Educators
Adopt Teamship at your school district or institution to bring equitable and powerful real-world learning to your students.
How to Adopt Teamship
1. Readiness
Join as a District C member. We’ll then take you through a planning process to ensure a successful (and enduring) Teamship implementation.
Over five short meetings, we’ll help you plan your Teamship course, identify the right educators to be coaches, recruit students, and generate excitement in your community.
Readiness takes between 2 weeks and 2 months, depending on your availability
2 . Certification
We’ll train and certify your educators through the District C Coaching Institute.
The Coaching Institute is an intensive PD experience that will prepare your educators to be expert Teamship coaches. Learn more about the Coaching Institute.
We recommend nominating forward-thinking educators who tend to jump at the chance to learn new approaches and bring new opportunities to their students.
3. Launch
Launch Teamship using our Playbook and business partner network.
We’ll give your coaches access to the District C Playbook containing all the resources needed to coach students through a successful Teamship experience.
We’ll even recruit business partners from our network so that your educators can focus on what they do best — coaching students.
Where Teamship Fits
Teamship is most powerful when implemented as a standalone semester- or year-long course, but it can also be offered as a capstone experience embedded in an existing course or as a co-curricular program.
Standalone Course
Offer Teamship as a standalone semester- or year-long course. This is the ideal implementation.
EXAMPLE: Research Triangle High School’s Teamship elective features five problem cycles over the course of one academic year.
Embedded Capstone
Use Teamship as a capstone experience inside of an existing course.
EXAMPLE: The entrepreneurship course at Sanderson High School ends with a 4-week Teamship capstone.
Co-curricular Program
Offer Teamship as an internship experience after school or over the summer.
EXAMPLE: The Summer Leadership program at the North Carolina School of Science & Math features an intensive 1-week Teamship experience.
How We Help You Succeed
Too many programs die on the vine for lack of rigor in the implementation process. Our members want an enduring philosophy and approach, not just another one-and-done program. This is where details and structure matter. With years of implementation and program management experience to draw from, we offer our member schools and institutions the following resources:
Readiness & implementation support
The District C team partners with you from the start to plan a successful (and enduring) Teamship implementation. After launch, we’re available to provide support to your coaches at any time.
Business partnerships
District C maintains a network of businesses ready to offer real problems for student work. We secure the partners for you, scope the problems, and manage the relationships.
The District C Playbook
The Playbook is a digital resource that includes program planning resources, coaching slides and notes, a video library of recorded PD content, and everything else needed to run Teamship successfully.
Ongoing professional development
This work is ever-evolving. District C’s team of experts provides ongoing development and learning opportunities for certified coaches through recordings and live events.
Meet Nathan & Reeha
Nathan and Reeha brought different strengths, weaknesses, and goals to the District C experience. Follow their journeys in this 8-minute mini-documentary.
FAQ
So District C finds the business partners?
Yes, and we work with the business to come up with the problem that students will solve! We know teachers don’t have time to be out recruiting business partners, which is why we’ve done that part for you. We maintain a network of hundreds of pre-screened business partners of all types and sizes — startups, large corporations, main street businesses, tech companies, nonprofits, and anything else you can think of. All of these partners have agreed in advance to be matched with our member schools, and they expect to be matched one to two times per year. Six weeks before a coach launches a Teamship cycle, the coach fills out a report to request a business match and note any preferences for type, location, or size. We look through our list to find a match, and then we work with the business partner to scope a problem and make sure they have the important program dates on their calendar.
What kinds of educators make for good Teamship coaches?
It doesn’t matter what your subject area is. Being a great Teamship coach has nothing to do with business knowledge or any other specific content knowledge. It’s about knowing how to coach student teams on process and ways-of-working. Our certified coaches include language teachers, English teachers, math teachers, entrepreneurship teachers, administrators, college professors, and many others. If you are passionate about the work and excited for the challenge, you are the right fit for this regardless of what you teach.
What age group is Teamship intended for?
High school and college students. That said, some of our school members have implemented Teamship with middle school students. It worked!
Of the three implementation options, which do you recommend?
The co-curricular and embedded options are easier to get off the ground, but the standalone course is the best experience for students. This is because the standalone course provides an opportunity for students to do multiple problem cycles back-to-back. The improvement from one cycle to the next is remarkable to see. We have some member schools who have adopted a semester-long course with three problem cycles, and others who have adopted year-long courses with five cycles.
Is Teamship just for CTE students?
Teamship fits well when it’s used as part of a CTE sequence or when it’s embedded inside a CTE course, but we believe every student should have a Teamship experience. In fact, some of our member schools are running Teamship honors elective courses that are open to any student in the school.
What’s included in the District C Playbook?
The Playbook is a digital resource for District C certified coaches. It contains a curated set of documents, artifacts, best practices, training videos, templates, examples, and roadmaps, all arranged and sequenced to provide a start-to-finish guide for implementing Teamship.
How long is each problem cycle?
A typical problem cycle is anywhere between 3 weeks and 6 weeks long, with teams committing 3-5 hours per week. That said, we’ve tested lots of different kinds of implementations, all the way from a one-week intensive problem cycle to a 9-week extended cycle. Here’s the thing about solving real problems — you have the time that you have, and your time constraints dictate your process. It’s all part of the learning.
Why is diversity such an important part of the model?
Workplaces are made up of all different kinds of people with different strengths, backgrounds, perspectives, and past experiences. We know from research that the best teams are diverse teams, but only when the members of those teams understand how to leverage their individual differences. Teamship is an opportunity to learn how.
What are some examples of business problems that student teams have worked on?
A non-negotiable for this model is that the business problems are real, meaningful, and urgent. Here are some examples of businesses and the problems they’ve brought:
A sports retail company looking to improve its employee training practice
A nonprofit looking to diversify its revenue sources to build a more sustainable business model
A local juice bar and cafe looking to revamp its in-store traffic flow to improve customer experience
A 100-year-old real estate company looking to unify its company culture across six divisions
Do student teams actually propose solutions that businesses can use?
Yes. We survey our business partners 60 days after their experience. So far, over 85% of our partners report that they plan to implement, or have already implemented, at least parts of the solutions proposed by student teams.
Instead of real business problems, why not just use case studies or hypotheticals?
When we ask students what they liked most about the District C experience, the opportunity to add real value to a real person or organization is almost always at the top of the list. Regardless of the problem, student teams have a chance to engage in real work that has real consequences and the potential to make a meaningful impact. Not only is this a huge motivator, but it also provides students with an authentic work experience that any college or potential employer will want to hear more about.
Ready to Adopt Teamship?