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.

Breaking Silos: Designing Interdisciplinary Learning Experiences

Explore how interdisciplinary teams design cross-curricular units that center student-driven learning and authentic, project-based experiences. This session showcases practical strategies, real-world examples, and collaborative planning approaches that empower educators to break down subject silos and create meaningful, integrated learning that engages students and deepens understanding.

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.

Boosting Teacher Power with Teacher-Teams in Opportunity Culture Models

The Opportunity Culture initiative works with schools nationally to move from a one-teacher-one-classroom model to a team-based approach, with teacher-leaders earning substantially more for leading teaching teams. Participants will have the chance to learn about these models, their results, and what factors help them work, and then to reflect on the potential of these strategies in their own schools.

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.

The Fun Committee (and Other Ways We’ve Used Joy to Grow Community, Culture, and Collaboration)

Discover how two teachers used their autonomy to cultivate a joyful culture that spread beyond students to families, educators, and the wider school community. This session shares strategies, stories, and the power of teacher leadership in creating vibrant, connected, and joyful learning environments.

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, broaden and deepen learning opportunities, and engage the community in the school. This session is designed so that participants have the opportunity for thoughtful dialogue about democratic school governance in a collaborative leadership model. During this session, we will collaboratively analyze qualitative evidence from youth about school-based youth councils and other forms of youth leadership in schools. We will also examine examples of youth and adult leaders working together. Finally, we will look at youth and adult leadership collaborations through three lenses: relationships and relational trust, systems and structures and school culture. We use active, engaging pedagogies throughout the session and participants will take more from the session by engaging with their peers throughout the session.

Using the Master Schedule to Enable Innovation in Teacher Teams

The master schedule is an incredibly powerful lever for lever for equity, efficiency, and student success. But the reality is that schools—middle and high schools, in particular—routinely struggle building their master schedules given its complexity and the lack of helpful tools. In this session, participants will learn how they can strategically build school schedules to enable true teacher-powered schools through teacher teams that are built intentionally and students at the core of the master schedule development.

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.

Enacting Systems-Change in School: Listening to Students & Redesigning Public Schools

In this hands-on session, educators will be guided through a systematic process for redesigning schools, using the Third Coast Learning Collaborative as a case study—an ongoing initiative across public middle schools in Western Michigan. Participants will learn to integrate empathy interviews (small group discussions) between students and educators to identify actionable ideas. The session will then explore the practical processes and logistics that in-field educators need to actually implement these ideas in their own contexts.

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. Liz, an environmental science and environmental justice teacher, will be joined by three of her current 12th grade students, who will share their perspective on the school’s teaching model and some examples of their work. We’ll consider how we support student choice and voice and showcase how we engage and partner with outside communities, and how we use mapping tools and ArcGIS “StoryMaps” in our class projects.

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.

Making Democracy Daily Practice: Two Schools’ Journeys With Choice, Voice, and Agency

How can we make our democratic values part of our daily practice? Come learn from two TPS ambassadors sharing their experiences in public secondary schools in Michigan and Virginia using democratic systems that center student and teacher voices including school governance. This session offers agency-building examples and practical tools like Town Meetings, consent decision-making, sociocratic circles, and collaborative hiring to strengthen belonging and democratic competencies through real stories from practitioners who’ve implemented these approaches.

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 tenured teachers with low teaching evaluation scores. Included is an overview of PAR programs in 27 school districts and presentations from a Consulting Teacher, PAR Board Co-Chair, and PAR Program Coordinator.

Common Language, Common Goals: Supporting Student-Centered Schools Through Shared Principles

Education Evolving’s research on the Seven Principles of Student-Centered Learning identifies key elements shared by learner-centered environments. Join us to explore this framework, see how these principles come to life at Avalon School in St. Paul, and learn how the Minnesota Learner-Centered Network used them to develop a reflective tool that supports professional learning and growth in student-centered schools.

Books, Not Bullets: Engaging the Education Community for Safe Schools & Neighborhoods

Join us for a screening of the Oscar-nominated short documentary Death by Numbers, which follows the story of Sam Fuentes, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. The film offers a powerful look at the lasting trauma of gun violence, the emotional toll on survivors, and the deep, enduring bonds between students and educators who have lived through these tragedies.

Following the screening, we’ll reflect together and explore concrete ways educators are organizing, advocating, and raising their voices for safer schools and stronger communities. This session is a call to action—and a space for healing, connection, and collective empowerment.

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.

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.

Reimagining Teaching Roles with Protected Flexibilities: A Set of Case Studies

Through case studies, we will share how school and district partners have leveraged autonomous and empowering conditions and shared leadership practices to drive innovation and improvements in teacher satisfaction, retention, and student outcomes. The following LEAs are highlighted:

• Cold Springs, Indianapolis, IN
• Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, Springfield MA
• Leadership Academy Network, Fort Worth, TX
• Washtenaw Education Options Consortium, Ypsilanti, MI
• Luminary Learning Network, Denver, CO

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.