It’s Time to Rethink the ‘One Teacher, One Classroom’ Model

Amongst the current shortage of teachers and classrooms, students are increasingly disengaged. Maybe its time to rethink the learning model.

As the old saying goes, “It takes a village to raise a child”. Unfortunately that is not the case in our current education system. There is one teacher expected to manage and fit the needs for every student in the classroom. This is a model that is being shown to be unsustainable in the current pandemic.

This article proposes a alternative model involving a team teachers per classroom. “The team of teachers working together will be able to plan lessons, monitor, and worked with each student across four connected rooms, regularly reconfiguring the space to support the purpose and structure of lessons and the needs of students”.

With some schools already implementing this new model, they were able to see immediate improvement in the quality of the education and benefits to the staff and school overall.

• Students were more engaged
• 50th percentile learning growth to 77th percentile
• Effective teachers able to be more impactful to the school and students
• New model doesn’t demand a higher budget
• $42 million dollars able to be reallocated to student pay

The article proposes a new model that is more flexible and effective in being the most impactful way to meet each students educational needs. Although the model has only started to be implemented in some schools, the benefits it brings cannot be undervalued. With all this in mind, more school districts should consider implementing something new like this in these challenging times.