As Jennie Clausen tells it, the ink was barely dry on Heather Horne’s contract before Clausen called to share her concerns with Horne. In the 2023–24 school year, Horne was the new principal of Hermosa Vista Elementary School, the fourth in five years. Clausen’s three sons, Nathan, Benjamin and Andrew, were enrolled at the Mesa, Ariz. school, which was undergoing a transition to team-based staffing models.
“I was totally against it. I was like, this cannot happen at my kids’ school. My husband and I actually had conversations about pulling them from Hermosa Vista if they were going to move forward with teaming,” Clausen remembers. “I was on the phone in her ear about teaming and how awful it was.”
In 2022, Hermosa Vista, which offers a Dual Language Immersion Program, launched its first team of 5th-grade educators with support from Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™ initiative, which helps P–12 school systems design and launch team-based strategic school staffing models. Horne had just transitioned from her role as an instructional coach to principal, and she knew there was work to be done: work to improve morale amongst both educators and students, work to keep some of her school’s best teachers from leaving, work to bring her school community together, work to improve student success and outcomes.
“As I was learning about teaming in graduate school, I realized that it was the perfect solution to this great divide that we had going on. With teaming, students have access to teachers they never would have. They are mixed in homerooms and we have seen some great results come from this,” Horne says.
Today, Clausen is a self-proclaimed “teaming convert.” Instead of being against teams, she proudly stands next to Horne at Next Education Workforce Site Visits and shares her story about how the new approach to school staffing has changed her sons’ lives for the better.
The transformative impact of teaming
Clausen was no stranger to classrooms or even to the concept of team-based staffing. She was a high school teacher for five years and worked as a clinical associate professor at Arizona State University for 11 years, where she taught classes in the evening and spent time visiting schools and educators during the day. In 2022, she became the director for Junior Achievement, a nonprofit organization that provides career exploration, workforce readiness and financial literacy learning opportunities.
It was during her time at ASU that the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation began working with schools and systems to explore alternative ways of staffing schools. Longstanding challenges such as teacher shortages, high rates of turnover and burnout and stagnant or declining student outcomes led the college to launch several workforce design innovations, including early pilots of team-based staffing models. Clausen’s experience observing educators in classrooms led her to believe that this model would be neither successful nor sustainable — in her words, “a recipe for disaster.”
“I was very anti-teaming. I was pretty vocal about it in the college because I just didn’t think it was the right thing for kids and I was getting ready to have kids in elementary school at that time,” Clausen says. “The experienced, loyal, hardworking teachers who have had the best reviews are going to be the ones that get asked to [lead teams and support newer educators] and they’re going to hate their life if they’re trying to teach 30 tiny humans in addition to five adults who have no idea what they’re doing.”
Horne assured Clausen that it would be different at Hermosa Vista. Teaming models have evolved as strategic school staffing gains momentum nationally. Schools also now have access to more resources and support around the design and implementation of team-based models, which look different depending on the unique contexts, assets and needs of that school.
“It was this mixture of, I support you and I trust you if what you’re telling me is true: That [teaming is] going to be true distributed expertise and that my children are now going to have access to more adults who are more passionate about what they’re teaching than they were when they were teaching five subjects. I’m on board for that.’”
Today, teams at Hermosa Vista consist of one lead teacher and three certified teachers who share a roster of 80-100 students. The school’s master schedule includes time set aside for team planning every day in addition to scheduled time for interventions. This change didn’t happen overnight and took months of planning and trust-building.
“Go slow to go fast,” Horne says when asked what other principals can learn from Hermosa Vista’s shift to teaming. “Build it strategically and make sure you give teams opportunities to learn how to be teammates, how to rumble and how to work toward a common goal.”
For Horne, teaming has led to a “night and day” difference in the school’s culture, such as a significant decrease in behaviors inside the classroom and a lower absenteeism percentage. ELA scores also went up 10% with state testing in SY 2023–24.
“Students are happier and more engaged in their learning, and teachers feel supported by one another,” Horne says.
The change in both morale and outcomes are also visible to Clausen.
Clausen shares the story of a teacher her students didn’t have a great experience with.
“I had been rallying against my kids ever being in her class again. When she moved to teaming and [she was able to focus on teaching one subject, with the support of a team], she was absolutely phenomenal. She ended up being my son’s favorite teacher that year,” Clausen says. “It was a miracle.”
In addition to seeing how teaming has impacted the quality of education at Hermosa Vista, Clausen says she has also noticed how that’s translated to the quality of care her kids have received as well. Clausen’s middle son, Benjamin, has an autoimmune disorder that impacts his brain and some of his behaviors at school. While he was initially enrolled in the dual language immersion program, Clausen eventually decided to pull him from the program as he wasn’t succeeding.
[Educators in teams are] teaching their content area and it frees them up a little bit to be a little more nurturing, a little more caring and a little more loving because they’re not trying to balance so many different things … .
Benjamin was moved into a different team and immediately, Autumn Higbee, his new teacher, assured Clausen that the team could support and care for him.
“So here’s this special needs kiddo, who is a lot to handle, who has a place … because of how the team functions. He gets the best content knowledge from the teachers because they have that distributed expertise; but he also gets the best of them because they’re not trying to teach five classes a day,” Clausen shares, emotional. “They’re teaching their content area and it frees them up to be a little more nurturing, a little more caring and a little more loving because they’re not trying to balance so many different things — and I’m eternally grateful for that. Because of teaming, he’s loved in a way that he wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
A lifelong lesson
Clausen has also noticed teaming’s positive impact on how her kids’ approach life outside of the classroom.
“My kids have recognized that every adult in their life serves a purpose and they’ve honed in on what that purpose is and that’s all because of teaming. They would have never understood that idea of distributed expertise in their everyday life if it was not for teaming at Hermosa Vista,” Clausen says. “My kids are getting knowledge and learning things from every adult in their life because of distributed expertise, and I’m really proud of them for that.”
While once a teaming skeptic, Clausen is now the strategic school staffing model’s biggest advocate.
“Letting people be experts makes them better teachers. Period. That’s the magic sauce,” Clausen says. “When you let someone be a content expert, they can teach in the most creative and wonderful way. I’m thrilled with the teaching that my kids are getting.”
