Reimagining the teaching profession — with teachers and students together

“Teachers at a California school district innovate alongside their students, transforming their professional journeys in ways that could reinvigorate the profession. At a Glance Jason Collar and Sabina Giakoumis are among the teachers at the Anaheim Union High School District who have been leading innovation efforts alongside their students. As district superintendent, Mike Matsuda developed a culture that encouraged innovation by focusing on what teachers and students do together. The architecture for transforming schools relies on giving teachers sufficient time to learn from each other and experiment. Abandoning hierarchical, top-down structures in favor of more networked structures where teachers work in teams can create the conditions for lasting change. Jason Collar and Sabina Giakoumis are among the growing number of teachers at the Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) who are leading innovations from the classroom and the community. In this mid-size urban district serving 26,000 diverse and mostly high-need students, teachers and students have developed a different way of thinking about the profession and become co-pilots in teaching and learning. Located a stone’s throw from Disneyland, AUHSD is one of California’s leading school districts, but its success is not quantified by traditional academic measures. Instead, it’s seen in the district’s high graduation, college-going, and college-persistence rates; the number of students engaged in internships, workplace learning, and earning industry credentials; and the California Democracy School distinction every school in the district earned by embedding civic learning in structures and operations so students can engage with local leaders. Recently, AUHSD (with its 120 external partners) became one of three California school districts to serve as a demonstration site for the state’s $4-billion, five-year investment in community schooling. In addition, students and teachers are working with the eKadence Learning Foundation to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools to personalize teaching and learning. In short, Anaheim students are learning how to become better in today’s complex society, as they develop ways to become better for society. A culture that values innovation Jason Collar, a junior high social studies teacher, incubated his own approach to student voice and service learning using Minecraft Education. He initially found the program when searching for hands-on ways for students to learn about the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of Mesoamerican civilizations. The open-ended gameplay, similar to the commercially available version of Minecraft, made it possible for Jason’s students to use virtual field trips and their own builds to demonstrate what they know, as well as how they know it. As a result, Jason said, “I realized that students could go into Minecraft and teach me what they learned. . . . I do not give traditional tests anymore.” His students — and their deep engagement in learning via Minecraft — convinced him to encourage colleagues pedagogically stuck in traditional textbook teaching to embrace instructional shifts. A year later, Jason and teaching colleagues, along with their students across three district schools, created an eSports career pathway with Fullerton College and Extron Electronics. Past efforts to professionalize teaching relied mainly on external policy levers (standards, evaluation systems, program requirements). The Anaheim story shows how professionalization can advance if the process begins with what teachers and students do together. Similarly, Sabina Giakoumis, a high school biology teacher, worked with her students to transform a classroom garden into the Magnolia Agriscience Community Center (The MACC) — a 3-acre farm where young people engage in transdisciplinary service learning projects, develop entrepreneurial skills, and provide fresh produce for their community, one of Orange County’s densest food deserts. These are just two of many deeper learning innovations developed by district teachers, in partnership with their students. The roots of these efforts go back to 2014, when newly appointed Superintendent Mike Matsuda unyoked teachers from test scores to focus on deeper, purposeful learning. The district’s new values architecture was anchored in student voice and the 5Cs: communication, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and compassion. Over 11 years, Matsuda visited schools and classrooms, looking for talented teachers who could lead from the classroom. He established a few formal hybrid roles — such as 5C coaches — so teachers could both teach and lead. The coaching role was less about training teachers in new pedagogical techniques and more about cultivating their peers as informal leaders. Neither Jason nor Sabina would have developed their “teacherpreneurial” skills (Berry, 2014) without the values architecture Matsuda created. Past efforts to professionalize teaching relied mainly on external policy levers (standards, evaluation systems, program requirements). The Anaheim story shows how professionalization can advance if the process begins with what teachers and students do together. An architecture for transformation Over the last decade, AUHSD students have benefited from a spate of teacher-led, deeper learning innovations: peer mentoring, soapbox speeches (TED Talks), interdisciplinary writing, project-based learning, capstone projects as graduation requirements, industry certifications, and student-inspired career pathways. Formal professional development plays an important role for teachers as they implement these innovations. But it is what happens between formal professional learning sessions that really marks the new learning developments. Changing the daily routines through informal teacher leadership was central to fueling