While some students dread end-of-the-year finals, 9th graders at Concord High School won’t.
An idea came to Jen Couling, a 9th-grade English teacher at the small high school in Michigan, after attending a session at the Aurora Institute Symposium on how educators could use the popular fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons in classrooms.
Students are divided into teams and have to come up with a game that incorporates material from social studies, English, math and science. Students create characters using concepts they learned in biology and solve math equations to unlock doors to new levels.
Couling has been teaching for 25 years and says she’s always pushing herself to try new things. But it’s only recently that she could pull off an interdisciplinary project of this magnitude. For the first time in over two decades, she has the support of a team.
Couling is part of a 9th-grade team that supports a cohort of 45 freshmen. The team includes five core content teachers (English, history, math, science, and special education) and three instructional aides who work together to plan interdisciplinary learning and support students’ academic progress and well-being.
For example, Couling and the history teacher co-teach a 90-minute interdisciplinary block each morning. In the afternoon, the math and science teachers team up, with students rotating between A and B blocks on alternating days. Special education teachers and aides provide targeted support during core instructional blocks and throughout the school day. Team members also teach electives and other courses, demonstrating a flexible, scalable approach to team-based staffing.
It’s this collaborative team structure that makes projects like Couling’s possible, enabling deeper, more connected learning experiences for students.
Last year, Concord Community Schools Superintendent Rebecca Hutchinson invited educators to join pilot teams at the district’s elementary, middle and high schools. These pilots are part of a broader initiative supporting schools as they explore, design and implement team-based staffing models, through a partnership between Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™ and the Michigan Education Workforce Initiative, launched in spring 2024.
‘A perfect marriage’
Michigan, like many states across the country, is facing an education workforce crisis: there’s not enough teachers, and starting salaries for those entering into the profession are low, ranking 39th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C., according to a 2024 report published by Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative. Student enrollment has also been declining across the state. Since 2015, enrollment for K–12 has fallen by more than 100,000 students.
A handful of organizations and coalitions emerged to combat these issues, including the Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative in 2022, whose mission is to “design, implement, fund and support innovative programs to recruit, develop, retain and elevate both new and veteran teachers and school leaders.”
Since the spring of 2024, MEWI has partnered with the Next Education Workforce to support schools and systems in Michigan. An initial grant funded the launch of Next Education Workforce team-based models in five school systems by June 2026.
After receiving overwhelming interest, MEWI went back to their board and requested additional funding to expand the number of total schools implementing these models from 8 to 14.
In the first year of the partnership with the Next Education Workforce, MEWI’s Director of Programs, Adrian Monge, says she’s seen students and educators have a markedly different experience than in prior years.
“Teachers and students are feeling more supported, resulting in higher passage rates, reduced need for academic intervention and increased opportunities to deepen learning for students,” Monge shares. “What inspires me about this work is that schools are able to leverage the talent they already have to get a different result. The teaming model represents a needed shift from the one-classroom, one-teacher model to a model in which multiple trusting, caring adults are able to wrap their arms around all of their students. This sense of community is what we want students to experience, not just in school, but in their world.”
Monge has held many roles in education over the years — teacher, instructional coach, school leader, nonprofit executive, government appointee and consultant — but her passion for developing teacher and school leader talent has remained constant. She references an African Proverb, which says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” and ties it to “the power of the collective” she’s seen in her experiences as a teacher and school leader.
“When we leverage our diverse, collective strengths to serve the whole, we are able to create a more sustainable environment in which both teachers and students experience more support and more success,” Monge says.
What inspires me about this work is that schools are able to leverage the talent they already have to get a different result. The teaming model represents a needed shift from the one-classroom, one-teacher model to a model in which multiple trusting, caring adults are able to wrap their arms around all of their students. This sense of community is what we want students to experience, not just in school, but in their world.
Adrian Monge, Director of Programs for the Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative
Andrea LaRocca, the Next Education Workforce’s Assistant Director for Partner Success, who oversees the initiative’s regional projects, says the partnership with MEWI is exciting because it has a deep understanding of and connection to schools across the state looking to innovate.
“We have been lucky to find that there are a lot of incredible schools in Michigan who are already a couple of steps into this work of thinking about how to support educators in different and better ways. Then, we get connected to them and have resources and more codified ideas around it, and it’s kind of a perfect marriage of people who already have started innovating around school staffing and the Next Education Workforce Initiative which can support them in doing that work more formally,” LaRocca says.
What makes teaming so great
If you drive about 100 miles east from Concord, you’ll get to the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences, also known as DAAS, a pre-K through 8th-grade educational community primarily serving students on the eastside of Detroit. There, you’ll find Principal Ndidi Onike-Onuzulike, who draws from a wealth of personal and professional experiences in education to oversee the school’s 2nd through 4th-grade building.
Onike-Onuzulike grew up in the Ivory Coast in a Nigerian family and says that education was her family’s primary focus. She went to French-speaking schools and then transferred to an international middle school. From 2007 to 2008, she taught in South Korea through the Peace Corps. After graduating from Georgia State University with her master’s in middle grade education, she worked as an educator, professional learning leader and principal in schools in Detroit before moving to the East Coast for four years. In 2023, she moved back to Detroit and began working as a model lead teacher at DAAS.
“In New Jersey, I had the opportunity to work at a high-performing charter school. Over the years, I perceived that the students were in great hands, and I felt that my skills and passion were needed elsewhere. When I came to DAAS, the purpose that led me into teaching — supporting students and empowering my peers — was rekindled. Since then, I have continued, remaining challenged and committed to innovative work,” Onike-Onuzulike says.
When she arrived at DAAS, she says there were large gaps in reading and math levels, in addition to student attendance issues.
