On Community and Collaboration in Teaching
UNESCO’s theme for World Teachers’ Day 2025 – “Recasting teaching as a collaborative profession” – has been sitting with me. Especially because through the years of championing the Teachers CAN Multiplier Programme, I’ve watched this idea shift from slogan to practice – teachers choosing community, choosing shared learning and choosing to solve problems together. I’ve seen what happens when teachers stop carrying the work alone and start building communities of practice that hold both the profession and the person. There’s a different kind of strength that comes from belonging and connectedness – not perfect conditions, but shared courage, shared wisdom and shared responsibility.
For teachers, being in community with one another – learning, exchanging best practice and sharing tools matters in a very real way. In the classroom, you are often the only adult and professional making countless decisions every day to ensure every learner has a fair chance and a conducive environment to succeed. But when you have a community of change-agent peers, you also have a reservoir to return to – one filled with ideas, strategies, encouragement and solutions from lived experience so that you don’t have to reinvent everything on your own.
And when teachers come together as a collective, within a school, across a district, or across a community something else becomes possible. They can look honestly at the challenges shaping their context and co-create solutions. They can name what’s hard and not working but in generative ways. They can make small and big shifts that support sustainability in their professional lives and relationships and ultimately improve the learning environment for children. This, to me, is what systems change from the ground up can look like in schools and communities.
If we truly acknowledge the school as a community asset, improving what happens in and around the school has ripple effects beyond the school gates but it also means the wider community must play its part. Teachers can’t do it all by themselves - we know this. At Teachers CAN, one of our Manifesto points speaks directly to this: “Connect to a Wider World of Social Change.” This point is an invitation for teachers to collaborate beyond their schools to respond to the real challenges that show up in classrooms and school communities. And sometimes, the support we need comes from role-players we wouldn’t immediately think of people and institutions that are willing when invited, and that contribute meaningfully when they are brought into the work.
This is also what Teachers CAN and specifically the Multiplier Programme more broadly aims to hold. It asks: how do teachers and their allies come together to solve what’s difficult while also creating a space where teachers feel seen, heard and valued? It says yes, there are many challenges but let’s also start with you. How are you showing up as a human being, a teacher, a leader and a professional? How do you reconnect to your “why” and your purpose so that the work of being a change agent is sustainable, and you aren’t driven into hopelessness? From what we’ve seen in our network, what keeps change-agent teachers going is not always that things get easier. Often, it’s that they commit themselves to something – advocating for themselves and their learners, collaborating more intentionally, sharing the load and using their influence with intentionality. This isn’t exhaustive but these are some of the key ingredients we’ve witnessed.
And I can’t help but think of the words shared by Irfaan Mangera at the Annual Teachers CAN Exchange in October 2025: ‘building and being in community takes hard work — but it is necessary and worthy work in the long run.’ I’ve been privileged to witness this hard work exactly – the grit, persistence and conviction of our teachers acrossteachers across the years of testing, piloting and running this work – they have worked and persisted! A principal from Tsolo in the Eastern Cape, who attended our 2024 year-end Teachers CAN Celebration, applauded the teachers for bringing each other together consistently. He reflected on how even he, as a principal, sometimes struggles to get three teachers into one room for a meeting or project because of the sheer weight of demands on teachers’ time.
So yes, building community in intentional ways is not easy, even for us as a team, trying to embody these principles isn’t always easy and we don’t always get it right. But we must hold on to this: in the long run, it will be worth it. As I close the year, I can’t help but reflect on three years of championing the Multiplier Programme from an early concept tested with teachers in our Fellowship, to piloting with 12 brilliant teachers, to running with 50 amazing teachers across three provinces in 2025. These teachers alone have ta, to piloting with 12 brilliant teachers, to running with 50 amazing teachers across three provinces in 2025. These teachers alone have taken Teachers CAN, the t been worth it? Absolutely.
As we look beyond (well, we’re probably just still looking to our year-end rest and festivities) but as we get back and look into what’s next, my hope is that we keep harnessing the power of community and collaboration – the kind that honours home-grown, contextually grounded, co-created and co-owned solutions. What would it look like if collaboration wasn’t the exception but the culture?
Written by Zamabhaca Manila Budu – Facilitation & Mobilisation Lead at Teachers CAN
