Teacher

This sample job description from Miami-Dade County Public Schools includes job responsibilities and hiring criteria for grade-level chairs, department chairs, and team leaders. 

Teach Plus, an advocacy organization dedicated to keeping high-performing teachers in the classroom, has a program that recruits, develops, and supports highly effective, experienced teachers to serve as teacher leaders in low-performing schools. This Web resource describes the eligibility criteria, application process, and roles and responsibilities of master teachers in its T3 program. 

As part of its Opportunity Culture initiative, Public Impact has developed detailed descriptions of several school models that enable excellent teachers to reach more students for more pay, within budget, in high-accountability and high-authority roles. This Web resource describes how teachers in one of these models, Multi-Classroom Leadership, are able to lead teams of other teachers to reach the leaders’ standards of excellence. It also provides several examples of schools that have used Multi-Classroom Leadership. 

The Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium, which includes union representatives, teachers, administrators, higher education leaders, and policy organizations, created this set of model standards for teacher leadership designed to guide districts, states, and others as they develop and support teacher leadership roles as a means of improving student achievement. 

This resource  from Public Impact provides an overview of standard teacher leader roles as well as a checklist for the characteristics of a teacher leader job. Districts planning to adopt teacher leader roles can use these as a guide to designing their own leadership roles.

This report from the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) and the Center for Educator Effectiveness at Pearson reviews lessons from other countries and professions and gives recommendations for developing sustainable teacher career pathways.

This article from Teachers Teaching Teachers profiles a data coach who learned through her experience in the classroom how to understand student data. It describes how she then helped fellow teachers assess their students’ growth and develop specific strategies to help at-risk students. The authors introduce some challenges associated with the data coach position—such as teacher buy-in.

This resource from KIPP provides a detailed explanation of how classroom teachers’ job responsibilities change as they progress to grade-level chair positions within the KIPP charter school network.

Starting from the premise that teachers and school leaders have the greatest influence on student outcomes, this report presents strategies for recruiting teachers and principals and ensuring opportunities for professional growth and leadership development.

This pilot study, which focuses on school districts in Illinois, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, finds that teacher turnover is costly and has a direct correlation with student outcomes in at-risk schools. The study includes a detailed analysis of recruitment, hiring, and replacement costs in five school districts.