When we published our first book, “The Next Education Workforce: How Team-Based Staffing Models Can Support Equity and Improve Learning Outcomes,” David Berliner wrote in the foreword: “This is a most welcome book, asking all educators to rethink how we do schooling. Can something like the ideas presented herein work? We sure won’t know until some schools and school districts give it a try.”
Three years later — after helping over 150 schools in 17 states implement team-based staffing models — we know.
In a new book, “Unlocking the Potential of Team-Based Staffing: A Guide for School and System Leaders,” co-authors Brent W. Maddin, Lennon Audrain, Lisa Maresso Wyatt and Kaycee Salmacia provide concrete steps on how to prepare for and launch team-based strategic school staffing models and navigate challenges that may arise during implementation.
“The first book explains why conventional one-teacher, one-classroom models need to be transformed and what Next Education Workforce models are all about. This new book gets into the how of what first steps a school leader might take as they begin their journey of launching Next Education Workforce models,” Salmacia says.
The book, published by Harvard Education Press and available for pre-order now, also features the voices of over 30 educators who have implemented team-based models in their contexts.
In this Q&A with the four authors, they share the experiences that helped shape the book and their work with the Next Education Workforce; what they hope school and system leaders will take away from the book; and why this book is important, especially now.
Rachel Nguyen-Priest: Why did you decide to write this book?
Brent W. Maddin: Over the course of the last nine years, we have learned a great deal from the schools, systems and educators with whom we have been lucky enough to work, and we’ve been able to harness those insights into something that we want to be able to share with the larger educational community.
Kaycee Salmacia: Absolutely. As we grow our team’s work outside of Arizona, new schools we are working with have been craving concrete guidance and lessons learned for how they might stand up these models in their own context.
RNP: What do you hope readers take away from this book? What impact do you hope it has for educators, learners and communities?
BWM: We hope that this is a practical book. We’d be thrilled if a group of educators at a school engaged in a book study and walked away with concrete ideas about how they could plan, design, and launch a team-based staffing model in their context. I want readers to feel like they got their money’s worth and who would recommend the book to anyone interested in staffing schools differently.
Lisa Wyatt: The book also includes lots of anecdotes and advice from school leaders and educators who are implementing team-based models and have learned a lot along the way. We want to make that learning visible so schools can build on the shoulders of those who came before them — and then we hope that those folks will share their learning with others.
Lennon Audrain: At the heart of it, I want this book to show how schools can become a much more collaborative effort; a place where success doesn’t rely on a single teacher but is shared across a team.
RNP: Why is this book important, especially now?
LW: Being a teacher is one of the greatest gifts of my professional career, but when my own college-age student said they want to be a teacher, my heart sank a little bit, and that makes me deeply sad. The job is so hard, and so isolating. When I visit schools with team-based models, educators are smiling and working together. It’s not always easy to work together — it takes work and planning — but teams that share students are able to achieve more together than they can alone, and they find belonging and joy. That’s the kind of teaching profession that I would like my child to enter.
LA: This book is also especially important now that the policy landscape is forcing schools and systems to make choices about how they will adapt. Declining enrollment is reshaping budgets, states and families are demanding greater transparency and voice in decision-making, and federal and state accountability pressures continue to raise expectations without providing new staffing solutions. This book offers school and system leaders practical guidance for building the conditions and structures that respond to this moment — models that make better use of talent, create sustainable staffing patterns and align with the policy realities schools are facing today.
BWM: I believe the best way to navigate the uncertainty of the current moment and what is assured to come is to liberate ourselves from the one-teacher, one-classroom normative model of staffing schools, and that when we do so, it actually creates a new and different way to innovate. I personally cannot figure out how to meet the demands of the moment and what is around the corner, within the conventional one-teacher, one-classroom model. We need more degrees of innovative freedom, and we believe that by changing the way that we staff our schools, we can enjoy those degrees of freedom.
RNP: Why four authors? What did each of you bring to the book?
KS: Our model is all about teaming, so it’s no surprise that our team decided to write this book as a team. We believe deeply in the notion of distributed expertise, which is that we all bring unique strengths, skills and experiences to our work, and doing work together as a team leads to better outcomes. We pushed each other, held each other accountable, provided ideas that no single one of us could have come up with on our own, and we also had fun sitting in a room together, co-writing. Both the process and the product are improved when you have a chance to work on a strong team with a strong shared purpose.
