The Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative is a movement of educational pioneers: Smart, savvy, thoughtful, committed teachers who won’t accept the status quo of the education system and who take advantage of and catalyze policies that allow them to design and run their schools as a team — sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, shifting the power to teachers.

Like insurgent political candidates, teachers in teacher-powered schools have an entrepreneurial spirit, are willing to take risks, and accept responsibility for those choices in order to create better schools for their students. Like changemakers inside state assemblies or the halls of Congress, these teachers have the power to improve the who, the how, and the what of education.

Over the course of this blogging roundtable, we are going to look at how these teachers — with collaborative leadership, shared decision-making, and student voice baked into the teacher-powered model — promote the habits of healthy democracy. We will examine how students are transformed by witnessing and practicing these habits themselves and how teacher-powered creates engaged citizens.

Please join the conversation and share your story, the actions you are taking, and the ways in which you are helping students to become engaged citizens. Invite your colleagues to join the discussion on social media with #CTQCollab and be sure to follow CTQ on Facebookand Twitter for new blog postings.