About the Guide

This guide’s purpose

In greatly increasing numbers, teachers, union/association leaders, district administrators, and policymakers are seeking information and resources to help them research, start up, and support teacher-powered schools. This one-of-a-kind guide features an extensive collection of resources and tools successfully used by teacher teams to design and run teacher-powered schools. It acknowledges and describes the different work that teachers have done while setting reasonable expectations about how collaborative teacher-powered teams develop over time.

The purpose of this guide is to help teachers and the broader education community reimagine the possibilities for student learning and the teaching profession by providing information that has been created and utilized by the pioneers who already design, run, and support teacher-powered schools. With this focus in mind, we did not include a complete list of resources and tools for school start ups and conversions. There are already many guides of that nature. This guide will help individuals and teams who are setting out to create or support teacher-powered schools build on the successes of their predecessors—and learn from their mistakes—as they set out on their own innovative journeys.

How to use this guide

Using the Table of Contents, readers can jump to any of the five stages and their associated steps. Browsing the contents will help you determine which areas of the guide address your current needs and stage of development.

Once you choose a stage, you will be presented with a series of associated steps. You can work through and read the steps in order, using web navigation. You can also use the Table of Contents on the main page of each stage to select steps that you wish to learn more about or skip around as you see fit.

In each step you’ll find information about how to work through that step as well as a collection of external resources. When you click on a resource, you will be brought to a webpage that offers a full description of the resource and how to access it. These pages can be bookmarked in your browser for later use and reference.

About the original authors

Lori Nazareno and Kim Farris-Berg originally created the Steps Guide to Creating a Teacher-Powered School in 2015. It was recreated as part of the teacherpowered.org website in 2016. We continue to update this Steps Guide with new and relevant resources for teacher-powered teams.

Lori co-founded the Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-powered school in Denver, Colorado. She is currently a CTQ Teacher Leader in Residence. Kim is lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots (R&L Education, 2012). In her work with CTQ and Education Evolving, Kim continues to observe, learn about, and report on teacher-powered schools.

Both Kim and Lori work nationally with teachers and the broader education community to inform and support the exploration and pursuit of teacher-powered schools.