From individual classrooms to a district-wide practice
Building an apprenticeship community with Warren Township
Where they were before
It was 2021. Warren Township was exactly where it could be within the surrounding system: competing for teachers against a landscape of increased school choice and the impact of COVID-19. The district was ready to take more ownership of its teaching pipeline and started building university partnerships to help support staff advance their education career.
However, the university programs didn't fit the dynamics of Warren's staff. University programs treated adult learners as if starting from zero despite some prior credit earned. Policies built for 18-year-old students enforced on working adults with careers and families — one bus driver who wanted to become a teacher couldn't student-teach in the district where she already worked. This prevented Warren from building the system of support envisioned for their staff.
Their ambition
After solidifying a valuable partnership with Indiana Wesleyan University that solved many of the road blocks the other university programs provided, Warren could now start to build toward their vision of a teacher preparation closely aligned with the "Warren Way." In doing so, provide a higher education experience to working educators that was cost-effective and connected them closer to the way Warren teaches.
What started as an effort to have more ownership of its teacher pipeline quickly turned into an ambition to support their loyal staff who had already proven their commitment, who Warren would have been "crazy not to find a way to support." The foundational instinct of "find a way to say yes because you don't know if you shouldn't unless you can't find a way" was a foundational driving instinct now becoming programmatic. The only thing missing was how to bridge between higher education and the "Warren Way."
How Intangled Learning transformed them
Intangled Learning enabled a paradigm shift in how Warren conceptualized teacher preparation. Beginning with the conviction that schools are the source of teaching knowledge, this centered Warren Township's instructional practices as central to the teacher preparation curriculum. Further, while a traditional student ("pre-practitioner") prepares to enter teaching, Warren's apprentice educators are "active practitioners" already embedded within and surrounded by Warren's culture of practice.
That reframing provided Warren Township a conceptual framework for positioning higher education not as the center, but a valuable partner in practice — helping educators become more deeply embedded in the organization. To make the connection directly, Intangled Learning partnered with Indiana Wesleyan University built around this principle, embedding the apprenticeship inside accredited degree paths and teacher licensure.
Equally transformative was that Warren's Teaching & Learning department — the experts that lead the district's strategy for instructional practice — was integrated directly into Intangled's program, positioning local instructional strategy as central to the teacher preparation curriculum. This marks a breakthrough where the higher ed curriculum and district instructional strategy are united.
And critically, Intangled Learning helped broker a partnership with Indiana Wesleyan University to embed the apprenticeship inside apprentice teachers' actual degree path toward licensure — spanning Elementary, Secondary, English as a New Language (ENL), and Special Education. The apprenticeship isn't an add-on to a teacher's training; it's structurally part of how they become licensed.
Outcomes
In the first phase of this work, Warren Township went from zero educators in a structured apprenticeship to:
- 10 apprentice educators in a credit-bearing, practice-based research structure, facilitated by Intangled's platform
- A practice-based research strategy now generating a continuous narrative record of organizational knowledge
- A strategy for distributed mentorship connected directly to the practice research objectives of the apprentices
- Warren's Teaching & Learning team formally integrated into apprentice preparation
What's next
What started as a bottom-up transformation of teacher preparation at the individual level moves upward into system architecture for learning in practice. The next phase of the partnership looks at how to create increased levels of professional ownership shared across teachers — lowering the burden principals carry today as the default owners of mentorship and instructional support, and strengthening the conditions for apprentices to access learning directly from their colleagues.
Warren Township and Intangled Learning are planning an internal workshop with practitioners across the district to demonstrate this principled approach in action and work through the architecture for mentorship and shared practice. The goal is to intangle three things that have historically lived apart: Teaching & Learning strategy, teacher preparation, and school-level practice — building toward a level of coherence between them that hasn't existed in K12 education before.
Could this work in your district?
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