Albuquerque Public Schools
A New Look for Middle Schools
APS is altering an old model through The Next Education Workforce Initiative.
Jan Brady is finally getting some long-overdue attention.
Middle school – the sometimes-overlooked middle child in the nation’s K-12 education family – is about to undergo a makeover in APS.
Six district middle schools are pioneering a partnership between Albuquerque Public Schools and Arizona State University’s highly regarded Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation – a redesign effort aimed at transforming the teaching model in grades 6-8. The collaboration kicked off last week at Hoover Middle School, where staff members and administrators from throughout the city trained on ways to make deeper, personalized and student-centered teaching a central strand of a school’s DNA.
Given time, it’s a parlay that could pay off – both for teachers and students.
Called The Next Education Workforce Initiative, the concept focuses on improving student motivation and learning, while also paving the way to better teacher satisfaction and retention. How? Once implemented, the initiative helps take teachers off an isolated, one-classroom island, and also alters the class-to-class, subject-to-subject spin cycle that sometimes loses kids in the process.
It’s a template that’s been used since the days of “The Brady Bunch.” But a quarter of the way through the 21st century, APS is rebuilding the model. As time goes on, teachers will learn to collaborate in planning teams as schools adjust schedules and student groupings based on individual needs and interests.
And really, that’s just the start. By making the teaching and learning process team-centered, both students and teachers feel more valued and understood. In many ways, the project has the potential to be a great handoff to another unique effort APS is about to debut in its high schools – the Academies of Albuquerque. That concept also features team concepts for teachers and students.
Wilson Middle School Principal Matthew Burrows said pioneer schools have seen the process in action in Arizona and were impressed by the possibilities because it emphasized ways teams of teachers could bond together.
“It’s knocking down walls,” he said.
The initiative is in place in about 50 school districts around the country
“You’ve got educators, you’ve got teachers, you’ve got paraprofessionals, talking to each other and saying, 'This is a way better way to work,’” says Brent Maddin, the executive director of Next Education Workforce Initiative.
“The families of kids are saying things like, `My kid feels seen in ways that we’ve never as a family experienced them being seen – known by name, served by strength and need,’” he said. “And the kids themselves are like, `School’s not boring. My educators, the teachers that I’ve got, they know me. I don’t feel like a number.’”
Later, Maddin added: “Because each of you (teachers) are sharing the same kids, you center your conversations. You’re not putting science in the middle, you’re putting the kids in the middle. And then you’re saying, `OK, what do we need to do in order to help Brent get to the next level?’”
Content is enhanced, not diminished, in a collaborative process, said Leslie Saucedo, the APS executive director for middle school learning.
“Teachers from different subjects actually plan together around common themes or real-world problems. So, learning becomes much more relevant and engaging because kids see how everything connects,” she said. “This really boosts their critical thinking and collaboration skills, too. Plus, it lets our teachers coordinate their efforts, leading to a much more cohesive and personalized learning experience for every student. It takes what used to be fragmented learning and turns it into this really connected, deeper, and genuinely more effective educational experience.”
The six pioneer schools – Wilson, Tony Hillerman, Hoover, LBJ, Grant and Hayes – will be joined by another grouping of middle schools in the '26-27 school year as the project eventually rolls through the district. Maddin, who lives in New Mexico, emphasized ASU’s role is to coach and evangelize the project, but at the end of the day a different kind of middle school experience will be all Albuquerque – and not out of some prefab box.
“They’re gonna grow it their own way,” Maddin said, nodding to a Hoover library full of APS personnel. “And if it goes well, they’re the best ambassadors of this approach.”