UnboundEd + Green Bay Area Public Schools: How Green Bay Made GLEAM a Districtwide Commitment

What began as a book study of Lacey Robinson’s Justice Seekers among a handful of school and district leaders has grown into a districtwide coalition spanning every department, every school building, and many teacher groups. Along the way,  Green Bay Area Public Schools (GBAPS) treated GLEAM^® not as a short-term program but as a shared lens, one that now shapes the district’s strategic plan, school-level priorities, and even budget decisions.

Inclusive by design. GBAPS built its work around educator-led collaboration, giving teams the autonomy to lead their own learning and the support to stay grounded in shared goals. More than 220 teacher leaders participated in training in the UnboundEd Planning Process and now lead colleagues in collaborative teams, reexamining how lessons are planned around grade-level standards.

Intentional and developmental. Rather than importing a fixed model, district and school leaders co-created a Theory of Action, an instructional vision shaped through shared experiences across the entire staff. Administrators completed the same learning journeys as teachers, then applied that growth in small-group GLEAM Instruction learning walks, debriefs, and action plans to calibrate what they were seeing and practice identifying targeted opportunities for continuous improvement.

Collaborative and responsive. When teachers and administrators needed an accurate and reliable way to reference grade-level standards during collaborative planning and post-observation huddles, the district’s own teaching, learning, and technology teams built a K–12 standards resource for laptops and phones, a creative solution that quickly took root across collaborative spaces.

Monitored and data-driven. GBAPS collects system-level data during learning walks multiple times per school year to surface themes and trends over time. The district’s own GLEAM walk data already shows rapid growth in grade-level experiences and increasing engagement through planning for productive struggle and scaffolding up to the standards.

“We had a mission to get our students to graduate and be successful, but we didn’t have a vision for what our instruction looked like to get us there,” said David Johns, Associate Superintendent at GBAPS. “The GLEAM framework really brings together all of those details. Together, we have created synergy driven by one purpose: to achieve our district mission through our instructional vision.”

The shift is visible in classrooms. “Before we had GLEAM, teaching was more like teacher-led instruction,” GBAPS teacher Brooke Newhouse said. “Now students are doing most of the work, as they should be doing, and I’m there as a guide to facilitate their learning.”

Momentum that lasts. District leaders are clear that the work is never finished. As schools move into summer 2026, each will review its data, develop a needs assessment, refine its Theory of Action, and build a 100-day plan aligned to the district’s instructional vision and two strategic actions: facilitating a teacher-led universal planning process, and executing a cadence of learning walks to verify alignment between instruction, materials, and grade-level standards.

“The hardest part of this work is keeping the momentum, because you’re never done,” reflected Johns. “We continue to elevate and amplify the work so that it is present everywhere — so that students are winning no matter whose classroom they are in.”