Bert Orgaer is an international educator and learning designer working across Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark. His work centres on teacher agency and co-designed professional learning that supports wellbeing and strengthens professional identity. He facilitates workshops and research linking design thinking with humanising, sustainable learning cultures.
In the passenger seat
Too often, teachers find themselves in the passenger seat of their own profession: the destination set by someone else, the route already mapped out. We are handed new initiatives and frameworks – sometimes brilliant, often well-intentioned – yet the steering wheel remains out of reach.
Across Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark, I have seen innovation and exhaustion coexist. OECD TALIS 2024 data echo this: only around 14–18% of teachers in these systems feel their views are valued in policy decisions (OECD, 2025a), despite strong collegial trust. Teachers work long weeks but lack of time and scheduling conflicts remain the main barriers to meaningful professional learning (OECD, 2025b).
Globally, the pattern is similar: only around 16% of teachers feel heard in policy decisions (OECD, 2025). Yet meaningful professional learning depends on teachers having agency in shaping it and on its connection to the real conditions of their work – a point underscored by Kelchtermans (2023) and Timperley (2008). This creates a familiar pressure point: expectations continue to rise, while the space for thoughtful, teacher-led development does not always rise with them. The issue is not unwillingness to learn; it is a design problem.
The case for agency
What if constant change could become the engine for teacher agency? When teachers are trusted to design collaboratively within their context, time stops being something we lack and becomes something we invest in.
Knight (2021), a foundational thinker in instructional coaching, and Kelly (2022), a leading researcher on teacher and leader wellbeing, remind us that sustained stress and top-down pressure erode both wellbeing and leadership capacity. Empowerment, they argue, is not a luxury – it is a condition for professional survival. When teachers have ownership over how they meet shared goals, pressure turns into purpose. Giving educators structured ways to design their work protects mental health, builds professional pride and sustains learning cultures that endure (Shaw, 2025).
From methods to mindsets
This is not about adding another initiative. It is about re-imagining how we use the time teachers already share. When collaboration becomes co-design rather than compliance, schools nourish both creativity and coherence.
Instead of another external training day, we can shift existing meeting time into short co-design cycles: identifying challenges, exploring ideas, and testing small, context-specific changes. Co-design, here, means teachers steering a structured process of analysing evidence, shaping ideas, and testing small, safe changes that strengthen their professional agency.
A simple rhythm works: identify a challenge → discuss experience and evidence → prototype a small change → observe → refine.
In my teaching, I worked with the inquiry cycle outlined by Timperley (2008), which the school I taught in used to support professional learning, and I later saw similar benefits in my research, where teachers refined ideas together through small, iterative steps that led to clearer feedback routines, more consistent practice, and stronger collegial connection. These experiences highlighted how teachers need structured space for their own learning, alongside cycles focused on students. In a recent International Baccalaureate (IB) workshop I supported, teachers used a design-thinking cycle for student learning and quickly realised they could apply it to programme development as well.
This iterative approach draws on design thinking principles and the Double Diamond model, which emphasise empathy, exploration, and continual adjustment rather than a fixed linear path (Berglund, 2024; Design Council, n.d.). These are tools, not goals. What matters is that teachers remain in the driver’s seat of developing their practice.
From collaboration to classroom practice
When co-design becomes routine, pedagogy shifts in subtle but powerful ways. Teachers start designing learning experiences together rather than merely aligning content, integrating reflection and feedback loops into daily practice. As one teacher said, it felt like “moving from planning for students to designing with them.”
Planning becomes lighter but richer – more responsive to how students actually think, not just what the curriculum prescribes. Students learn to think aloud, prototype ideas, test and revise – the same cycle that shapes teacher learning shapes theirs.
The three T’s
Time
Reclaiming even one meeting a month for co-design can shift professional learning from an external demand to a shared rhythm. Time becomes not what’s missing, but what’s meaningfully used.
Trust
Leaders who protect time for experimentation, treat missteps as learning, and invite teachers into structural improvement build psychological safety and collective efficacy (Kelly, 2022).
Tools
Structures such as empathy maps, co-design boards, and shared reflection cycles support teachers to analyse learning together and make agency, collaboration, and wellbeing visible in practice (IBO, 2024; IBO, 2025).
These three T’s represent cultural rather than financial shifts. When they align, professional learning becomes sustainable rather than seasonal. This is about making professional learning teacher-led — teachers thinking together about learning, identity, and wellbeing (Orgaer, 2024).
When conditions for agency are in place, teachers design learning with, not just for, their students – and that opens space for deeper thinking.
Knowledge-rich, design-smart
Recent reforms in Sweden and Flanders have refocused on a return to fundamentals (Surma et al., 2025). But knowledge alone is not enough. Teachers must be able to design how that knowledge comes alive in their classrooms. A knowledge-rich curriculum succeeds only when it meets design-rich pedagogy – when teachers connect evidence with empathy, structure with responsiveness, and content with the lived experience of learners, an approach aligned with Biesta’s view of teaching as world-centred rather than merely curriculum-centred (Biesta, 2021).
Design thinking is not a silver bullet – it is a way of working within real constraints. The goal is not to do more, but to work differently: embedding reflection into routine rather than adding tasks. And when teachers co-design, students notice. In classrooms where co-creation thrives, learners ask better questions, take creative risks, and own their outcomes. Agency breeds agency.
Curricula will continue to evolve; expectations will continue to shift. But when schools nurture a culture of teacher-led co-design, educators remain in control of their craft. This is not another initiative – it is a mindset for navigating complexity with curiosity and care.
If we want students to design their future, we must first let teachers design the present. It is time to hand the keys back.
In your context, what might the next step toward more authentic and intentional co-design look like?
- Berglund, A. (2024) Design thinking: Catalysing change in the educational ecosystem – a framework for future challenges. Design Science, 10, e34. doi:10.1017/dsj.2024.39.
- Biesta, G. (2021) World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. London/New York: Routledge.
- Design Council. (n.d.). Framework for Innovation.
- International Baccalaureate Organization (2025) Wellbeing interventions for schoolteachers working in childhood and adolescence: Summary document. (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
- International Baccalaureate Organization (2024) Wellbeing for schoolteachers (Report No. 2). University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre. (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
- Kelly, H. (2022). School Leaders Matter: Preventing Burnout, Managing Stress and Improving Wellbeing. London: Routledge.
- Knight, J. (2021) The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching: Seven Factors for Success. Corwin.
- OECD (2025a). Results from TALIS 2024: A Global Perspective on the Teaching Profession. OECD (2025b). Country Notes: Flemish Community of Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark.
- Orgaer, B. (2024). Designing for Change: Implementing Teacher-Centred Professional Development. Oulu University of Applied Sciences.
- Shaw, D.K. (2025) Curative culture: Stepping away from a toxic workplace. Cedar River Media.
- Surma, T., Vanhees, C., Wils, M., Nijlunsing, J., Crato, N., Hattie, J., Muijs, D., Rata, E., & Wiliam, D. (2025). Kennisrijk Kansrijk: Naar een onderwijscurriculum voor diepe denkers. Antwerpen: Pelckmans.
- Timperley, H. (2008) Teacher professional learning and development. Educational Practices Series 18. Brussels: International Academy of Education.