Don’t Let the Building Hold Us Back
A Call to Align Learning Spaces with Team-Based Teaching
A new wave of research, including the recent study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), underscores the transformative potential of team-based staffing models in education. These models—which leverage distributed expertise, shared accountability, and collaborative teaching, are proving to improve instructional quality, reduce teacher burnout, and create more responsive learning environments for students. And yet, just as this powerful practice begins to take hold, we risk losing its momentum, not because of a lack of belief or willingness from educators, but because the physical structures of our older school buildings are holding us back.
The study notes that team-based models thrive when schools are designed to support flexible groupings of students, fluid collaboration among adults, and shared ownership of space and learning. Unfortunately, many existing buildings, particularly those constructed under traditional industrial-era models, are configured around isolation: closed-door classrooms, rigid grade-level wings, single-teacher ownership of space. These layouts not only fail to support team teaching, they actively work against it.
This is not just a design challenge; it is an urgent leadership opportunity.
Starting the Conversation: Ask the Space to Reflect the Practice
If we believe in the promise of team-based staffing, we need to interrogate the environments in which it must take root. Here are some ways to open the conversation in your school or district:
Tour the building with new eyes. Walk the halls with teachers and ask: Where does collaboration happen? Where can it happen? What’s preventing it from happening more?
Use space as a listening tool. Set up a dialogue with staff: “If we were to work in teams more effectively, what about our current space would need to change?”
Explore constraints creatively. Acknowledge that structural change doesn’t always mean renovation. Can doorways between classrooms be opened? Can shared planning areas be reclaimed? Can storage rooms become small-group breakouts?
Design is not about what we buy or build first, it’s about what we believe. If we believe that team teaching is a better model for students and educators alike, then we must be ready to reshape our environments to support that belief.
Building Momentum: Prototypes, Possibilities, and Small Wins
Just because a building is old doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a new vision. Here are several ways schools can begin aligning physical spaces with collaborative teaching structures:
Pilot a “team zone.” Select one grade level or department and experiment with flexible room use, co-planning stations, and shared instructional areas.
Map movement patterns. Study how students and teachers move through the day and redesign hallway and shared spaces to support connection over congestion.
Shift language and ownership. Stop referring to rooms as “Mr. Thomas’s classroom” and start calling them “Learning Studio B” or “Team 7A Commons.” Language sets the tone for shared ownership.
Schedule for flexibility. Structure the school day to allow teaching teams shared planning time and overlapping student access.
By embracing these small shifts, school leaders can create proof points that team-based models can thrive, even within legacy structures. These wins not only build momentum but create visible, tangible change that inspires others.
Don’t Let the Walls Win
We are standing at a crossroads: team teaching offers one of the most promising innovations in modern education, but our buildings weren’t built to support it. That misalignment threatens to stall a practice that could finally address some of our system’s most persistent challenges, from teacher retention to student engagement to instructional equity.
The risk isn’t just that the idea will fade. The risk is that we will let 50-year-old walls dictate 21st-century learning. That we will continue to ask teachers to collaborate in isolation. That we will continue to ask students to learn in rows when they should be learning in circles.
This is a moment for courage and creativity.
We must challenge ourselves to design beyond the floor plan, to imagine what could be when we trust the practice and reshape the space to support it. Because when our buildings reflect our best educational models, not restrict them, we move from possibility to progress.
Let’s not let this opportunity be lost to brick and mortar. Let’s make the space match the promise.