It’s a constant tap-dance to keep a roomful of 80 5-year-olds focused and engaged during a kindergarten math lesson. Stevenson Elementary’s kindergarten team teachers stay perfectly in step.
Festooned with Elephant and Piggie headgear, teachers Taylor Murphy and Mary Pierce acted out the characters from Mo Willems’ book, Let’s Go for a Drive!
“OK, we’re going to take Elephant’s bags and we’re going to take Piggie’s bags, so how many?” Murphy asked as Pierce stacked luggage on the carpet crammed with kids. “Adam … Anthony … let’s count Elephant’s. Math facts first, here we go: 1, 2, 3, 4.” Murphy points to each bag as Pierce holds up four fingers one by one and the children count along.
Then both cue the children to raise their hands, tracing the number in the air. “Ready? I want to hear you. Down and over. Down once more. That’s the way we make the four.”
As Murphy and Pierce walk the students through counting and tracing, other members of the three-person kindergarten teaching team quietly made their way around the crowd, guiding fidgety fingers, bending to answer questions and setting up supplies for the next stage of the lesson.
Team support gave Murphy and Pierce the space to lead the students in a highly interactive lesson while still maintaining order. Stevenson Elementary is one of a growing number of schools deciding that teachers can’t—and shouldn’t—do their jobs alone, and reorganizing how teachers work to reflect that reality.
In these models, more than one teacher at a time assumes responsibility for a larger group of students at each grade level. While there are no national data on how many schools use team-teaching, more than 1,100 schools across 18 states use two of the most common team models, with many others using home-grown versions.
The bold idea is not new, but previous iterations have proven hard to scale due to contract restrictions, space limitations, and most of all, cultural tensions: The norms of one teacher, one classroom have proved remarkably durable over time.
That appears to be changing, in part due to emerging evidence that it may help teachers stay longer, and also because the team model address some of the most difficult tensions that bedevil the teaching profession: It helps students connect to more adults, protects institutional memory in school buildings, and gives teachers timely support to improve their own craft.
Take Murphy and Pierce, for instance: Later, they’ll meet to debrief about how well the lesson landed and how to best build on it, receiving instant feedback and an opportunity to reflect and grow their practice.
“We all teach subjects concurrently and I have the unique experience of having another teacher who teaches the same exact content as me at the same time,” Murphy said. “So we have that opportunity to really talk, like, what’s working for you? Let’s try this.”
As Education Week’s second annual State of Teaching project has highlighted, teachers are starting to regain optimism about their jobs, but continue to struggle with tailoring lessons for students of different ability levels, discipline, and technology distractions.
We know that [young teachers] want more flexibility … and we know that they don’t want to work alone. Unless we provide that, oh, goodness, I’m so worried about the field.
Brent Maddin, executive director, Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce initiative
Asked how to boost their morale, teachers were more likely to want additional staff to help them over any other option except pay raises. And that need for more helping hands will only increase as the profession itself undergoes a shift, becoming less experienced overall and less stable.
In theory, team-teaching can spread the load and increase support for a student body with greater and more diverse needs than ever. In the typical classroom today, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students is wider than ever, and even students with the same average scores in a subject often vary considerably in their understanding of specific concepts.
Pooling their skills can help teachers personalize instruction for students without duplicating effort, and team-teachers say the support can ease stress and lighten their workloads.
The benefits of a team approach
Murphy spent the first decade of her 13-year teaching career in non-teaming schools. In her early career, she said she was often at a loss of what to do if her initial lesson plans didn’t work.
“My first year teaching, I cried nearly every day, and my behavior management plan was, ‘They’re going to listen to me ‘cause I’m a great teacher,’” Murphy said. Having a whole team makes things like establishing and keeping to routines, and troubleshooting the same lessons or behavior problem, easier than when she worked alone.
The notion of two-hands-are-better-than-one is not a totally original idea: Teaching teams have been used off and on since the 1950s. And the team-teaching concept isn’t always initially popular with teachers, many of whom have been subject to any number of reforms over the years that haven’t panned out.
At base, though, all these approaches differ from the traditional and widely prevalent “egg crate” model, in which each teacher is responsible for one classroom of students and works in relative isolation. Instead, in team teaching, small groups of content and specialists—in special education, English-language acquisition, or career education—work together to plan lessons, teach and manage classes, and monitor student progress.
The model can help teachers build off each others’ strengths and buffer weaknesses in ways mentoring alone may not.
“As we think about younger generations of our workforce, we know that they want more flexibility—which is really hard to do on a one-teacher, one-classroom model—and we know that they don’t want to work alone,” said Brent Maddin, executive director of ASU’s Next Education Workforce initiative. “Unless we provide that, oh, goodness, I’m so worried about the field.”
