Making Innovative Teaching Sustainable: Seven Policy Recommendations

I’ve recently returned from the 2025 FullScale Symposium in New Orleans, inspired and rejuvenated by all the great folks who showed up. I was inspired by their commitment to, and deep work on, school and district transformation, their focus on student-centered learning through policy development and competency based assessment systems, and their inspired practice at the school, district, state, and federal levels. There is so much amazing work going on around the country! Educators are doing so much that is transforming the experience of young people, creating welcoming, engaging, challenging, and meaningful learning settings, graduating healthy and thoughtful young adults who will be future engaged citizens and leaders!

When I returned home, my wife met me at the airport. She is an English teacher in an urban public high school in Oakland that has, over the past decade, transformed into wall-to-wall Linked Learning College and Career Pathways. She had just finished a long week of public demonstrations of learning by her students for two large project based learning units, one for her sophomores and one for her juniors, in her Public Health Pathway. And she was profoundly exhausted.

She and many of her colleagues have been teaching at this school for almost 20 years, through hard times before the pathways were developed and into a place where the school just really works, for students, for families, for teachers, for administrators, for other staff, and for the community. It’s become a really cool place for young people to learn. And the adults there also continue to learn together, iterating their practice into more refined curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments. It’s exciting to visit and feel the energy as students and adults learn together.

But these veteran teachers are all exhausted. And this is not just the case with Oakland teachers; it’s true across the country. As much as we want to celebrate their success, these newer ways of teaching and learning they have learned and iterated together into better and better approaches over the last 20 years are not sustainable. Over the past few years, I have found myself mourning in advance the death by a thousand cuts that will drive these great teachers out of the profession, and quite possibly eventually kill what we know to be good teaching and learning.

Districts seem to be trying to address this problem, but for the most part their solutions are individualistic, not systemic. We’ve been through the years of “self-care” lectures, and efforts to provide trauma-informed care for the educators as well as for the students. We’ve seen teachers lectured in PD about how to maintain a good “work-life balance.” Schools have even offered teachers massage chairs on Friday after school.

But I find myself, someone who is not in any way a policy wonk, thinking that there must be some systemic policy changes that we could make that would create the teaching ecosystem where these teachers could sustain their exciting and challenging work in healthy ways, to go along with this new and exciting student learning ecosystem we have been creating. And while I have my own healthy ambivalence about the effectiveness of policy (I can cite numerous examples over the course of my career where the unintended consequences of a policy ended up being worse than the supposed positive benefits of that policy), I do think that there are several policy changes that might help.

So here are seven policy changes that I think might make the profession of innovative teachers sustainable:

1. Real Pay

First of all, pay teachers what they are worth, comparable to similarly well educated and qualified professionals in other fields. They are real professionals. They are not assembly line workers. Teaching is the hardest profession there is; a good teacher can’t coast through any day and doesn’t get “water cooler” time. They are on all the time; they interact with a constantly changing classroom culture and the unpredictable behavior, moods, and needs of young people from minute to minute; they solve thousands of small and large problems a day in real time; they quickly and creatively pivot when a lesson is not going the way it should; and they have the responsibility to help those young people grow into healthy, knowledgeable, and functional adults. No other profession with similar educational preparation requires as much on a daily basis. Pay them for that education, experience, and expertise. While this should be a matter of better funding for public schools, even if that is challenging to do, there are many ways to think of better pay for teachers as a trade-off for other ways that schools spend their funds. See #3 and #6 for two options.

2. More Planning and Collaboration Time

Teachers in the U.S. spend more of their time with students than in any other OECD country. So the good ones work every night and at least a day on the weekends in planning and grading and have almost no time for collaboration. We know that the old image of the solo teacher with the closed door teaching in isolation from other adults is no longer a workable design for what we expect of public schools in the 21st century. We also know that no good teacher can teach just by lecturing or reading out of a textbook. Planning engaging, challenging, and accessible units and lessons to meet the needs of all their students requires lots of time and lots of collaboration. Grading (or assessing formatively and summatively for competencies and mastery, not just memorized content, as teachers are more and more being asked to do) also takes immense amounts of time.

3. Ongoing Communities of Practice for Lateral Practice Sharing

Sharing practice in a once a year workshop, or even a monthly PD series, is not effective. Teachers need an ongoing organic opportunity to share across classrooms, schools, and districts those ideas and practices, little and big, that recombine to make innovation happen. Relationships that form from participation in communities of practice emerging out of dense social learning and innovation networks are where the most innovative practices develop, improve, and spread. Top down models of curriculum adoption and mandated use may provide technical consistency and resources (or may not), but real improvement in the quality of the learning space happens among teachers who learn with and from each other. As an aside, schools might consider the cost/benefit analysis of a curriculum adoption versus better salaries and more collaboration time for teachers. Every good “curriculum implementation plan” is mostly successful because of the amount of time teachers have to work together to actually make it useful and adapted to their students and their context, not the adopted curriculum itself.

4. District People's Jobs Should Focus on Support for Teachers

Richard Elmore put it this way:

“The problems of the system are the problems of the smallest unit. All actions of the system at large have to be evaluated in terms of the value they add to the instructional core—the relationship between the teacher and student in the presence of content.”

