The importance of building a teacher workforce

Dean Carole Basile, Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at ASU, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss the N.E.W. model with Ted Simons, host and managing editor of the show.

Dean Basile testified before the House Committee on Education and Workforce about teacher retention and the importance of building a teacher workforce.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 86% of public schools reported difficulties in hiring teachers for the 2023–24 school year.

The Next Education Workforce or N.E.W. is a team-based staffing model that started at ASU. The model embraces purposefully designed teams with at least two teachers per roster of students.

This design means a team can consist of different educators, from special education teachers to STEM experts.

Students in the classroom would report to multiple teachers specializing in a single content area, rather than the standard “one teacher in one classroom” approach. Learning spaces would be redesigned so that students are not confined to the same classroom.

In this new model, teachers would provide distributed expertise to personalize learning for students. Dean Basile described how an effective educational workforce is made up of various professionals from diverse backgrounds.

“So today we’re seeing where all of these teachers have different levels of expertise and the question is which one do you want for your kid? Wouldn’t you want all of them? Would you also want all of them to have different layers of responsibility, so that they’re working together as a team and we’re really using the strength of every individual on that team,” Basile said.

Dean Basile also said the government should not hold schools back from making structural and systemic changes. She believes the government needs to give schools the permission to be innovative.

According to Dean Basile, in the 2024–25 school year, the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College anticipates working across 40 school systems in 15 states to implement the team-based models.