Evolving How We Meet the Recruiting and Retention Needs at the Nation's 4th Largest School District

Like most of the nation and, in particular, like many urban districts, Miami-Dade County Public Schools focuses a lot of energy and considerable resources on recruiting and retaining the best teachers. In fact, in some years we have recruited and hired between 700 to 1,000 teachers.  

We also recognize that the needs and expected experiences of the workforce of tomorrow is changing and therefore we must also change what we do to meet their needs, both in how we recruit and retain teachers. This is challenging. 

Our Human Capital Management Team is dedicated to meeting the recruiting and retention needs of the more than 350 schools in our district.The team works tirelessly to support schools. As a team, we always make time to learn and explore new ways to improve our recruiting, hiring, and teacher retention practices. Nonetheless, we often feel like there is a better way for us to do our work. As the fourth largest school district in the nation we often routinely deal with the tension between scale and nimbleness, bureaucracy and innovation, consistency and creative problem solving.

Through the lens of The NEW School Rules, we have begun to explore how our practices -- the way we do our work -- impacts outcomes of the work we do. We recently spent a very productive day experiencing a number of the practices and experiments that are highlighted in The NEW School Rules. It was a powerful experience for our team. 

Planning for change and not perfection, teaming as a way to build trust and spread authority, and encouraging broad sharing by harnessing the natural flow of information are crucial elements that we are focused on as we strive to build a stronger, more agile Human Capital Management learning organization. 

Based on these experiences, we have planned to delve deeper into the six rules described in book. The experiments and workouts described in the book make it really easy for our team to get started trying things now. As such, we just launched a book study with a group of senior Human Capital Management leaders to learn together, to make connections, and to embrace a more crystallized purpose for our work across our Human Capital functional areas.