BWM: Lisa’s really close to the schools. Kaycee is such a good systems thinker. Lennon has the experience of not only being close to the work as an educator himself, but also in project managing the production of books. I’m a big ideas person and have a lot of connections within the larger educational ecosystem. Together, we represent both the big ideas and the practical and operational aspects of this work that make it not just a big idea, but also something that is plausible and doable.
LA: As a group, we also made sure to center the voices of our partners — we brought people together in person, interviewed them over Zoom and built in their advice and wisdom throughout.
RNP: How does this book build on the Next Education Workforce’s first book?
LA: The first book, which I was lucky enough to co-author, was really more of a manifesto — it laid out the theory and the argument for the Next Education Workforce and team-based staffing models. This second book responds to a different need: a hands-on guide that shows leaders how to actually build these models. Writing it also pushed us to codify our own work, both for ourselves and for others — what already exists that helps schools get started, and what the phases of implementation look like in practice.
RNP: This book was specifically written for school and system leaders. Why this audience?
KS: In our experience, change first starts at the school level. Before a school system can revise their policies, systems and beliefs, the system first needs to see that the change is possible in schools, in their own context, and that Next Education Workforce models are making a real positive difference for students and educators. We wanted to write a book that focuses on this very first point of change to give school leaders concrete steps to start this change in their own context and examples of words of wisdom from the school leaders who have gone before them.
RNP: Were there any specific situations you drew from when writing this book?
LA: Much of the book reflects the day-to-day realities we saw in schools as they began implementing team-based models. We leaned on stories of principals figuring out how to reorganize schedules, teachers navigating what it means to share students for the first time and system leaders learning how to adjust policies to give schools the flexibility they needed. In particular, we paid attention to the kinds of dilemmas that came up repeatedly: how to communicate with families about the change, how to identify and support lead teachers, how to handle staffing shifts mid-year. These recurring situations became guideposts for the book, shaping the advice and tools we included so they would feel practical and immediately usable.
LW: We talked with so many educators while writing this book. My favorite sections of the book are those that lift up their expertise and knowledge. They are incredible humans doing incredible work.
RNP: How has your background as an educator influenced not only what you wrote but also your perspective on this work as a whole?
BWM: I spent time prior to this work in teacher preparation, and despite the fact that I felt like we had created one of the best teacher preparation programs in the country, I was still seeing educators leaving the profession at rates way higher than I thought was ideal. So, it started to occur to me that it’s maybe less about us having a teacher retention problem and more of a workforce design problem. I have to believe that there are ways to enjoy greater degrees of innovative freedom, and I believe the way that we staff our schools is one of the most long-held and constraining assumptions that educators and educational leaders have to work within. Liberating ourselves from that constraint is incredibly helpful.
LA: My background as an Education Professions teacher — a CTE course for high school students exploring careers in education — shaped my perspective in a unique way. While I wasn’t teaching in a fully team-based model myself, I was constantly working alongside schools that were. Twice, sometimes three times a week, I brought my high school students into those elementary classrooms so they could see what team-teaching looked like in practice. That gave me two vantage points at once: the perspective of my own students, who were noticing how different these schools felt compared to their earlier experiences, and the perspective of educators navigating the realities of implementation. For me, it underscored both the challenges and the promise of this work. We want the next generation of teachers to feel inspired. To do so, they need to encounter models of schooling that are collaborative, hopeful and sustainable, not simply the isolated structures of the past.
LW: During my 17 years as a teacher, I was fortunate to have a few jobs where I was able to really have an impact on students. When I look back at those jobs, every single one of them was because I was working closely with another adult and sharing the same students, whether it was with a special education co-teacher, a Montessori co-teacher or an interdisciplinary academy team in high school (back in 1997 — I’m dating myself!). We are better together.
KS: Having been a teacher and teacher trainer, I’ve seen firsthand just how hard it is to improve student outcomes and make the teaching role sustainable. What this lived experience brings to this book is practitioner-level reality. We know these models are possible not just in a theoretical way, but because we’ve lived the life of being a teacher and know that these recommendations make the profession more enjoyable and sustainable.
Buy the book from Harvard Education Press, or learn more about the Next Education Workforce with a free, virtual Explore Experience.
