At St. Anthony-New Brighton Middle School, educators value collaboration for students and practice together in real, visible ways across the school.
Now in its third year of partnership with World Savvy, St. Anthony has built deep trust with its coaches and grown into a school community deeply engaged in reflection, coaching, and shared learning. As the partnership moves toward what could be its final year, the focus has shifted to building internal capacity for lasting systems change. This has taken shape through a peer-coaching model through Professional Learning Communities (PLC): mixed groups of teachers across grade levels and subject areas who use World Savvy’s Knowledge-to-Action framework to collect data, reflect together, and inform changes in practice.
When World Savvy coaches joined St. Anthony for the school’s first gathering of all PLC groups, the focus was on one of the World Savvy skills the school has emphasized this year: collaborative thinking and problem-solving. School leaders guided the session themselves, sharing how that competency has already taken shape in tangible ways across the school. Examples include co-taught ELA with multilingual learner support, co-taught math and social studies with special education support, new approaches to academic and behavior intervention, restorative practices, grade-level and department teams, family nights and conferences, and math tutoring. The school has also applied this collaboration to greater schoolwide efforts like curriculum review, arts programming, and planning for community-centered events.
Teachers shared that having dedicated time to reflect together helped them hear multiple perspectives, generate new ideas, and make shifts in practice that could ripple across the system. School leaders guided this work while being coached through the same model, ensuring the learning was aligned, sustainable, and deeply rooted in the life of the school.
This is the kind of community more people are searching for right now. In a time marked by uncertainty, division, and distrust in systems, people are looking for more than surface-level connections. They are looking for spaces where they can think honestly together, stay in relationship across difference, and build trust strong enough to support change.
Schools remain one of the few places where that kind of community can still be built every day. They are where young people and adults come into relationships across differences in experience and perspective, and where the habits needed for a healthy, participatory democracy can be practiced in real time. That is why World Savvy’s work has always centered schools not only as places of academic learning, but as community spaces where deeper belonging, critical dialogue, and shared purpose can take root.
St. Anthony-New Brighton Middle School offers a powerful example. When educators have the structure, trust, and support to learn from one another, collaboration becomes more than a value. It becomes a way to strengthen practice, build capacity, and lead change from within.
That is the kind of movement growing in schools, and it is one worth investing in.
