Fewer ‘hold on’ moments, more breakthroughs: What Indiana classrooms really need

By JOSH HEIDEMAN
Guest Columnist

During an independent reading lesson, I bounced from student to student. Every few steps, a student needed my attention. One required help decoding a difficult passage. Another had a question about the directions. Across the room, two students needed a reminder to stay on task.

Every few seconds I caught myself saying, “Hold on just a second.” One of my fifth graders, Kate, looked up at me and asked, “Mr. Heideman, have you noticed you say ‘Hold on just a second’ a lot?” I told her the truth: there is only one of me and 29 of them, and I am doing my best to meet everyone’s needs at once.

That interaction stuck with me. While our school has aides who support specific students with legal learning plans, general education teachers like me spend most of the day flying solo. It raises an important question: is the one-teacher-alone-in-a-room model still the right design to meet the needs of our students?

With the school year underway, teachers like me juggle lesson delivery, emotional regulation, behavior management, and individualized support. We can do it, but can we do it well for every single child? At what point does a classroom staffing decision undermine the effectiveness of the education they receive?

With surveys showing that 70 percent of educators report that their schools are understaffed and 83 percent say insufficient support staff is a major barrier, some schools have started to answer that differently. For instance, through Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce, schools in Mesa have moved away from one teacher alone with one roster of students, building teams of educators who share a larger group of students and take on different roles based on their strengths and expertise.

At my school in Fishers, other teachers and I have had class sizes of over 30 students. Paraprofessionals and aides provide legally required accommodations and instruction, but every year I have students without formal learning plans who need small-group or one-on-one support to understand a concept. Modern classrooms require a team, not just a solo teacher. Indiana must invest in strategic staffing, so that teachers work in teams led by an accomplished teacher-leader, so educators can deliver the individualized support every child craves.

In pockets of the state, Indiana districts have adopted Opportunity Culture, a model where an accomplished teacher leads and coaches a small team of colleagues and is paid more for that added responsibility. With growing interest in scaling strategic staffing models statewide, we can turn to other states to offer a roadmap.

Districts across North Carolina and Tennessee have built Opportunity Culture models into how their schools are staffed, not as pilots but as standard practice. Indiana has the pieces in place to do the same. Texas created a Teacher Incentive Allotment that pays designated teachers substantially more to stay in high-need classrooms and extend their reach to more students. What we need now is the commitment to scale it, so that no teacher is left alone to balance the needs of nearly 30 students.

A team is not only made up of teachers. For example, paraprofessionals are part of it, and strategic staffing means giving them roles that are clearly defined and well supported, rather than asking them to fill whatever gap opens up that day. With increasing student needs and growing behavioral and attention concerns, including students with Individualized Education Program (IEPs) plans and those who are multilingual learners, it is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers to provide consistent, one-on-one instruction and behavioral support to every student without the support of aides all day long. When paraprofessionals have the training and direction to do the work they were hired to do as a part of the team model, they are able to do it well, and the adults in the room are not stretched thin covering for one another. If students like Kate miss a day or need assistance on an assignment, that extra adult help should always be available.

I still think about Kate’s observation and how I try to divide my time for each and every learner in my classroom. While staffing our classrooms as teams won’t solve every issue in our schools, it delivers the one resource we need most: time. Indiana has the power to change the narrative in our classrooms, so fewer students hear “Hold on just a second,” and more hear “I’m here. Let’s figure it out together.”

Josh Heideman is a fifth-grade reading, writing, and social studies teacher at Fall Creek Intermediate in Fishers and a 2026-2027 Teach Plus Indiana Returning Policy Fellow.