Reimagining Educator Roles
Case Studies
Ember Charter School
Ember developed a teacher-led, distributed leadership model where educators are Human Development Practitioners committed to holistic, lifelong transformation for both themselves and the young people they serve. One of Ember’s founders, Rafiq, described the challenge of efficiently training incoming staff on their multi-faceted approach to teaching and learning. Together, Transcend’s Design Partner and Ember’s leadership team codified their approach to teaching, learning, and educator development into a “Human Development Practitioner Guide.” The guide will be used as a source code and starting point for internal and external training, facilitating adoption of the model to new sites.
Montrose
In 2023, Montrose—like many rural districts—was experiencing a teacher shortage. Their superintendent, Carrie Stephenson, convened a group of about 15 teachers to spend two days generating ideas for an instructional model that would attract, develop, and retain teachers while driving student engagement and learning. The model they envisioned—The Learning Academy–aligned well with ASU’s Next Education Workforce model, so they piloted adapting this model to their elementary school context. The superintendent shared her excitement about early data from the pilot about the impact of the TLA pilot on teacher satisfaction. To determine whether and how to scale the model within the district, Montrose and Transcend partnered to collect, analyze, and prepare to share qualitative data on the model’s impact on teachers, students, and families.
SEEQS
At SEEQS, rigorous academic content courses enable students to cultivate the knowledge and skills of the disciplines. Interdisciplinary project-based Essential Questions of Sustainability (EQS) courses empower students to apply their learning in real-world contexts. Through it all, students develop proficiency in the SEEQS Sustainability Skills. Leaders described hearing that teachers were feeling stretched thin creating these extraordinary student experiences; they wanted to better understand what aspects of the teacher experience felt best for teachers and what areas felt challenging. To do that, a Transcend Design Partner audited the school’s vision for the educator experience against the day-to-day realities of teaching at SEEQS.
Transcend is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that operates nationally.