day-to-day connections among the adults — and then between the adults and young people. For example, establishing hybrid teacher leader roles provided opportunities for teachers to take instructional risks. Giving teachers modest amounts of released time to develop leadership skills enabled them to build relational trust. Engaging teachers in workplace externships in cybersecurity, biotech, and with eKadence — mirroring their students’ internships — opened new mindsets for how they approached teaching and learning. Creating interdisciplinary teaching pods in the district’s Cambridge Virtual Academy demonstrated the power of connected autonomy among teachers as a new form of professional accountability. All of this represents a deep change in the culture of the district. What made the most difference is the district’s values architecture, built on Matsuda’s passion for finding talented teachers and creating small spaces for them to make big changes. This journey of transformation is still at the early stages, with the momentum for change growing and becoming more widespread. AUHSD educators estimate that about 20% of the district’s 1,150 teachers are innovating in some form. But Sabina says that another 50% of the district’s teachers could innovate as she has — under the right conditions. It begins with finding and cultivating a critical mass of teachers as system thinkers. Teachers as system thinkers System thinking emerges naturally in children, but is also often lost due to reductive, fragmented teaching and learning as well as cultural conditioning (Clinton, 2020). Very young children have an instinct to connect things. However, schools often snuff out such system thinking as playful learning. Exploring and experimenting have been pushed out by the growing obsession with productivity and efficiency (Fullan, Rincón-Gallardo and Clinton, 2021). But as we have seen, system thinking can be rekindled among both teachers and students through reflective, relational, and participatory learning (Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2018; Senge, Clinton, & Boell, 2021). Developing a critical mass of system thinkers is key to transforming schools and systems. And “systemness thinking” — actual conscious changes in how students and adults think and act in relation to changing the culture of learning and development — is increasingly evident at AUHSD. For Jason, Sabina, and others like them, learning to become a system thinker is less about formal coursework and degrees than it is much about relational mentoring, iterative practice, co-leadership, and boundary-spanning work (see Table 1). As we spent more time with Jason and Sabina, we saw how they developed their capacity to transform key elements within a system — the people, structures, processes, and ideas. Teacher leadership must not be a boutique program. It must be woven into a school and district’s values architecture, organizational structures, and daily operations. Sabina points to her role as an adjunct professor as widening her view of leadership. Jason talks about his part-time gig as a bartender, where he continues to learn from people from all walks of life — lessons he brings back to his students. Both educators have participated in the district’s teacher externship program. Through that initiative, they have had opportunities to engage with industry professionals who bring real-world skills to learning experiences for students and teachers alike. As Sabina and Jason reflect on practice and evidence and lean into their colleagues, they learn to navigate the bureaucracy. They see themselves as lifelong learners who embrace life lessons from outside of school, including the world of business and government, and bring those experiences into school so they can help their students learn in both the classroom and community. Learning through Jason Collar Sabina Giakoumis Mentorship Mentored by district leaders, uses students as leaders in motivating his peers to innovate. Supported by superintendent, learned side by side with him as well as other teachers. Iterative practice Grew ideas through Minecraft experiments with students and external partners. Scaffolded projects from garden to MACC to Freight Farm, a container farm that grows fresh produce for school lunches. Relational ecosystems Draws on his experience working in the service industry. Co-developed across institutions and sectors, drawing on work experiences in other fields. Leadership roles Supported by the administration to serve as a community school teacher lead, and formally and informally as a district innovator. Served as adjunct professor and civic connector. Student codesign Positioned students as content experts. Amplified student voice in program design. Table 1. How two teachers learned to be system thinkers A system of leading teachers “More teachers need to understand the system,” Sabina said. “But too few have access to the information, and too many believe they are not supposed to lead, because they try and do not always feel like they are supported.” AUHSD’s value architecture rests on knowing every student by name and story and helping them find their passion for learning. What might it mean if districts applied the same architecture to teachers? Sabina said: Every teacher has their own personal and professional passion, and those could be tapped into. I feel like teachers might feel valued if they knew their own strengths and those of others — they may be more likely to lead. Teacher leadership must not be a boutique program. It must be woven into a school and district’s values architecture, organizational structures, and daily operations. Researchers have found that the social side of education reform ignites more effective teaching and improved student learning. For example, more professionalized working conditions in schools (including peer collaboration) influence teacher effectiveness, even among teachers with more than 20 years of