School Site Process Improvements
Partner: Oakland Unified School District
We’ve heard from many substitute teachers their experience with logistics at a school site, usually determines whether they choose to return to the school. Yet, when we asked partner districts, “how do you support your school site staff to ensure great experiences for substitute teachers?” The answer was for the most part, “we don’t.” Oakland Unified School District was already investing in tools and resources to better support and develop their school site staff. Now in partnership with Substantial, they’ve invited us to design a workshop and resources around the substitute teaching experience—from the school site staff perspective.
The workshop will support and inspire school site staff to update their substitute processes. We’ll combine peer-to-peer sharing of what is working well at individual schools, time to design and/or update sub materials and empathy building activities, diving into the experiences of current subs. In preparation, we are seeking out examples of schools who do a great job making substitutes feel welcomed and valued. Do you know of one? Let us know!
We’re Exploring
- How can we support school office staff to invest more in the substitute teacher experience?
- How do changes in school site processes impact the experience of substitute teachers? And their likeliness to return to a school site?
- How can we help substitute teachers have a more consistent experience at each school site within a school district?
- What kinds of resources and support work best for developing school site administrative capacity?
- How can we build systems and relationships to enable school sites to share ideas and support each other in process improvement work?