New spins on classic teaching teams
The fastest-growing approaches now—including ASU’s New Education Workforce, and Opportunity Culture, a model designed by the North Carolina-based nonprofit Public Impact—bolster core-content teachers on the teams with support staff. They wrap in counselors or tutors, and provide the teams more autonomy to adapt lessons, class sizes, and instructional approaches to meet student needs.
Stevenson, for example, has seven instructional teams serving kindergarten and grades 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6. Each team includes teachers in reading, writing, math, and “innovation,” which covers interdisciplinary projects in science and social studies. The school also partners with nearby Skyline High School, where students who are part of the school’s education career track tutor Stevenson students two to four times a week and provide feedback to teachers.
“We want to include full-time teachers, but also paraeducators or tutors or members of the community,” Maddin said. “It’s leveraging the time and the talent of those people in really strategic ways to match the right kids with the right educators at the right time.”
Overwhelmingly, these new teams work in high-need schools. Stevenson, a pre-K-6 school, has a student body in which more than 85 percent of children live in poverty and a quarter of children learning English as a second language.
Here in the Mesa, Ariz. district, participants have discovered instructional benefits, too.
On a typical Wednesday morning in November, 9th graders at the district’s Westwood High School—a 3,300-student school that was among the first in the district to adopt the Next Education Workforce model—split among related lessons planned by one of the 9th grade teams.
Arianna Roemke’s English students read The Martian, a “hard sci-fi” novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars, and scientific articles related to recycling waste and growing food in space. Next door, science teacher Mikaela Thomes explored related lessons on how humans maintain homeostasis—stability of bodily functions—in different environments, and algebra teacher Saige Phillips taught students to use linear functions to graph and analyze waste-management systems—all in preparation for an upcoming project on engineering practices and disasters.
Teachers sent some students into each other’s classrooms if they finished a task or needed extra help.
“It challenges us,” said Shaun Reedy, a social studies teacher. “We’re constantly learning and wanting to try new things, so that really does dictate how we look at projects. The learning is truly interdisciplinary.”
A ‘built-in support system’ to keep teachers invested
Westwood High School has been using 9th-grade instructional teams since 2018-19 and expanded to 10th grade in 2023-24. Each of its nine teams is responsible for around 150 students, and comprises an English, math, science, social studies, and career-education teacher, as well as a special educator.
“This distributed expertise not only is good for kids, but this is good for educators,” said Westwood Principal Christopher Gilmore. “Education’s a very lonely profession. Day one looks the same as day 30. And so when you get a group of educators together, you could share the good things that are going on. You could share when you’re having difficulties with a project or with a student, and you have a built-in support system.”
Some initial signs are promising. Mesa teachers who are working in teams were 9 percentage points more likely to say they plan to continue teaching for the next five years than their colleagues working solo, according to research by Mary Laski, a researcher for the Center on Reinventing Public Education at ASU who is not associated with the Next Education Workforce initiative. They were more likely to feel satisfied and less likely to be burned out than teachers working solo.
Other team-teaching models have shown similar benefits for teacher retention. For example, the Ector County district in Odessa, Texas, adopted Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture team-teaching model in 2019 to cope with and reduce staff vacancies.
Ector County district leaders credited the teams with boosting teacher retention—vacancies dropped from 350 in 2018-19 to less than 30 in 2024-25, even accounting for pandemic disruptions.
Teams won’t prevent some degree of natural churn in the education workforce, but they do ensure there’s more institutional memory when it happens.
“If someone does leave, there are two or three or four other people who actually know what happened last year with a young learner—so there’s some coherence,” Maddin noted.
Developing that continuity is critical, according to Huriya Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, who studies the role of teacher social dynamics in school improvement.
Jabbar’s research found that the most effective teaching teams quickly develop collective lesson plans, procedures, and student data. Some teams had well-organized systems for tracking calendars, lesson plans, and modifications they’d made over time.
“When we compared teams, it really made a huge difference—even with similar rates of turnover, or almost wholesale turnover of a team—when a team had these kinds of documents to rely on to continue the work,” Jabbar said.
The grade 3 teachers at Stevenson Elementary started this school year with a common dilemma: The grade was cut from four teachers to three just before the first day of classes when lower enrollment figures came in. They scrambled to rearrange schedules, only to find the position reinstated a few weeks into the year.
In a typical school, in which each teacher supervises a standalone class, losing one of them would normally mean transferring students from each of their class rosters to create a new class—disrupting both students’ routines and teachers’ planning. “You would have a new teacher trying to learn 25 new kids, five weeks into the school year,” said Maday.
But the team-teaching approach made the last-minute changes less disruptive, and imperceptible to the students.
