Classroom Change Creates Systems Change
The challenges facing our schools are not small. Districts are being asked to close gaps, redesign systems, and transform outcomes, often under urgency that makes “small” feel like a luxury. And yet systems thinker adrienne maree brown, from her work Emergent Strategy, offers a reminder worth sitting with: “small is all.” How do we hold the urgent need for large-scale reform alongside the belief that small, real-time, on-the-ground work, with students in classrooms, is often what actually moves a system?
At Lead by Learning, we believe in the magic of small, consistent changes to create systemic shifts. For us, it starts in the soil, with a close tending to the roots of a system, the educators and adults who work the closest with students day in and day out. One of the most impactful ways to tend to the educators and adults in our system is the relational work of teacher collaboration: what teachers talk about, how they talk about it, and who is centered when they do. When done well, this is a catalyst for responsive innovation, educator thriving, and student success.
The impact of teacher collaboration and its role in systems change is further highlighted by The Center for Universal Education at Brookings in its report, “Systems Thinking to Transform Schools: Identifying Levers that Lift Educational Quality.” They discuss reframing educators as a professional “guild.” In this light, educators are granted autonomy and structures for collaboration more than “top-down control” or set curricula and mandates. When this happens, the role of the leader is about creating the time and space for ideas to circulate amongst teachers, to empower them to try something new, to increase their competence. It is here that inquiry lives.
We know not all teacher collaboration is created equal. Ilana Horn’s research on the quality of teacher collaboration surfaced a distinction between routine, logistical talk and what she calls “high depth meetings” or conversations marked by dialogic discourse, where teachers bring formal ideas and their own lived classroom experience into direct contact with each other. At Lead by Learning, we distinguish these two as sharing (routine, logistical, or presenting talk) versus learning (dialogical) conversations. These richer, learning conversations happen when teachers are investigating real problems of practice: interpreting a piece of student work, debriefing a lesson that didn’t land, or troubleshooting a student who was struggling. Horn also found a missed opportunity worth naming honestly: in some cases, even rich collective interpretation doesn’t always carry forward into instructional planning.
Start Small to Create Big Impact: Zoom in on Focal Students
Teachers often ask us the same question: how do you gather meaningful student data without drowning in it? Our answer is the focal student approach, asking teachers to partner deeply with just three to five students to improve learning for everyone.
The power here isn’t only in the data collected, but it’s also in the process of selection itself. Choosing which 3–5 students to focus on gives teachers a direct opportunity to disrupt patterns of inequity, deliberately moving students who have been historically marginalized into the center of the conversation and the center of their learning experience.
When this happens well, students who have felt like outliers become the lens through which a teacher understands their own instruction, their efficacy, their teaching, and the students’ learning. It creates a counter-narrative: instead of being defined by what they struggle with, focal students become partners whose strengths, growth areas, and agency actively shape the classroom alongside the teacher.
Lead by Learning supports this through our Focal Student Learning Partnership Conversation practice, which are structured conversations that intentionally disrupt the typical adult-to-child, teacher-to-student power dynamic. Once that data exists, it becomes the substance of the collaboration itself: the raw material for the kind of dialogic discourse Horn identified as the marker of high-impact teacher learning. And because the student is positioned as a partner, this partnership holds both the teacher and student accountable to acting on this data together to reform practice.
Teacher Spotlight: How Inquiry Transformed a First-Year Teacher’s Mindset and Practice
One first-year, second-grade teacher in Oakland Unified School District brought an inquiry question to her SEL-focused Lead by Learning district-wide community of practice: how could she shift the “why” behind homework? How could it move away from a right/wrong, finished/unfinished approach, and toward practice and brain-strengthening?
The problem was concrete. Homework completion rates in her classroom were low, and the school’s existing structure treated incomplete homework as something to be made up through loss of choice time or Fun Friday.
Her focal student interviews became the turning point. When she asked her students directly, “Why do you do your homework?” their answers centered almost entirely on not getting in trouble, and on simply finishing, mistakes and all, rather than on the continuous learning or skills practice. This student data shocked her. As she put it, she didn’t want students completing homework only because it was required; she wanted them to take ownership of high-quality work.
Through her inquiry work with Lead by Learning, she tried a different approach. She introduced a system where students recognized their own effort: stickers and stars for writing and math, paired with a personal reflection. Over time, the reflection became the center of the change. Students began explaining, in their own words, why they’d given themselves a sticker or a star, building pride in the work itself rather than in avoiding a penalty. She really wanted students to focus on the metacognitive process of their work, rather than just simply completing the work.
Each month, she brought back data, her updated realizations, and new questions to her monthly professional learning session with colleagues. In this community, they engaged in high-impact learning conversations that informed her next small steps in the classroom.
The biggest change in practice she made, based on her partnership with her focal students, was that she decided to stop using Fun Friday as a homework punishment altogether, directly based on what those students had told her. Completion rates shifted. By the end of the year, homework completion reached 100%. Students felt invested in completing their work because they wanted to improve, rather than avoiding punishment. This shift boosted students’ self-confidence and created a healthier relationship with doing homework.
Without doing this inquiry, she would never have known what her students actually thought about their work and her classroom structures. One set of conversations reshaped the entire dynamic and culture of her classroom.
The story is a working example of the focal student approach and the importance of creating spaces for educators to collaborate and inquire about their practice. Zooming in on three to five students gave her something more useful than a full picture of every learner at once: a manageable, specific lens. That’s what allowed her to move out of survival mode or out of simply inheriting practices that get “passed down” and normalized because they’re what everyone does, and into an adaptive mode of meeting her students’ needs.
While her changes and moves might seem small, they have implications for the system.
A Common Misconception: Inquiry is Only for Veteran Teachers
There’s a common assumption worth naming directly: that inquiry and “high-depth” conversations in a “guild” of colleagues is something a first-year teacher can’t yet take on. But the story above shows otherwise.
What made this work wasn’t years of expertise. It was agency: being given control over what to change in her own classroom, rather than being handed curriculum, standards, and interventions to implement as-is. For a brand-new teacher, that distinction is the difference between another mandate to absorb and a question she was invested enough in to actually answer.
This is a professional learning design principle with implications well beyond one classroom.
The same principle extends to who we assume can generate insight. It’s tempting to assume upper grades or secondary students are the only ones capable of offering real feedback about their own learning. Yet, this teacher’s second graders complicate that assumption. Given the chance to share honest feedback, elementary students shared far more than expected. Students are wise and honest about their own experience when someone takes the time to ask.
Big reform and small change aren’t competing priorities. They’re the same work at different scales. A few students, one set of interviews, one changed classroom policy: this is what systems change looks like when you get curious and close enough to see it happening.
A professional network of teachers, given real agency and the structures to collaborate, rather than more oversight from above, is itself a systems change strategy. The second-grade teacher’s story is a lived, concrete instance of that strategy working.
For schools, districts, and organizations asking how to structure professional learning, are your educators being given room to inquire, or only room to implement? Lead by Learning’s model is one way to build the former.
