and instructional leadership and excellence resources. Funding for development of resources to help schools design and implement Opportunity Culture models and support teachers taking on new roles has been provided by national foundations.
For more information, please visit https://www.opportunityculture.org/. To arrange an interview with Public Impact, contact Sharon Kebschull Barrett at [email protected]; 919.590.4154.