Ready to learn together, share crisp ideas, and harvest new connections in breakout sessions at the Teacher-Powered Schools National Conference?

Sessions come in two varieties:

• 60-minute breakouts
• 120-minute deep dives

And organize under three strands:

• Cultivating Joyful Innovation: Innovative ways teacher-powered teams use their autonomies, structures, and collaborative leadership practices to govern their schools over many years.
• Sharing Power Inside and Out: Ways teacher-powered schools have designed joyful, student-centered learning programs and environments that allow students and educators to be successful.
• Sustaining Teacher-Powered Schools: Focused on ways educators, school communities, districts, unions, networks, authorizers, and education organizations share power to support system-changing work happening in teacher-powered schools.

2025 session descriptions below.

Blueprints for Tomorrow: PBL, Futurism, and the Remixing of Possibility

Participants will explore the Gold Standard PBL framework as a vessel for future-building, drawing on the ideas of Octavia Butler, Bettina Love, Sun Ra, and others to ground their understanding of Futurism. Through this lens, they will examine how PBL fosters new pathways for educators and students.

Collaborating to Support Students’ Learning Differences in a Teacher-Powered School

Avalon teachers-a general education advisor and a special education teacher-will share how our Teacher-Powered Model fosters joyful collaboration to serve students with learning differences.

Collaborative Co-Planning, Co-Teaching, and Co-Reflecting: Building Connections Across Grade Levels

Discover the impact of co-planning, co-teaching, and co-reflecting through cross-grade level collaboration to improve student outcomes. We’ll share how this approach boosted collective efficacy and teacher autonomy, providing insights and strategies you can apply in your own school.

Harnessing AI for Teacher-Powered Innovation: Supporting Student-Centered Learning with SchoolAI

How can AI support student agency, collaboration, and teacher-powered teams while preserving autonomy? This session explores AI’s role in student-centered learning and personalized instruction. Using SchoolAI, we’ll showcase AI tools for differentiation, student feedback, data-driven teaching, and collaborative governance.

Ignite Your SPARK! 

Join us for a professional development session focused on creating detailed learner profiles with your staff. You’ll explore strategies to cultivate and model key characteristics that promote self-efficacy in students, empowering them to design and manage their own cumulative portfolios. This collaborative session will help you foster a student-centered approach that encourages growth and independence.

Place-Based Leadership: Student and Adult Leadership Collaboration

When student and adult leaders in a school begin working together, their collaboration has the potential to change the school culture, learning opportunities, and community engagement in the school.

Amplify Student Voice: Empathy Interviews Spark Change

In this hands-on session, educators will receive all the tools they need to transform school climate, culture, and pedagogy to change structures/systems by leading with student voice.

Co-creating Communities of Belonging and Care

Discover new ways to cultivate trusting relationships and co-create, along with your students, spaces of belonging, care, and joy in your school. Engage with Facing History & Ourselves’ student-centered resources and strategies that nurture empathy, curiosity, and civic responsibility in young people, and allow them to thrive socially, emotionally, and academically.

Designing Sustainable, Teacher-Powered Programs With Purpose and Joy

Discover how teacher-powered practices built a connected, curious, and joyful K–8 IB program from the ground up in Southgate Community Schools. Learn how shared leadership shaped learning, policy, PD, and assessment. Leave with adaptable strategies and inspiration to build or refine any student-centered program—with time to reflect and connect with fellow educators.

From Knowledge to Action – Empower Learners with AI 

In this interactive deep dive, discover how to help students harness AI as a tool for real-world impact. We’ll explore frameworks that shift students from passive consumers to empowered creators, examine successful case studies like Votewise, and practice techniques that develop both technical skills and ethical understanding. Leave with actionable strategies to help your students transform knowledge into meaningful action.

From the Core: Designing Learning Experiences from the Inside Out

By starting with students’ interests and questions about the world, participants will learn how to guide others in creating meaningful educational experiences. This hands-on session will show how to design interdisciplinary projects that foster real-world exploration and creativity. Attendees will leave equipped to be experienced creators in their classrooms.

Growing Into an Educator-Led Program 

Laura Jeffrey Academy has grown into a collaborative, student-centered learning community driven by dedicated educators using research-based practices to empower every learner.  Building on lessons learned, this session will explore strategies to enhance and strengthen educator autonomy. Participants will reflect and plan ways to increase autonomy within their own programs.

