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In the current educational climate, where the conversation has shifted to focus increasingly on student voice, project based learning, individualized learning and mastery – moving away from the standards-based emphasis of the past 20 years - the pressure to update the approach to substitute teaching is all the more pressing. Substantial Classrooms: Redesigning the Substitute Teaching Experience offers insights, and concrete suggestions, as to how substitute teaching might be reimagined as a relevant and valuable part of a student’s educational experience and an asset to the school.
Substantial Classrooms: Redesigning the Substitute Teaching Experience will include an introduction to process improvement, providing a data-driven lens to understanding substitute teaching challenges, and the principles of design thinking, offering an experimentation approach that lends itself well to the daily nature of the demand. Subsequent chapters highlight different opportunities for addressing the challenge of substitute teaching, such as working with college students as subs, focusing on the sub to teacher pipeline, and developing specialized sub pools (art subs, poetry subs, financial literacy subs). Each chapter will include stories and examples to illustrate the opportunity, what this looks like for different players (school leaders, district leaders, colleges and community partners), and some concrete suggestions on how to get started and experiment.