Save the date!
Next year’s Strategic School Staffing Summit will take place Feb. 3-4, 2027.
At the 2026 Strategic School Staffing Summit, Bill Withers’ song “Lovely Day” welcomed attendees from across the country into the opening session. It was a lovely day, Executive Director of the Next Education Workforce Brent Maddin said, because the nearly 100 speakers and more than 450 participants representing over 150 organizations at the annual convening shared a common goal and purpose: “We’re here for educators, we’re here for young people. We want the world to be better, and the jobs and their time [in schools] to be better for both.”
The seventh annual Strategic School Staffing Summit, hosted by Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™ initiative, took place Feb. 4–5, 2026, and featured more than 30 virtual sessions on how schools, systems and states are building and sustaining team-based staffing models.
The sessions were aligned to the Summit’s four content tracks:
- Teams of educators with distributed expertise
- Team-enabled high-quality instruction
- Entry, preparation and advancement pathways in team-based models
- Technology and AI in team-based roles
Together, the sessions reflected a field gaining traction and moving toward scale. Speakers shared implementation experiences from diverse contexts, including large districts, rural communities and statewide initiatives, offering concrete examples of how leaders are redesigning roles, schedules and systems to support educator teams.
This year also brought greater emphasis on the role of state leadership and investment in creating the conditions for strategic staffing. Across both days, sessions featured data from team-based models around the country alongside policy and funding strategies that states are using to support and expand the work.
Deirdre Smith, who has led programming and operations for the Summit since 2022, said the conversations reflected a turning point for the field.
“This year’s Summit showed that team-based staffing is no longer an emerging idea. It’s becoming a shared strategy across schools, systems and states. The conversation has shifted from making the case to making it work, with practical examples, data and lessons from implementation, and a growing focus on how redesigned educator teams bring coherence to instruction by aligning the right expertise to student needs.” Smith shared.
For one attendee, the wide range of speakers and sessions allowed them to see that “making big changes isn’t just possible, it’s achievable in all sorts of systems. The presenters shared wisdom, concrete strategies, and pitfalls to help me think more deeply about the ways schools need to change.”
Echoing Maddin’s sentiment and joining him for the opening session was Kira Orange Jones, CEO of TeachPlus.
“Gatherings like this allow us to accelerate learning together, to connect ideas across many different contexts and to strengthen the collective momentum needed to reimagine the teaching role in ways that truly serve students and educators alike,” Orange Jones shared.
During the session, Orange Jones delved into the work happening at the intersection of strategic school staffing and high-quality instruction, primarily through the newly-launched Center for Inspired Teaching and Exceptional Learning. CITEL is leading a community of practice across eight states, including in Arizona, Mississippi and Michigan, through which they’re seeing six emerging patterns related to strategic school staffing.
This collective momentum is what Maddin often refers to as the “big-tented” nature of the Summit, a unique hallmark that allows people at all levels and in different contexts to engage in the conversation around school staffing.
“It’s rare that a Commissioner of Education will be at the same session as a special educator working directly with kids in schools,” Maddin said. “This is the point. We believe in the diversity of perspectives, and that we are building a movement at all levels of the work.”
From the teacher’s desk to the State Commissioner of Education’s office
Michael Flores never dreamt of becoming a teacher. But now, as a 6th-grade ELA and special educator working at Wilson Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The educators that I met in college were inspiring, and I wanted to be like them,” Flores said. “I kind of fell in love with the middle school age group. They’re crazy … but, also, they’re great little humans.”
Flores is a member of the school’s first team, working alongside two other certified educators and a student teacher. In addition to an individual prep period and a shared planning period, Flores said he and his team frequently community to check in, ask questions and ensure they’re aligned on learning objectives.
Flores shared that one of the most impactful things he’s seen since joining a team is how connected his students are, which he said can be directly tied to their academic performance as well.
“I can tell you definitely that there’s a change in our 6th graders. They all know each other. Because they’re so interconnected socially and because of the proximity, at the start of class, they greet each other, and there’s this big cluster of little people in the hallway, and so we have to get them to where they’re going, which is good,” Flores said. “If the students feel connected, then they’re going to want to come to school because they have friends, because they feel safe. And I think it’s all a good foundation for them to grow academically.”
