![]() Four percent said they’d want to work entirely from home. Another EdWeek survey, conducted in March, found that 20 percent of teachers and school leaders said if given the choice, they would want to work both from school and from home once the pandemic ends. This could open the door to allowing some teachers to choose whether they want to teach students in person or virtually. An EdWeek Research Center survey administered in February found that 68 percent of teachers, principals, and district leaders say that it’s likely a wide array of remote learning options will be available to students post-pandemic. Remote learning will likely stick around once the pandemic is over. Allow teachers to work remotely post-pandemic Here are four ways that districts can offer more flexibility in the workplace. “There’s a momentum here we have to leverage.” “There is so much that’s happening now that we’ve been pushing for so long,” said Lynn Holdheide, a senior adviser for the Center for Great Teachers and Leaders at the American Institutes for Research. ![]() Student success must be at the center of any new staffing decisions, experts cautioned: “Schools should not be starting with the notion of a flexible schedule for teachers and then seeing what the consequences are for students,” Johnson said.īut advocates for alternative staffing models are optimistic that the pandemic’s impact on schools may have inspired more of a focus on collaboration, differentiation, and flexibility. “What’s common across most school districts is they’ve realized there are new possibilities they haven’t thought of before about how school has to look and how staffing has to work and how kids can benefit from all that,” said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which collaborates with RAND on its surveys of district leaders, including this one. And many of the leaders surveyed said they’re open to keeping some of the innovative practices they adopted this school year in the future, even after the pandemic has passed. Another 18 percent considered doing so but couldn’t due to a lack of resources or flexibility.īut some level of remote instruction took place in most districts this year, and many tried out virtual professional development and meetings, and leveraged support staff in new ways. “Teacher retention ultimately depends on teacher satisfaction with their work, and that means having the conditions that enable them to succeed with their students, but also having a manageable work life,” said Susan Moore Johnson, a Harvard University professor of education who studies teachers’ work conditions and satisfaction.Ĭhange may be slow-going: Another RAND Corporation survey found just 4 in 10 school system leaders said last fall that they were planning to adopt flexible and non-traditional staffing models, in which teachers provided instruction to students other than those who would be assigned to them if instruction were in person. For teachers who left the classroom but found another job in education, more flexibility was the most common attribute that attracted them to their new jobs, a recent RAND Corporation survey found. Thinking beyond the traditional staffing structure could both lead to learning gains for students and help keep teachers in the profession longer, experts say. But after a school year in which teaching was flipped on its head, some experts are hoping that there will be enough momentum for district leaders to permanently reimagine what a teacher’s role could look like. That’s despite persistent pushes for schools to adopt more flexible approaches, like team-based teaching or assigning teachers’ roles based on their expertise. The model of one teacher standing in front of a class for six or seven hours a day has changed very little in decades. But will school districts follow suit and embrace workplace flexibility? The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns have permanently shifted the way many industries think about how and where people work.
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