As a first year teacher at DAAS, Onike-Onuzulike attended a Next Education Workforce Site Visit in Arizona and saw team-based models in action — an experience which she says enabled her to believe in the model.
“At first, I was confused about this model and how it was helping teachers and students … but I saw what Stevenson [an elementary school in Arizona] was doing, which was actually very impressive,” Onike-Onuzulike says.
Since launching teams at the start of the year in kindergarten and 2nd grade, Onike-Onuzulike says they’ve been able to close the gap in reading grade levels and currently don’t have any students two or three years below standards. And through an ongoing comprehensive talent strategy at DAAS to recruit, grow and retain the highest-impact educators, the percentage of certified teachers at the school has continued to increase, with the number of certified staff now at 66%. Additionally, more than half of those educators not yet certified are enrolled in a certification program, such as Talent Together, another MEWI initiative. Due to the success of the team-based models, DAAS also has plans to launch a 6th-grade team next year.
“Our two teams have demonstrated what can be done with this model. … Teachers are helping each other … [and] are talking to each other about strategies on how to teach certain elements and foundational skills,” Onike-Onuzulike says. “That’s really what makes teaming so great: teaming allows a lot more teacher autonomy … to really say, ‘ I’m looking at the data and looking at benchmarks, and we need to really group our students in a different way.’ I, as the principal, can say, ‘OK, yes, tell me why,’ and there’s less hand holding and fewer barriers to specifically addressing student needs.”
Back in Concord, Amanda Arbuckle shares the impact of teaming for educators and students on the elementary school’s 2nd and 3rd-grade team, comprising two 2nd-grade teachers, two 3rd-grade teachers, one special education teacher and four instructional aides.
“In the previous way that we ran things, I had to figure everything out on my own. I was responsible for the learning of all the kids and whether they made progress or not,” Arbuckle shares. “[Now], we really feel like we’re using all of the adults to the best advantages that we have. Because the kids are in such small groups, they’re getting a lot of one-on-one attention.”
Arbuckle says one of the things she loves most about teaming is the new ways in which students are able to connect with more adults.
“I also love that it offers the kids to have more people that care about them, so instead of just having one teacher they know that loves and cares about them, now they have four or more. That’s a lot of opportunities for kids to be seen and heard,” Arbuckle says. “I would love to say that I connect with every kid on the same amazing level, but the reality is that sometimes, that doesn’t happen. … I think we’re going to see some really positive growth because of that connection.”
No one model
Amanda Dahm, a Michigan-based implementation coach for the Next Education Workforce, has worked closely with MEWI and schools in the state to launch team-based models. She shares how it’s been exciting to see the varied ways in which Concord Community Schools, a traditional public school system, and DAAS, an urban public charter school system, have embraced the model in different ways to achieve goals unique to their contexts. Public school district and charter school system.
Dahm says that DAAS’ two teams have embraced dynamic student grouping, and kindergarten and 2nd-grade students will move across classrooms all day, every day. Concord has also implemented strategies that maximize educators and increase interdisciplinary collaboration.
“What I love is that no one model looks exactly the same,” Dahm says. “Next Education Workforce models value contextualization. We don’t come in with a one-size-fits-all model because our systems are so different, and they need different things, they have different staffing allocations and different schedules. It’s fun to see all the different ways that people can implement team-based models in a way that centers the needs of the specific students in their system.”
As a 5th- and 6th-grade science teacher, Dahm often talked about her students with other educators and shared a roster with her fellow math and ELA teachers. When she later became a principal, some of the teachers at her elementary school started doing a reading intervention block across the entire school, and she saw how it “unlocked a level of differentiation that wouldn’t have been possible for any one teacher in their classroom.”
“It can be easier in some ways to close your door and operate in a one-teacher, one-classroom model. But it can be much more rewarding and impactful to break down those walls and work with others around you,” Dahm says.
DAAS and Concord Community Schools are a testament to Dahm’s statement, with all educators currently on teams choosing to continue in team-based models. Additionally, the two school systems will expand their pilots to additional grade levels in SY 2025–26.
In addition to the work in Michigan, the Next Education Workforce also has regional partnerships in several states including Colorado, California, and Missouri, with work in progress to expand into other states across the country.
“Regional-based [work] is so powerful because education is local. As a result, what happens in Colorado is different than what happens in Michigan and different than what happens in Arizona. Being able to see the work happen in the place that you are in is more powerful than seeing it in another state,” LaRocca says.
LaRocca sees regional partnerships as an exciting opportunity to build momentum. Schools in a particular state can learn from others who have successfully implemented team-based models and navigated state-specific policies and the local climate and culture of a place.
“The regional partnership and implementation strategy feels particularly fruitful for us because by connecting people in a region and standing up examples in a region and being able to connect people to each other rather than just us as an organization, there’s a lot more power and momentum in the work.”
Do what you love
Although Couling has taught freshmen for more than 15 out of her 25 years, she has more recently taught English, drama and computer science to juniors at Concord High School. When she was told that her new team would teach freshmen, she was a bit reluctant after so many years away.
A year later, Couling says her team has pushed her to become a better teacher. It’s also rekindled her joy in seeing the immense growth freshmen go through over the year.
“As you get to the end of your career, if you want to go out the door still loving what you do, you should push yourself to try something new and realize that there are depths of your teaching you haven’t even reached yet,” Couling says. “I’m always changing. I always try to do new things, but [being on a team] really pushed me to be even more intentional and think more deeply about what I was teaching. And it was amazing to feel the support of other teachers around me.”
Email John Roberts, Assistant Director of Partnerships, to learn more about opportunities to partner with the Next Education Workforce.