How Team-Based Models Center Students and Empower Educators

Explore how educator teams—like those at Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences—expand teacher leadership and create student-centered learning environments. Play an interactive game that challenges assumptions about how students are assigned to teachers—and consider how teams could unlock flexibility, collaboration, and student-centered structures in your context.

Interdisciplinary Student-Driven Projects: Tackling Real World Problems with Real-World Skills

Learn about an interdisciplinary, co-taught class model in MN that centers student choice and engages students in considering relevant issues from their own communities with a focus on environment, equity, and economic sustainability. We’ll showcase two of our larger projects (on local land management dilemmas and on mapping community sustainability) and consider how they support student choice and voice, as well as how we engage and partner with outside communities, including local parks departments and government agencies, nonprofits, and academics. See and interact with student work and play with mapping tools!

The Joy of Student Agency in Inquiry-Based Processes

Establishing strong inquiry-based learning (IBL) classroom cultures can foster authentic learning experiences leading to student agency through IBL classroom practices and processes, I.e. Project Based Learning. Examples of teacher-led IBL sessions impacting classroom applications coupled with student-led authentic learning experiences will create a robust picture of agency for both groups.

Peer Assistance and Review: Empowering Teachers as Professionals

This session introduces Peer Assistance and Review (PAR). In PAR, Consulting Teachers and a PAR Board (composed of teachers and administrators) mentor and assess the performance of newly-hired teachers and/or those with low teaching evaluation scores. Included is an overview of PAR programs in 27 school districts and presentations from Consulting Teachers in two districts.

Power Up Partnerships: Connecting Families & Educators for Student Success

Discover how Parent Teacher Home Visits ignite powerful home-school partnerships! This interactive session explores how sharing power with families strengthens relationships, boosts student success, and aligns with Teacher-Powered Schools’ core values. Learn how home visits foster trust, collaboration, and equity—ensuring all voices contribute to a thriving, student-centered learning environment.

A Strong Network Elevates Teacher-Powered, Student-Centered Schools

The MN Learner Centered Network has done something new! Come learn how students and adults from network schools were empowered to design and launch a MN Certificate of Excellence for Student-Centered Learning. In this session, learn about the impact this process has on building a supportive network system.

Building Inclusive and Effective School Schedules: A Collaborative Approach

This interactive session explores the collaborative process of school calendar and schedule creation. Participants will analyze their own practices, learn from real-world successes and challenges, and develop actionable plans to bring back to their schools. Through discussion and guided planning, educators will leave with strategies for engaging stakeholders and improving scheduling decisions.

Empowered Leadership: Strengthening Collaboration and Decision-Making in Teams

Participate in learning activities from the high-powered teams’ professional development series developed for WAVE, a teacher-powered school. Attendees will practice building a team’s leadership capacity in three areas: equitable decision making and collaboration, addressing conflict through positive disagreement, and sustaining teacher power during times of organizational change.

Leading Together: An Administrator’s Story of Shared Power and Collaboration

In this session, Rebekah Kang, an assistant principal at a K-12 public school in Los Angeles, will share her journey from being a teacher to a teacher leader, and then to a program coordinator and administrator. She will discuss how her understanding of teacher leadership and collaborative leadership has evolved over time. Additionally, she will openly share the challenges of sharing power within a hierarchical education system and offer strategies for navigating top-down structures to facilitate meaningful, transformational change. Participants will leave with practical tools and strategies they can apply at their own schools.

Purpose-Powered Teams: Embedding Your Mission into Policy and Practice 

Participate in learning activities from the high-powered teams professional development series developed for WAVE, a teacher-powered school. Attendees will practice aligning team values and daily behaviors with their organization’s mission to drive purpose, engagement, and results.

Sustaining a Teacher-Powered Culture: 15 Years and Counting

Our schools have navigated several big changes over the years regarding our mission, staffing, and decision-making to fit a transforming and growing educational landscape.  Learn about the journey of three veteran Teacher-Powered Schools and how we adapt, change, and grow to sustain our organizations.

Teacher Leadership of Education Policy

In this session, learn about Teach Plus and how teachers have already impacted state education landscapes, how to elevate your voice in education policy discussions, and how to employ those advocacy skills to create the policy conditions that will enable expanding models like teacher-powered schools.