Differentiated staffing is a method of dividing the tasks of educating
students among two or more professionals
with differing levels of education and expertise. Teachers who performed the higher levels of
education would be considered more valuable and compensated for this. To use a sports analogy, they would be given
the franchise tag – the teacher the school was building student education
around. Teachers with less education
could be responsible for the more mundane tasks associated with teaching that
would free up the upper level teachers to concentrate more on impacting the
lives of students.
One example of differentiated staffing that we have implemented this
year on our campus is in our RTI processes.
We have two teachers who are responsible for the data disaggregation
that they use to plan for RTI for the elementary students. They will also be responsible for working
with some of the students being pulled even though they are not their classroom
teacher. We are also incorporating our
secondary staff members who do not have a full teaching schedule due to be an
electives teacher. When first approached
with this idea the teachers told me that they were not certified in elementary
and that if they wanted to work with the young students they would have chosen
that teaching pathway. My responses…
first, these are OUR students. We are
responsible for the education that each one of our 216 students receive. Second, we have asked UNCERTIFIED,
NON-DEGREED para-professionals to do this for years. (More on this later!) Each of these teachers have had children and
some even had grandchildren. In my mind
they are highly qualified to deal with helping with RTI! So we have two teachers that are running the
elementary RTI program that is staffed by 7 secondary teachers with openings in
their daily schedule.
Another example of differentiated staffing concerns the use of
paraprofessionals in the classroom. We
have paraprofessionals that do things for the teachers that allows the teacher
more time to interact with the students.
Some of those tasks include:
running off papers, TPRI testing, 1 on 1 reading, and the all time
teacher hates – cafeteria duty for breakfast and lunch. By a paraprofessional performing these tasks,
we have freed up teachers for student teaching or planning with another teacher
which directly impacts the students’ education.
One other example of differentiated staffing on our campus involves our
teaching of the required foreign language at the secondary level. We do not have a certified Spanish teacher on
staff. Instead, we have contracted with
a certified teacher who has produced video lessons, engages in
teleconferencing, and provides all the lesson planning including daily work,
projects and tests. We have two teachers
that are our class monitors who follow the lesson guides and lead discussions
on day that video lessons are not used.
While they are not certified in Spanish, they are degreed and certified
in another area and are providing the in person support needed for our students
to have a better chance at successfully acquiring a second language.
All of these three positively impact our school environment and the
success we are striving to attain. The
RTI process is a work in progress as we are just starting it this year. It will not look the same as it does now in
May is my guess as we will continue to make changes to improve the program and
provide a better intervention. By
focusing on the individual needs of the students, we will eventually see
students at the higher grade levels who are further along and better prepared
for the challenges of a more rigorous educational system. The paraprofessionals being used definitely provide
more time for teachers and students to be working together. The planning time also allows for the “two
heads are better than one” mentality to show promising results when it comes to
the lessons being used in the classroom.
Our students have just started using this new Spanish program this
year. We are already seeing improvements
and more Spanish being learned in the first six weeks. This has been a very positive change in
providing our students an opportunity at their foreign language being more than
a Rosetta Stone program.
Has
differentiated staffing ever truly, completely died out? My guess is no. The trick is going to be trying to find
creative ways to allow more adults to have an impact on the lives of the
students.
Trevor Edgemon
There are two ideas of differentiated staffing.
The first idea behind differentiated staffing is that different teachers should be paid differently according to how well they do their job, and the different responsibilities they complete. This is the incentive to get teachers to do the kind of things that are necessary to be great teachers. Differentiated Staffing means different pay for different responsibilities. The best teachers should be earmarked as a valuable resource. The ideal situation is to get these outstanding teachers to influence the lives of more kids. The old system actually works against this concept. Great teachers get the lower class size, and thus influence fewer kids. The old system also influences great teachers to go on and become administrators. We use to have this model in the career ladder. I understand this concept is used in the business model but I am glad we do not use this type of model. My brother has been in the private school sector his whole life and they use this model. We do not have a big enough pool of applicants to make this work.
The 2nd type of Differentiated staffing was in the lecture, Dr. Lu Stephens stated, “Differentiated staffing is a concept that proposes specialized use of personnel. Differentiated staffing could create greater efficiency in a school district by assigning teachers and other educators different responsibilities based on carefully prepared definitions of many teaching functions. It would analyze essential tasks and create a means to implement new educational roles for teaching the students. The results could create significant operational cost savings for a school district.”
Differentiated staffing can impact the organization of school staff based on varying levels of experience and qualification. In a differentiated staffing structure, teachers and other instructional staff are assigned different titles and sometimes different pay grades based on their experience or certifications. Differentiated staffing models are premised on the idea that schools can improve the overall effectiveness of teaching staff by designing a staff structure that recognizes and maximizes the strengths of its best teachers. The design of most differentiated staffing models places fully licensed and credentialed teachers who demonstrate instructional success in positions as lead or master teachers. These teachers often act as mentor or coach to newer teachers or to those who have been identified as needing improvement.
An example of differentiated staffing within my district in the area of instruction would be the use of instructional aides within the classroom to provided instructional support. We use the model from the above paragraph. The teacher of record is the master of the content and the instructional aide can offer the focused delivery. We have utilized this for the regular education class and the special education. With special education we use the inclusion model. The special education teacher, who works with the regular education teacher on curriculum, can provide content mastery and more specific instruction on a one on one basis. This concept allows the teacher of record to cover more material within a class period allowing more learning to occur. Instructional aides at my school can also help with direct instruction, with classroom management, and logistics. In addition, the number of regular certified teachers would be less. However, the number instructional aides increase. This results in a smaller budget for staff salaries and benefits.
All children learn, but not all learn the same way. Differentiated staffing allows the schools to look for teachers with different specialties and train teachers to better meet the needs of the students.
Shawn Clubb
Differentiated staffing is a
concept that seeks to make better use of educational personnel. In the lecture
Dr. Lu Stephens compared differentiated staffing to that of a doctor’s office.
She explained that doctors do not take blood pressures, weight, temperature, or
medical history reports. They are specialized in seeing patients and diagnosing
them therefore they have someone else do the routine work. They have office
people that take payments, make appointments and put medical information into
the computer. They also have medical assistants that do the routine work such
as taking vital signs, medical history, and giving shots. She said that just
like doctor’s offices, school districts could “create greater efficiency by
assigning teachers and other educators different responsibilities based on
carefully prepared definitions of many of the teaching functions.”
In schools today, teachers
have many responsibilities. This is especially true in the smaller districts.
It is thought that differentiated staffing would alleviate some of the
pressures associated with these many responsibilities. It refers to classroom teachers at various
responsibility levels and pay, subject specialists, special service personnel,
and a number of sub professionals and non-professionals.
An example of differentiated staffing within my district in the
area of instruction would be the use of instructional aides within the
classroom to provide instructional support.
The teacher is the master of the content and presents the lesson while
the instructional aide can offer the specialized delivery. The instructional
aide can help make sure accommodations and modifications are being carried out
in the classroom (ie. Oral testing, note taking assistance etc…). Therefore,
the teacher can cover more material during a class time which allows more
learning to occur. Having an instructional aide in the classroom helping some
students with more specialized learning helps keep the teacher from taking
learning time to provide these services.
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