“We didn’t have to lose any time or lose any content in that first quarter of the school year, even with all the contract changes,” Maday said. “Our students had no idea that there was really even a change. They just gained a teacher.”
Murphy, the kindergarten team teacher at Stevenson, said she takes less work home now than she did in her previous, non-teaming school. “There is a lot more time when you’re collaborating, and you find those nooks and crannies in the day in your schedule,” she said, to reflect, relax, and build better relationships with students.
A heavy lift to build teams and trust
For all their purported benefits, teaching teams remain comparatively rare in schools. Logistically, they are a heavy lift: They require extensive and ongoing training for teachers, outreach to parents and community groups, and sometimes even physical changes to classroom layouts.
Districts may need to seek waivers to laws or bargain with the teachers’ union on new contract language around class sizes, teacher pay, and evaluation, among other details.
For example, Indianapolis changed its teacher contracts to boost pay for teachers who work in teams, and to create new roles and pay grades for teachers leading multi-classroom teams of different sizes, according to a national database. These lead teachers are responsible for observing, giving feedback and modeling instruction for their teams as well as co-teaching.
While not all models contain these formal career steps, all teachers do need help to understand their new responsibilities.
“Simply creating roles and assigning them to teachers will not be as impactful as ensuring that there are supports for teachers to take on these roles, understand the roles, to be able to get feedback as they do these roles to improve their efficacy,” said Heather Peske, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, which maintains the contract database. “This is an investment of time and professional learning. It’s an investment of thinking about how to structure collaboration for a variety of people in a school.”
Westwood Principal Christopher Gilmore agreed, adding that getting a teacher team system up and running, particularly at the start, is “not pretty.” It takes time for teaching teams to trust each other and develop shared goals and chemistry.
“They’re going to go through struggles,” Gilmore said. “That’s why they need to have conversations around psychological safety.”
Two years into team teaching, said Westwood special education teacher Kelly Owen, “We were really frustrated, because we had all of these ideas of what we wanted to be and we just couldn’t quite get there. We were having a really hard time clicking as a team.”
The teachers needed professional development, not just on teaching methods but on practices for cohesive and effective teams. Owens and her teammates reached out to Kevin Corner, a senior program manager for Next Education Workforce who helped the teachers get to know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and teaching styles, and to develop team goals.
Now, each summer, Westwood’s team teachers get specialized training in conflict resolution, interdisciplinary lesson planning, and how to manage group dynamics among students. They build on those trainings during the school year.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions around what kind of culture we wanted to have, not only with each other but with our students,” said Reedy, the social studies teacher.
The training and conversations led to what Owens calls their “manifesto”—the team’s collective goals and practices for their group.
“I think the biggest difference for us is this year, it’s like the bell rings and what we’re doing doesn’t change,” she said. “We think of ourselves as one instructor with nine instructional hours. We have one assessment, we have one objective. We take turns being a teacher depending on what skill set is best needed for that lesson. That shared instruction allows us to plan together and then divide the preparation materials, which I think has made a huge difference.”
It takes ongoing work, though.
“Kind of like that first year of teaching, you have to go through every little thing; how students get pencils has to be the same in every room, otherwise those little cracks start to show,” said Lindsay Pombier, a six-year teacher who took over as team lead for Stevenson Elementary’s 5th grade this summer with two other teachers. Pombier and her fellow teachers spent the summer reviewing every classroom procedure and routine to be sure all were on the same page.
“Since we’re new to each other as a teacher team, we wanted to make sure that we have that trust, that we do what we say we will do,” Pombier said. “So we did a lot of relationship-building, learning each other’s strengths, things that make us happy, things that drain us during the day.”
Getting teachers to buy in to the team model
In the end, teacher buy-in can be the most difficult piece of the puzzle.
Tara Spielberger, the grade 1 reading teacher at Stevenson Elementary, said she hated the thought of leaving her solo classroom to be in connected rooms where her students would move from teacher to teacher or even among tutors based on the lesson.
For younger grades in particular, she worried, “How is this going to work? They’re 6, they’re 7. They can’t follow a schedule. They’re going to be looking through the doors and waving to their friends. Just everything that you could think of that could go wrong is what was going through my head.”
Though initially dubious, Spielberger said her 1st graders adapted quickly to the schedule over the first semester. Students and parents were enthusiastic.
“[Students] have four teachers that are wrapped around them and if they don’t really have a super-strong connection with one, then they do with another,” she said.
And she was won over to the model in part by one boy who entered 1st grade speaking only Spanish. By the end of the year, he could read and understood grade-level English
“That would’ve never happened before,” Spielberger said. “You know what it’s like: You give the same test year after year; you give your blood, sweat, and tears and you get the same dismal results every year. And it’s not that way. The growth that I have seen out of these children is amazing.”
