Across the country, states and school systems are investing heavily in high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM, designed to support rigorous, grade-level learning. These efforts reflect a body of research showing that many students, particularly students of color, students experiencing poverty, multilingual learners and students with disabilities, have historically had uneven access to grade-level assignments and strong instruction.
But strong materials alone do not guarantee high-quality instruction.
Increasingly, educators and system leaders are recognizing that part of the challenge is structural. In the conventional one-teacher, one-classroom model, instruction is largely designed and delivered by individual teachers working independently. Even when high-quality curriculum is available, implementation can vary significantly from classroom to classroom, making it harder to ensure that students consistently experience grade-level instruction and that educators can coordinate their work around shared expectations for learning.
To address these structural challenges, and others inherent in the one-teacher, one-classroom model, many school systems are redesigning school staffing by organizing educators into teams that share responsibility for groups of students. This structure unlocks new possibilities for teaching, learning and collaboration.
This intersection of team-based staffing and high-quality instruction was a major theme at the 2026 Strategic School Staffing Summit, hosted by Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™ initiative. For the first time, the Summit included a dedicated Team-Enabled High-Quality Instruction strand, highlighting examples from across the country where educator teams are collaborating to strengthen instruction.
One session in that strand highlighted lessons from Inspired Teaching, Exceptional Learning Arizona, or ITEL AZ. It’s part of a national effort led by Teach Plus via the Center for Inspired Teaching, Exceptional Learning, or CITEL, which brings together organizations working with local school systems to explore how team-based staffing can strengthen instruction. As Kira Orange Jones, CEO of Teach Plus, noted, “If we want students to experience rigorous, grade-level and affirming instruction every day, we need to ensure teachers have the access, time and support they need to implement high-quality instructional materials.”
Early experience from ITEL AZ points to an emerging lesson: When curriculum implementation becomes shared work across educator teams rather than the isolated responsibility of individual teachers, schools may be able to move more quickly toward consistent grade-level instruction.
From ‘teacher of record’ to ‘team of record’
A central feature of ITEL AZ is a shift in how teaching work is organized. As Lisa Wyatt, senior director of implementation with the Next Education Workforce, explained during the Summit session, “We’re talking about a team of record rather than individual teachers of record. That means a group of educators sharing responsibility for the same roster of students at the same time.”
ITEL AZ launched in five schools across two systems and is supported through a partnership between the Next Education Workforce and the nonprofit organization Instruction Partners, which works directly with school systems to strengthen instructional leadership, align curriculum and professional learning and support high-quality teaching. The collaboration combines team-based staffing models with professional learning and coaching focused on implementing HQIM.
Wyatt explained that the two organizations began working together more than a year ago to develop a shared theory of action for the project.
“Ultimately, the goal [of the project] is more rigorous and engaging instruction for students,” Wyatt said. “The big idea is that we can leverage Lead Teachers and content leads in team-based models, and when we use unit and lesson internalization routines built around HQIM, we start to see instructional expertise grow across the entire team.”
Building instructional expertise within teams
In its first year, ITEL AZ has focused on strengthening Tier I instruction by helping educator teams deeply understand and implement high-quality instructional materials. Central to this effort is curriculum internalization, a structured routine in which teams examine upcoming units and lessons together before instruction begins.
As Nicholas Mendoza, senior director for custom services at Instruction Partners, explained, internalization helps educator teams move beyond reviewing lesson plans to understanding the broader arc of student learning.
“Unit internalization is really a study of the content resources and the longer arc of the unit,” Mendoza said. “It’s about stepping back from the day-to-day lesson and understanding what students are meant to learn. Lesson internalization is where teams ask, ‘How do we bring that bigger picture into day-to-day instruction?’”
In conventional one-teacher classrooms, this level of preparation can feel daunting, particularly for newer teachers. But educator teams allow the work to be distributed.
“What we’re seeing with teams is that educators can divide the thinking,” Mendoza said. “A content lead might guide the team through the standards or materials, while different teammates take responsibility for different parts of the lesson.”
Teams also identify shared lesson structures, including key “can’t-miss” moments in HQIM lessons that help maintain coherence across classrooms. Over time, Mendoza said, the process has become both productive and efficient, allowing teams to deepen their understanding of the curriculum while preparing for instruction together.
Early signals from classrooms
The ITEL AZ project team set a goal of reaching 100% HQIM use for Tier I instruction by May 2026. Participating schools reached that milestone in October 2025, months ahead of schedule. Project leaders noted that reaching consistent curriculum use across classrooms often takes a full school year or longer when implementation relies primarily on individual teachers adopting new materials in their own classrooms, making the early milestone a notable signal of progress.
Mary Brown, assistant director of regional implementation with the Next Education Workforce, said the team-based structure helped accelerate progress.
“In team-based models, we see higher responsibility for teachers to do the thing they say they are going to do,” Brown said.
Over time, that shared responsibility also helped address some of the hesitation educators initially felt about using HQIM consistently.
“Once educators had strong support around the HQIM, many realized it was actually a great resource. Being able to dive in and use the materials alleviated a lot of the time they had previously spent searching for or creating resources. So it’s not just compliance with using the resource. Teachers start to see the value in it,” Brown noted.
Classroom walkthroughs conducted in fall 2025 in ITEL AZ classrooms indicated encouraging shifts in practice, with more classrooms engaging students in grade-level math tasks and incorporating grade-level content into daily instruction.
Early lessons
The first year of ITEL AZ is reinforcing a key lesson: Strengthening instruction depends not only on the quality of curriculum materials, but also on how teaching roles and responsibilities are organized.
When educator teams have structured time to study curriculum together, identify key moments within lessons and observe instruction through a shared lens of grade-level rigor, instructional expertise can begin to spread across the team rather than remaining isolated within individual classrooms.
This idea surfaced repeatedly at the Strategic School Staffing Summit. Partners across the ITEL portfolio shared related work during the Summit, including:
- Leaders from Public Impact and Leading Educators discussed how educator teams can coordinate literacy instruction through clearly defined roles, shared instructional routines and aligned coaching structures.
- Educators working with Teacher Powered Schools and Empower Schools described how schools are redesigning teaching roles so instructional expertise is distributed across teams rather than concentrated within individual classrooms.
- Leaders from the Michigan Inspired Teaching Teams Educator Network, or MITTEN, shared early lessons from efforts to support educator teams across multiple districts, highlighting how team-based models can create space for collaboration around curriculum, coaching and instructional improvement at scale.
Taken together, these efforts point to a growing alignment across the field. Strategic school staffing models are powerful when they are intentionally designed to strengthen instruction. Through clear roles, distributed expertise and use of high-quality instructional materials, educator teams support rigorous instruction for every student.
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