Why Opportunity Culture?

What barriers keep teachers and students from experiencing great support and strong learning outcomes? This brief video highlights some of the barriers that Opportunity Culture school models can remove.

Our school district is part of a growing, national Opportunity Culture movement to extend the reach of excellent teachers, principals, and their teams to more students, for more pay, within regular school budgets. That means great opportunities to have a fulfilling career path full of support.

Why Did We Choose to Use Opportunity Culture Models?

To provide all students with excellent teaching and to help students close achievement gaps and leap ahead, our schools are using Opportunity Culture models for their teachers and students. Opportunity Culture models enable schools to reach every student with excellent teachers and their teams—consistently—while paying teachers more for their extra responsibilities, and helping all educators improve on the job and work collaboratively. All pay supplements are funded through reallocations of existing budgets–no temporary grants.

Opportunity Culture models create new roles for teachers—through a foundation of Multi-Classroom Leadership—and support staff, and they carefully integrate technology to save teachers time and help individualize instruction, often through small groups. The most effective teachers are responsible not only for helping more students, but also for helping their peers achieve teaching excellence, too. Research has shown large student learning gains for students on multi-classroom leader teams.

In each Opportunity Culture school, a team of teachers and administrators adopts new roles to reach more students with teachers who have produced high-growth student learning. The team decides what reallocations to make to fund higher-paid roles, how to design school schedules for collaboration at school, how fast to reach all students with excellent teaching, and other design elements.

Opportunity Culture schools have attracted large numbers of outstanding educators committed to creating a culture of excellence for students, teachers, and staff. Learn more at OpportunityCulture.org.

The Opportunity Culture team at Public Impact supports and trains districts, schools, and partners who share our commitment to reaching every student with excellent teaching, every year, and to providing outstanding career opportunities to teachers.

2022-2023 Participating Schools

Burchett Elementary School

Jenkins Elementary School

Reynolds Elementary School

Roberson Middle School

Spring Leadership Academy

How Do Opportunity Culture Models Work?

This brief video details how Opportunity Culture implementation provides on-the-job, consistent support for all teachers to reach many more students with excellence, learn more, and earn more—by having great teachers lead teams or reach more students directly, with more school-day collaboration and planning time.

Opportunity Culture models restructure pre-K–12 schools to extend the reach of excellent teachers, principals, and their teams to more students, for more pay, within regular school budgets.

Opportunity Culture career paths let you stay in the classroom while continuing to advance as a teacher and teacher-leader, reaching many more students with excellent instruction and getting and giving great support—while earning more! Career paths include yearlong, paid teacher and principal residencies, advanced paraprofessionals called reach associates, team reach teachers, multi-classroom leaders, and multi-school leaders.

In each Opportunity Culture school:

• A design and implementation team of teachers and administrators determines how to use Multi-Classroom Leadership and other roles to reach more students with teachers who have demonstrated high-growth student learning.
• Multi-classroom leaders lead a teaching team, providing guidance and frequent on-the-job coaching while continuing to teach, often by leading small-group instruction.
• Accountable for the results of all students in the team, multi-classroom leaders also earn supplements averaging 20 percent (and up to 50 percent) of teacher pay, within the regular school budget.
• The schools redesign schedules to provide additional school-day time for teacher planning, coaching, and collaboration.

Multi-Classroom Leadership is the cornerstone of Opportunity Culture designs.

Independent research found that students in classrooms of team teachers led by multi-classroom leaders showed sizeable academic gains.

Multi-Classroom Leaders, or MCLs:

• Are teacher-leaders with a track record of high-growth student learning and leadership qualities.
• Lead a small grade or subject team: co-planning, coaching, co-teaching, and modeling instruction and data analysis for and with the team.
• Continue to teach part of the time, often by leading small-group instruction.
• Work with other multi-classroom leaders as a team to help principals lead instruction, behavior policies, and other critical activities affecting learning in each school.
• Take accountability for student learning, teacher satisfaction, and other outcomes for all the classrooms they lead.

The Opportunity Culture Principles guide the work.

Teams of teachers and school leaders must choose and tailor models to:

1. Reach more students with excellent teachers and their teams
2. Pay teachers more for extending their reach
3. Fund pay within regular budgets
4. Provide protected in-school time and clarity about how to use it for planning, collaboration, and development
5. Match authority and accountability to each person’s responsibilities

For more information contact:

Natasha Tillman

Project Director of Opportunity Culture

njohnson@springisd.org