What Schools Need Now: A Reimagined Role for Substitute Teachers

by | May 6, 2020

Across the country, over half a million substitute teachers are currently sidelined. But Peggy isn’t one of them. In her new Covid-19 reality, she is helping her school’s 2nd grade team make the transition to remote learning. A veteran sub, she’s used to stepping into unfamiliar situations and doing what’s asked. That means today she will join three virtual class meetings, offering whatever help the teacher has requested of her. She’ll read a book aloud to one class, review the remote-learning packet with another class, and present a math lesson to a third class. A frequent sub at the school where she’s supporting distance learning, Peggy was excited when the principal asked her to continue in this non-traditional assignment. She’s happy for the opportunity to continue getting paid, but most of all, she’s happy to know she’s helping the teachers and students she’s gotten to know over the years.

I know a lot of subs who, like Peggy, would be happy to continue earning a paycheck and who are anxious to get back to serving the students they have come to know and care about. It’s time to get them back to work. Our teachers need the backup.

As we turn our collective attention to re-opening business and schools, substitute teaching is one of many things that will likely need to be redesigned. The 100 year-old system for how we handle teacher absence – a central pool of substitute teachers working across a region – is particularly ill-suited for a moment when we need to limit germ exposure and support traumatized students and teachers. But, those substitute teaching pools are filled with the type of practical, make-it-happen people we need right now, and in the fall. To get subs back to work, we need to lean into what works best in substitute teaching while also re-imagining how it works at scale. 

At Substantial, we’ve spent the last three years going deep on the dynamics around substitute teaching, and we just finished writing a book encouraging innovation in the field. While we’ve learned a lot about what doesn’t work in substitute teaching, we’ve also learned about what does. The clearest bright spots are people like Peggy who work frequently at a school and gradually become part of that school community. There is no mystery as to why these subs are more successful – they know how the school works and build relationships with students, teachers and staff.  Those relationships make them more effective at managing a classroom and more likely to get support- including robust and engaging plans from teachers- when they need it.

Accordingly, the best systems we’ve seen involve substitute teachers who are assigned full-time to a particular school.  For example, faced with a substitute shortage, Central Falls School District in Rhode Island reimagined substitute teaching as a one-year fellowship, and assigned a team of three to six fellows to each school. These fellows became part of the school team, available to fill in when teachers were out and to support students in other ways when there was no teacher absent. By reimagining substitute teaching as a full-time, school-based position, Central Falls provided more consistent and reliable support to their students and teachers, and went from a shortage to an abundance of applicants (over 80 people applied for their first 11 spots).  The fellowship program has now become the number one teacher pipeline for both their district and surrounding districts.

These bright spots offer a clear path for creating a new role for substitute teachers, and one that matches the needs and challenges of schools in a post-quarantine world. We encourage schools and districts  to consider:

  • School-Based Subs:  Allow schools to select teams of substitute teachers who will be based at their school. Make these subs a part of the school community, not strangers who come in and out of the lives of traumatized students.
  • Subs as Support: Use familiar subs to provide extra support for classrooms.  Whether schooling is virtual or in-person in the fall, it’s clear that students will need extra help both academically and emotionally, and subs can provide assistance to teachers as they meet the needs of their students.  

There’s no need to wait until fall, you can try out this expanded role right now. Let Peggy be your inspiration!