experience (Kraft & Papay, 2016). Teachers’ social capital increases schools’ instructional capacity because teachers often seek advice and share strategies with peers rather than relying solely on administrators or external experts (Leana & Pils, 2016). And a school’s social network — the web of relationships through which information, resources, and influence flow — affects teachers’ self-efficacy and capacity to change instruction (Lockton et al., 2025). A transformation of culture that includes a strong internal network is crucial to deep learning success. AUHSD’s journey, as well as the established research literature, show us that professional learning and leadership emerge best as a “socially distributed and cultivated phenomenon” that develops over time as teachers gain efficacy with “repeated opportunities” to reflect on what they master in the context of structured collaboration (Szczesiul & Huizenga, 2015). Creating a networked profession that operates in this way requires system leaders to find out more about every teacher’s personal and professional passion and to uplift their best work to support their students’ academic, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Teaching is too complicated for one individual to do it all. The work of schooling now and in the future demands a team of experts, specialists, and generalists. What if teaching as a profession became — as Yong Zhao (2018) has suggested — “the sum of the entire community of teachers”? What if highly accomplished “teacherpreneurs” — like Jason and Sabina — are strategically organized in teams that include life coaches, mentors, tutors, curriculum designers, project managers, and representatives of postsecondary education and business/industry? What if teams of educators had their own AI agents as research assistants? AUHSD represents the transformation of teaching and learning by enabling teachers and students to work together for a higher purpose. What if teaching became a networked profession defined by teachers working with students? A networked, reimagined profession In traditional notions of school leadership, a vertical hierarchy pushes the flow of information, insights, and influence. We imagine teaching as a neural network that, by contrast, operates laterally and dynamically, with distributed nodes that process, learn, and adapt together. Our book about AUHSD, The Future of Public Education: One District’s Journey to Transform Schools and Systems , shows how teachers and students formed these nodes as co-pilots in learning and leading. The synapses connecting the nodes are professional relationships and trust. Distributed processing occurs through collaborative inquiry and problem solving. Like Sabina suggested, creating a networked profession that operates in this way requires system leaders to find out more about every teacher’s personal and professional passion and to uplift their best work to support their students’ academic, social, cognitive, and emotional development. A LinkedIn-like network of teachers with differing areas of expertise would be matched with each other, where eKadence’s AI-enabled tools help colleagues connect with each other based on interests, expertise, and aspirations. To make this work, schools and systems must be fully redesigned so students learn in both classrooms and the community, unleashed from rigid seat-time curriculum requirements. Teachers will have more time to learn from each other, within and across schools. Schools will become hubs of community with many more opportunities for allied professionals to mentor young people and work with teaching teams. And teachers have more openings in the workday to incubate new ideas, conduct action research, and tell the story of their impact. By reallocating time and people — as outlined by the Learning Policy Institute’s Redesigning High School: 10 Features for Success (Darling-Hammond et al., 2025) — and the strategic use of AI, teachers will have more time to codesign more powerful learning experiences and assessments. AUHSD is now on this path and is playing a central role in reDesignED — one of 14 networks funded by the State of California to transform the factory model of schooling. Anaheim High School Principal Ruben Calleros along with Bill Johnson, a teacher and coach at the school, pointed out in AUHSD Future Talks: Episode 134 (AUHSD Communications, 2025) that a reassessment of time and people is a must-have to expand the district’s teacher career pathways and make space for teachers to create the learning environments, fueled by AI-enhanced technologies, that students need to thrive in a rapidly changing world. District offices also will need to change the way they do their work. The human relations (HR) department is not just about recruiting but also about developing talent. Professional development (PD) becomes less about training teachers and more about finding and spreading pedagogical expertise. Teaching evaluations are no longer about compliance but about creating space for teachers’ reflections on teaching and learning, placing a premium on learning from students and sharing expertise with colleagues. We can envision what happens next. HR and PD, typically two distinct units, evolve into a cross-functional team. School districts partner more formally with universities and business in preparing and developing teachers as generalists and specialists. More teachers act as instructional designers, content curators, assessment experts, and change agents. Students will have more choice in who teaches them what and when. And teachers will have more choices about when they facilitate learning — in classrooms, virtually, or in the community. Teacher unions and school administrators will redefine contractual language to enable teachers to serve in a variety of leadership roles and be compensated differently based on expertise defined by micro credentials or other validated evidence of accomplished practice. And