A Showcase to Celebrate Teachers: Highlights of Authentic Learning from 2024-2025

As we prepare this month’s updates, we just celebrated National Teacher Appreciation Week—and we’re nearing the end of the school year—so we’re feeling extra grateful and reflective. We celebrate all educators who make learning possible every day, and we’re especially thankful for the teachers, leaders, and coaches at our Partnership Districts of 2024-2025, which are the districts in which we collaborate long-term. With authentic learning and creativity, you’re teaching children to design the world that we want to live in, and this inspires us! Thank you for the courageous work you do!

Across our roughly 20 Partnership Districts in Ohio and beyond, we had the privilege of collaborating with hundreds of educators to advance one shared goal: reimagining, building, and sustaining a shared vision that makes learning irresistible. In this spirit, we celebrate the 250+ K–12 educators who brought their creativity and talents to our many kinds of design sessions and reimagined learning through an authentic lens. Their work conservatively reached over 10,000 students and sparked hundreds of fresh, student-centered projects.

While we can’t name every title to every experience here, we’re excited to showcase the 10 most common authentic innovations we saw—just one way to honor the incredible work teachers do every day.

1. Gave students real-world reasons to learn—beyond the grade book

2. Centered learning on agency, curiosity, passion, and purpose

3. Brought service-learning to life through powerful community partnerships

4. Redesigned traditional units with life skills, authentic audiences, and Portrait of a Graduate competencies

5. Used design thinking to reimagine everything from literacy lessons to career-tech pathways

6. Infused future-ready skills into traditional core content to emphasize career readiness 

7. Made moving into a new school building a student-led, learning-rich experience

8. Nurtured entrepreneurial mindsets and skillsets to fund real causes 

9. Pushed student inquiry, creativity, and collaboration to challenge the status quo

10.  And most of all—empowered thousands of students to become confident, creative problem-solvers and change-makers. If teachers aren’t the experts at creating a world that we want to live in, we don’t know who is.

    
    

As the school year wraps up and we look ahead to greeting many of you at the Summer Institute (we hope 🙂), here’s what we’re feeling, surprised at, and delighted by:  Celebrating teachers? Absolutely. Honored to be part of the change? Always. Excited about what’s ahead? Without a doubt. When we design learning with purpose, engagement, and authenticity, we set up our children to thrive, we make the future brighter—and the world more inspiring.

Educators, you make learning irresistible, and we know how much that matters. Thank you!