It sounds unusual, but that's exactly how it works: a major American bank, Huntington National Bank, has invested in teachers. Not in textbooks, not in equipment—in the educators themselves. In March 2026, over a hundred teachers from the Great Lakes Bay Region steel first participants in the Ignite the Classroom program in their region.
A year of study is not a weekend course
The program is structured differently from typical seminars. Throughout the academic year, teachers from various schools meet, discuss new approaches, and work with mentors. The emphasis is on the live classroom: how to hold students' attention, how to make a lesson so that students want to understand it, not just get through it.
A separate story is a trip in the summer to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta. This is a school that the world's media writes about: they've long turned learning into something close to performance art. Teachers go there not for a diploma, but for the feeling of what it's like when children are truly passionate.
Since 2024, nearly 2,300 educators from 40 districts have participated in the program. Nine out of ten say that they have become more demanding of their students afterward – in a good way: they believe that students are capable of more.
This, in general, is the main idea. A teacher who is inspired themselves infects the class with it. At Palme School, we think the same way - which is why our teachers are constantly learning, keeping up with what's happening in global education, and bringing it into their lessons.