with new tech tools, teachers and students will have more ways to tell their story. The bottom inspires the top Both of us, for many decades, have studied the teaching profession and sought to advance it. We believe innovative developments at the school and district levels should intrigue those at the top so they will leverage those new ideas (Fullan, 2025). However, over time, it has been one step forward, three-quarters back, and many steps from side to side. We have seen recruitment, preparation, evaluation, professional development, and compensation reforms come and go. We have seen efforts to demand more clinical preparation undermined by policy makers who lower standards to make sure classrooms are filled (Berry & Shields, 2017; Fullan et al., 1998). We have assessed and critiqued teaching evaluation systems that have not moved the needle on identifying and spreading pedagogical expertise. We have seen more states craft policies to recognize accomplished practitioners, (e.g., National Board Certified Teachers), but too few structures put in place so they can lead (Berry, 2007, 2019). Decade after decade, efforts to advance the profession have been marked by periods of momentum, followed by fragmentation, underinvestment, or policy misalignment (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Darling-Hammond & Berry, 1988; Ingersoll & Merrill, 2017). No wonder the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years (Kraft & Lyon, 2022). The teaching profession cannot be transformed from the top. It needs to connect to the bottom, with teachers and students together. AUHSD has taught us that for teaching to advance as a profession in the age of AI, students and teachers can no longer be conceived as working independently from one another. Rather they are increasingly seen as crossing “role lines” in developing their learning together. It is this interactive restructuring and “re-culturing” that fundamentally alters the two-century culture of individualism that has plagued the teaching profession. We see five policy shifts that we believe will help advance and sustain this movement. Fund time for teaming as an instructional core, not a nice-to-have. Create categorical or formula add-ons that pay for common planning blocks, interdisciplinary pods, externships, and student co-design time. Rewrite educator preparation, licensure, and evaluation policy around team-based, networked practice. Expect teacher training, induction, and evaluation processes to require educators to demonstrate competence in interdisciplinary design, performance assessment, peer coaching, working across boundaries with industry higher ed, and empowering students as co-learners. Create and finance “career lattices,” not only ladders. Develop a state micro credential framework (that is stackable and performance-based) tied to differential pay and released time. Roles would include assessment lead, industry liaison, advisory lead, AI guide, and more. Make performance assessment and capstones statewide engines for networked teaching practice. Adopt (or scale) graduation-relevant performance tasks and capstones with technical assistance centers that are led by teachers with students. Create fund-scoring institutes that double as professional learning. Elevate system thinking as a professional standard. Add system thinking and working across boundaries to state teaching standards and leadership standards. Fund fellowships that place teachers in cross-sector projects with released time from teaching. Expect more administrators to teach periodically. These policies will emerge only after a critical mass of districts work together, make tough decisions, assemble evidence of impact, and tell their story, anchored by teachers. Only then, with teachers and students together, can the education profession reimagine itself and build the demand for it that every community deserves. Note: This article is adapted from The Future of Public Education: One District’s Journey to Transform Schools and Systems by Barnett Berry, Mike Matsuda, and Michael Fullan, published by Corwin Press (2026). References AUHSD Communications (2025, December 5). AUHSD future talks: Episode 134 (Ruben Calleros & Bill Johnson) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQLjPJBNSeU Berry, B. (2014). Going to scale with teacherpreneurs . Phi Delta Kappan , 95 (7), 8-14. Berry, B. (2007). The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the future of a profession [Conference presentation]. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards 20/20: Clarifying a Vision for Quality Teaching. Racine, WI. Berry, B. (2019). Teacher leadership: Prospects and promises . Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (7). 49-55. Berry, B. & Shields, P.M. (2017). Solving the teacher shortage: Revisiting the lessons we’ve learned . Phi Delta Kappan, 98 (8), 8-18. Clinton, J. (2020). 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Quintero (Ed.), The social side of education reform . Albert Shanker Institute. Lockton, M., Caduff, A., Daly, A.J., & Rehm, M. (2025). The human side of knowledge networks: Why individual connections drive educational change . University of California–San Diego SOSNetLab. Senge, P., Clinton, J., & Boell, M. (2021). Compassionate systems framework: A systems approach for understanding self, others, and the world. MIT Center for Systems Awareness. Szczesiul, S.A. & Huizenga, J.L. (2015). Bridging structure and agency: Exploring the role of teacher leadership in teacher collaboration. Journal of School Leadership , 25 (2), 368-410. Zhao, Y. (2018). The changing context of teaching and implications for teacher education . Peabody Journal of Education , 93 (3), 295-308. This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 7-8. The post Reimagining the teaching profession — with teachers and students together appeared first on Kappan Online .

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