Michael HornThought leader creating a world where all individuals can build passions & fulfill their human potential. Author of the national bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career

Scaling the Transformation of the Traditional Teaching Model

Name: Scaling the Transformation of the Traditional Teaching Model
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T16:11:44+00:00
Duration: 1 min 13 s
Channel: Michael Horn
Description: In this interview excerpt, Speaker A discusses with Michael Horn the entrenched "one teacher per classroom" model that has dominated U.S. schooling for a…

2 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:13

In this interview excerpt, Speaker A discusses with Michael Horn the entrenched "one teacher per classroom" model that has dominated U.S. schooling for a century. The conversation highlights three major problems caused by this model: (1) systemic inequity, because only a limited number of students can access high‑growth teachers; (2) a lack of career pathways for teachers, contributing to a national recruitment and retention crisis; and (3) difficulty for schools to realize a unified instructional vision when teachers operate in isolation. Speaker A explains that Emily (presumably an education leader) is exploring alternative school‑wide teaching models that extend the impact of excellent teachers across the entire school, aiming to address these challenges.

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I mean, Michael, you've written about, with Clay Christianson, you wrote about how kind of hard and fast these notions of schooling are, right? It's like there's one teacher for each classroom. We assign kids there. And that's how almost every single school in the country has worked for 100 years. And so Emily started thinking, what could be different? And she started getting input from people like you and teachers. And that led to a bunch of different models, because the one teacher, one classroom creates a ton of challenges. One of the big ones is it's very inequitable. It means that only a fraction of kids get access to teachers who are really strong enough to give them that kind of high growth learning. So it's built in guaranteed inequity every year. It also means teachers don't have a career path to move up without leaving teaching. And so that's another crisis in our country right now is the teacher retention and recruitment crisis. And part of that is there's not much opportunity. And then finally makes it really hard for schools to implement their vision of what they want instruction to be like, because it's every single teacher for themselves rather than working together. So lots of challenges all can be addressed. Emily thought by thinking, how can we extend the reach of excellent teachers and teaching across the whole school?