He attributes this increased sense of belonging to the wraparound support the team provides.
“[Teaming is] allowing us to get to know the students better, and also for us to work together and understand how these students work together best,” Flores said.
If the students feel connected, then they’re going to want to come to school because they have friends, because they feel safe. And I think it’s all a good foundation for them to grow academically.
The importance of having multiple adults caring for students is also something Colorado Commissioner of Education Susana Córdova has seen firsthand, as a former bilingual educator, principal, superintendent and mother.
“I was the mom of a struggling student, and one of the best experiences that my son had as a very little kid was the summer program at Metropolitan State University, where they had [four] practicing apprentice teachers working with a master teacher. … That made such an enormous difference for him; he was able to benefit from five adults in the room who could help him as a 1st-grader with all of the things that he was still learning,” she shared.
Córdova joined the Dean of Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Carole Basile, for the Summit’s keynote session, where the two discussed the importance of creating a sustainable environment for educators, elevating teacher leadership and collaboration at a state level, the three areas of focus her office is working to address.
While increasing student engagement and accelerating student outcomes are the first two, it’s actually the third area of focus, strengthening the educator workforce, that Córdova sees as foundational.
“I’m a big believer that it really starts with investing in our adults if we want to invest in our kids. And that really is what’s behind the concept of strategic staffing. How do we make the right investments at every step of a career ladder so that from the first time somebody is considering education as a profession, they’ve got the supports they need?” Córdova shared. “The other thing I think is great about strategic staffing is [that] there are educators who want to learn and grow. … In strategic staffing, you have the opportunity to grow without having to leave the classroom, without having to stop being a classroom contributor. It makes a huge difference for our kids to be able to have access to the people who are really top of their profession.”
Basile agreed, highlighting the positive radiating effect of strategic school staffing — from the state and system level all the way down to the educators and students.
“The minute you get out of a one-teacher, one-classroom model and you start thinking about teams of educators, then schedules change, the way we think about induction changes. We have now self-improving teams, right? So now professional learning changes. … All of a sudden, we can actually do something to make all that look very, very different. And so that domino effect of this is really, really important,” Basile said.
Following the keynote, attendees tuned in for a live panel discussion, featuring Gabriella Blakey, Robert Crosby, III, and Kelvey Oeser, who responded to the keynote discussion from their perspectives as the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools, Director of K-12 Education at the Valhalla Foundation and Deputy Commissioner of Educator and System Support for the Texas Education Agency, respectively.
Future forecasting
After a full day and a half of learning, the Summit ended with a powerful closing session featuring the expertise of Isabel Geathers, senior program officer for education for the Robertson Foundation, and Emily Freitag, co-founder and CEO of Instruction Partners. The two reflected on what they took away from the Summit and looked ahead to what lies ahead for strategic school staffing and the education sector, more broadly.
For Freitag, who joined from the principal’s office at Green Elementary School in Mississippi, where she was spending the day looking at AI-powered tech solutions in action with kids, she views technology as the big story — not just for education but for the country.
“I really think we are on the precipice of truly the most interesting chapter I’ve ever seen. I was super prepared to write off AI [as] just another bad dream coming through … and then I saw a really interesting product in action with kids,” Freitag said. “I’m like a tale of two outcomes when it comes to the AI impact, but it is here, and I am seeing it do things for kids in beneficial ways that I never thought I would see as an educator. … [Tech] is here, and we all actually need to really understand the options and where they’re going, and see them as an asset to teaming.”
For Geathers, who leads the Robertson Foundation’s Teaching Reimagined portfolio along with the foundation’s AI and innovation investments, she supports efforts to reimagine the teaching experience.
“I see strategic staffing as being omnipresent in a number of these conversations for a couple of reasons. We are at a stage where this [strategic school staffing] is coalescing formally as a field […] of practice and policy and learning,” Geathers said. “And I think as the scale and the pace of this change accelerates, the work is going to demand deeper collaboration amongst all of us.”
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