From EdNC, by Bryan Hassel and Sharon Contreras, March 18, 2025
Opportunity Culture roles, created by Public Impact, make it possible for schools to have small teaching teams led by a teacher with a record of student success and adult leadership competencies. This Multi-Classroom Leader (MCL) role gets a significant pay supplement, made possible by school budget reallocations, and takes formal accountability for the results of all the team’s students.
From EdNC, by Sharon Contreras and Bryan Hassel, March 18, 2025
No school wants to gamble with their students’ futures. But when teacher shortages loom — with educators leaving the profession and fewer graduates opting to make the classroom their career — schools confront tough odds. Too often, schools are trying to find great teachers to serve every student after being dealt a losing hand.
When The Innovation Project (TIP) and Public Impact joined forces in 2024 to support the inaugural cohort of the TIP Opportunity Culture Consortium, bringing together leaders from five school districts — big and small, rural and urban — to rethink school staffing models, the large conference room was abuzz with renewed hope.
From EdNC, by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, July 8, 2024
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars will evaporate from the U.S. economy due to permanent learning shortfalls post-COVID, by McKinsey’s calculation.
Research has shown high-dosage tutoring is crucial to addressing these shortfalls. In effective high-dosage tutoring, tutors provide students with at least 90 minutes of tutoring per week, aligned with the school’s curricula, in small groups based on their learning data, to build relationships and meet students’ instructional needs. Tutors grow their knowledge and skills through professional development and coaching.
But far too few students in North Carolina get this sort of tutoring.
Is there a way to get tutoring to everyone without increasing costs? Yes, by engaging all available adults to create a “tutoring culture”– for all, by all.
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, first published by EdNC, August 16, 2021
When multi-classroom leader Kenyatta Davenport got the chance to talk to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, her message was simple: Teachers haven’t given up, but we need your support to get students back on track after the coronavirus — and fast.
Simple — and short, since she had limited time to speak to Cardona when he visited Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on July 12. But Davenport would definitely tell him more if she had the time. Read More…
By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Week, October 1, 2020
Even before COVID-19 sent students and educators home, teachers’ jobs had grown increasingly complex. Rightful demands for standards matching those of other nations—and for equitable opportunities allowing students to meet or exceed those standards—swelled over recent decades.
With research clearly indicating how important teacher and principal quality are to student learning growth, a thoughtful school staffing and compensation strategy would have been a natural response. Instead, decades of benevolently intended policy shifts snatched dollars from teachers’ pockets as their jobs got harder, while failing to innovate like other professions.
Some parents are creating home-based, closed groups of a few families’ children to learn together under the rotating supervision of parents or a paid supervisor. Pods could keep students’ learning and social-emotional development on track while helping protect their and their teachers’ health. Read more…
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett; first published by EdNC, August 18, 2020
Delmonika Vick always wanted to be a teacher, and she got an education degree. But other opportunities kept coming along, and she found herself in corporate banking for four years — only to realize, several years in, what a struggle it was to go to work each day.
“I didn’t have any sense of fulfillment — I didn’t feel like I was making a difference,” Vick said. “I knew that I was supposed to teach, then — I knew that I had to pursue education.”
An Edgecombe County, North Carolina native, Vick intended to go straight into a classroom teaching role, until a chance meeting with Principal Donnell Cannon led to an offer to be a reach associate (RA) at North Edgecombe High. Read more…
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, also published by EdNC, April 8, 2020
During the coronavirus crisis—and any future periods of at-home teaching and learning—rural school districts face special challenges. In North Carolina’s Edgecombe County Public Schools, Multi-Classroom Leader® Amy Pearce said in a recent interview, two keys to taking care of students will be schoolwide consistency and a focus on taking care of stressed teachers. Read more…
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, also published by EdNC, April 3, 2020
How do you teach 212 students from a distance? Expanded-Impact Teacher Jimmel Williams says you listen carefully to your students’ needs, and keep your teaching—and your high expectations—largely the same.
Williams, who teaches eighth- and ninth-grade math in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and was a 2017-18 Opportunity Culture Fellow, is still figuring out exactly how he wants the “live” teaching component to work with so many students, but he has a wealth of materials—and individual connecting with students—to draw on meantime. Read more…
By Sharon Kebschull Barrett; first published in EdNC, March 18, 2020
Can deep dives into large flows of student learning data actually lower teacher stress? Successful multi-classroom leaders, who lead small teaching teams in data analysis, say yes. When schools focus on small teams led by highly successful teachers, they help address the concerns North Carolina teachers expressed in a recent EdNC.org survey about professional development on using data and about having time to analyze and use data.