Two structural and cultural changes districts could make to enable this focus are:

• Get everything that is not directly connected to teaching and learning OFF teachers' plates. This includes the mountains of administrative paperwork that teachers are always expected to do, which more than doubles when teachers are trying to do real-world project-based learning that requires building and sustaining relationships with industries and organizations outside school in the community as well as managing all the logistics when those partners are interacting meaningfully with students.
• Find out (by asking and authentically listening) what teachers need to do their job well, and provide it.

Rethink the district organizational model: If district staff can't do these two things, they should have no job, or their job should be shifted back to the school site. Most districts have too many layers of people supervising other people, and competing or conflicting siloed programs, without an actual impact on the quality of student learning.

5. Teacher Preparation Is Not a Linear Pipeline

Numerous studies show that 20-30 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years; the percentage is even higher in high-poverty schools.¹ That loss and churn is a huge burden on school districts and on the teachers who stay. So much of the sustainability of innovation depends on the relationships that teachers build with each other. Starting over with rebuilding those relationships every time a teacher leaves is exhausting. But there are good solutions to this problem that help new teachers stay in the profession. We need to stop thinking of the beginning of a teaching career as a linear and sequential "pipeline" with a hard boundary between the teacher preparation program and the school classroom. Instead, let’s think of it as an acculturation process where teacher education programs and schools work together (residencies, cohorts, etc.). Imagine every teacher acculturated into a team of teachers at a school site (like grade level teams in elementary, houses in ninth grade, pathway teams in upper levels in high schools) right from the first day. This is not the same as being assigned to a mentor teacher or having a student teacher in your classroom. In addition, most university teacher education "classes" could actually happen at the school site and involve veteran teachers co-teaching with the university professors, as an integral part of ongoing professional learning for everyone.

6. Real Career Advancement Choices and Parity

In Singapore there are three ways to advance if you prove to be an excellent teacher: 1) into administration (as we do here), 2) into a specialist role at a district (as we sometimes do here), and, 3) into a master teacher role staying in your school (where you have grown solid trusting relationships), teaching part time, and coaching other teachers (not just the new ones; everyone can benefit from coaching). The difference is that in Singapore the salary scales and advancement timelines for all three are the same.

7. Four Days Student Facing/One Day for Planning and Collaboration

This is my most radical policy recommendation, but certainly do-able: teachers should have a four-day student-facing week and one additional day per week for planning, grading, collaboration, and professional learning. In high schools and some middle schools, we already have some examples (the Met) and with rising numbers of Linked Learning pathway schools, there is almost an infrastructure in place already to have kids out learning in the community for one day each week. In elementary, specials (music, art, PE) and other community-based organizational activities for the kids (gardens, outdoor activities) could be clustered so teachers could have at least a half day twice a week to plan and collaborate.

It's partly just a logistical problem, and partly a cultural problem. This solution requires us to advocate for the idea that the whole community is responsible for the development of its young people into healthy and civically engaged adults. There is some good news on this front: in California, at least, the Community Schools initiative has combined in some places with the Linked Learning College and Career Pathways approach to high school, such that, when well designed and integrated thoughtfully, academic, social emotional, counseling, wellness supports, and afterschool programming provide a “wrap around” ecosystem that means that the teacher is not the sole source of adult connection and caring for young people. In our work in the Deeper Learning Dozen we learned from several of our British Columbia districts that had begun substantive partnerships with their local Indigenous elders and knowledge keepers as a part of the province’s truth and reconciliation efforts to “decolonize” the educational system. These partnerships both addressed the need for teachers to have more planning and collaboration time and also provided young people with meaningful experiences in the community that connected to broader learning goals that the schools had. In one community students spent days working with elders and knowledge keepers on rebuilding the clam beds of the Coast Salish people. In another community, middle school students went on overnight canoe trips as part of ritual coming of age ceremonies. As they all worked together, the elders and knowledge keepers shared stories of their history and culture with the young people.

Do We Have the Will to Sustain Innovative Teaching?

I am excited to see innovative and engaging approaches to public education happening more and more. What we seem to be missing, or at least doing some magical thinking about, is that these approaches are exhausting our best teachers. The ones who really want to be doing this kind of work are finding it harder and harder to sustain. Surely we can turn some of our innovative thinking toward this impending collapse before it comes crashing down on us! We don’t want to go back to the tired, old factory school approach, the passive, industrial model that made our classrooms so dull and dour for all of the 20th century. Maybe these seven ideas are not the policy changes that will turn things around. Maybe you have some other, better ideas? But let’s have this discussion now, before we lose even more of our innovative teachers than we already have. It’s really a question of will, skill, knowledge, and capacity. We have the skill, the knowledge, and the capacity, so mostly, it is just a question of whether we have the will to take on the task.

¹ “National studies of teacher retention indicate that around 20–30% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and that attrition is even higher (often reaching 50% or more) in high-poverty schools and in high-need subject areas…” Guha, R., Hyler, M.E., and Darling-Hammond, L. (2016). The Teacher Residency: An Innovative Model for Preparing Teachers. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.

Credit, all photos: John Watkins