By: Courtney Ochi
In a recent piece by Rebecca Midles, George Philhower of Indiana’s Microschool Collaborative offered a provocation worth sitting with: “Nearly all the rules we play by in education today were made up once. None of these are laws of nature.”
Most conversations about redesigning schools focus on schedules, grading, or seat time. These are real constraints- and important ones. But there’s another set of rules that gets far less attention: the rules about how teachers work together.
One teacher. One classroom. One roster. Teach your students, your subjects, your way. This is the default. It feels like infrastructure. It’s actually a choice—and one that most teachers have never been explicitly invited to question.
At Thrive, we decided to question it. The result is the Thrive Bridge Collective, a Bay Area community of practice bringing together teacher teams from five schools across the region. These schools span elementary and secondary contexts and include both district and charter systems, creating a cross-section of how this work can take shape in different environments.
Together, these teams are redesigning what collaboration actually looks like from the ground up.
The Design Intent: Agency, Not Disruption
The Thrive Bridge Collective was not built to blow up schools. It was built on a quieter premise: that teachers, given the right framework, tools and support, will discover that they have more agency over how they work together than anyone told them they did.
The rules about one teacher owning one classroom were made up. So were the rules about subject-area silos, fixed rosters, and the idea that differentiation is a solo act. None of these are laws of nature. And once teachers begin to see that, something shifts.
The Thrive Bridge Collective works within existing systems. Each teacher team remains in the same building, with the same students, bell schedule, and accountability structures. We are not asking teams to opt out of their context. We are asking them to study it closely, identify where they have flexibility, and redesign how time, students, and expertise are organized within those constraints.
In practice, that means teams are not starting with abstract ideas about innovation. They start with a concrete problem they are trying to solve for students, then redesign their collective work to better meet that need. Across the Collective, that has looked like:
- Re-grouping students across classrooms for targeted instruction based on data-identified needs
- Distributing content expertise across a team rather than replicating it in every classroom
- Creating shared blocks of time where multiple teachers are responsible for all students, not just “their” roster
- Building consistent routines and instructional approaches so students experience coherence, even as they move across teachers
Each team moves through a structured yearlong arc. In the fall, they identify a focus and design a model grounded in real student needs, while also learning how to operate as a true team. This includes building a shared vision for what strong instruction looks like, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and designing ways of working that are not only effective for students but sustainable for the adults doing the work. In the spring, they launch, test, and refine that model in real time with students. Throughout the year, they engage with peer teams across schools through open houses, dilemma consultancies, and calibration protocols to both learn from others and make their own work visible.
Every team builds a theory of change, grounded in Thrive’s Strategic Staffing Assessment, that connects specific shifts in how they work together to the student and educator outcomes they are aiming for. Because that theory is co-constructed, it becomes a tool teams actually use to make decisions, reflect on progress, and iterate on their design.
Five Schools, Five Models
What makes the Collective worth writing about is not the framework. It’s what five different teams, each working within their own context and constraints, actually built and implemented this year.
Across the Collective, the question was never “What’s the right model?” It was “What does our model need to solve for?” The answers led to five different approaches, each grounded in real constraints, real students, and real teams figuring out how to work differently together.
Rocketship Mosaic | San Jose, CA | Grades K–5
The fifth grade team redesigned their two classrooms into a shared model with distinct instructional roles. One teacher leads STEM across all students, while the other facilitates a Learning Lab that blends enrichment with targeted intervention. Both teach humanities, and students move between teachers throughout the day based on instructional purpose rather than homeroom.
Student groupings are dynamic and regularly adjusted based on data, allowing the team to respond to changing needs in real time. During independent work, students engage in differentiated learning playlists, which create space for teachers to pull small groups and provide targeted support. Together, these structures make differentiation a shared, intentional practice across the team rather than something each teacher manages alone.
Adelante Dual Language Academy | San Jose, CA | Grades TK–8
The team expanded beyond a single grade level to reorganize designated English language development across grades 3–5. Students are grouped by language proficiency using multiple data sources, and teachers plan for their assigned group rather than their homeroom. Groupings are revisited regularly, making instruction more responsive and personalized.
Michelle Obama School | Richmond, CA | Grades TK–6
The fifth grade team implemented a content-specialized model, where one teacher leads ELA and Social Studies and the other leads Math and Science for all students across both classrooms. Instead of each teacher teaching all subjects to their own roster, students rotate between teachers for core instruction based on content. The team aligned routines, expectations, and instructional approaches so students experience consistency across classrooms.
At the end of the day, fifth and sixth grade students are combined and regrouped for designated English language development based on proficiency levels. Teachers plan for their assigned language group rather than their homeroom, and groupings shift as student needs evolve.
New School San Francisco | San Francisco, CA | Grades K–8
The first grade team redesigned their phonics block by grouping students across classrooms based on targeted skill needs, using ongoing progress monitoring data to adjust groups over time. Multiple educators share responsibility for all students, each taking on a defined instructional role, including enrichment and targeted small group instruction.
What makes the model distinct is how specialized supports are integrated into the core block. Speech and language services and resource support are embedded directly into the phonics block rather than pulled out, allowing students to receive targeted support within the context of grade-level learning. This creates more continuity for students and allows specialists to work alongside the team as part of a shared instructional system, rather than operating separately.
Summit Prep | Redwood City, CA | Grades 9–12
At Summit Prep, AP English Language and AP U.S. History were redesigned into a shared instructional model anchored in a research paper that all juniors complete. Rather than treating the courses as separate, the teachers co-designed the project as a central experience that integrates reading, writing, historical analysis, and argumentation.
They co-plan each phase of the project, align pacing across both classes, and use shared rubrics to assess student work. Key lessons are co-taught, and students pursue topics of their own interest, allowing them to engage more deeply in the work. What looks like a single assignment is actually a coordinated system across two courses, where responsibility for student learning is shared and reinforced across content areas.
What Connects These Five Models
No two models look alike. That’s the point.
The Collective was designed to learn across different school contexts because the goal is not to replicate a single model, but to understand what becomes possible when teams are supported to rethink how they work together.
What we learn from the Collective informs a broader effort in partnership with Teach For America Bay Area and their Collaborative for Reimagining the Teaching Profession, which is helping to connect and grow these efforts across the region. By bringing together leaders and teams across schools, the Collaborative is creating the conditions for this to become more than isolated innovation, but a shared effort to rethink how teaching roles, teams, and structures can better support both students and educators across California’s Bay Area. Alongside this, Educators Thriving is conducting research across participating schools to better understand how these shifts impact teacher wellbeing, engagement, and sustainability.
What connects the five teams is not a shared model but a shared orientation. Each team started by asking what their students needed that the existing structure wasn’t providing. Each team built a theory of change that connected team practices to outcomes. Each team was supported to prototype, reflect, and adjust, rather than implement a predetermined design.
And each team discovered something similar along the way: the most significant barrier to working differently was the assumption that the current arrangement was fixed.
As the Getting Smart piece that preceded this one put it, the infrastructure is not failing these teachers. The inherited assumptions are. And those, it turns out, can be redesigned when teachers are given the support and space to do it.
Courtney Ochi is a Senior Director at Thrive, where she leads the coaching and design of the Thrive Bridge Collective, a Bay Area initiative supported by NewSchools Venture Fund that helps teacher teams redesign how they work together. A former teacher and principal, she partners with schools to build collaborative team models that strengthen instruction and support educator wellbeing.
