B.Y.O.T Bring Your Own Thoughts
The latest on all student-centered models, leadership development, strategic planning, teacher retention, and all things innovation in K-12 education. We answer questions before you think to ask them.
Education Elements | Equity | Organizational Leadership & Change Management
I was recently struck by a piece by Elena Aguilar, the “coach’s coach,” about acting in one’s sphere of influence to create change. She writes that when looking at making change in the world, the best place to start is within one’s sphere of influence. In other words, systemic change is not just a collective responsibility, it’s also an individual responsibility.
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District Leadership | Equity | School Leadership
In September of 2020, Education Elements announced the first cohort of the “Systems for Education Equity Development," or SEED, Fellowship. The fellowship is an exclusive, multi-month, cohort experience for educational leaders to redesign a system within their school district that is contributing to creating inequity in the student experience. The inaugural SEED Fellowship cohort is a powerful group of educators made of leaders across 7 states including the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Individually they are amazing, and together and through the SEED experience, the fellows will have an additional set of tools as well as a network of support to address their local, systemic challenges around equity.
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District Leadership | Equity | School Leadership
At the beginning of last week, my colleagues Purvi Patel, Dave Hardy, and I were excited to welcome leaders participating in our inaugural cohort of the Systems of Educational Equity Development (SEED) Fellowship after a well-deserved break and launch the beginning of our INCLUDE sessions.
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The systems that teachers and leaders design and implement in schools are all impacted by the biases of their designers. We have to design explicitly for our marginalized students and to do this, we need to first understand the way our own power and privilege impact what we believe is best for kids. As my colleagues wrote in Capture the Opportunity: Steps to Redesign School-Level Systems for Equity:
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Equity | School Leadership | Teacher Retention
This year has exacerbated the national crisis of staffing in schools. Attrition was already a looming challenge, but with all of the changes in education this year alone teachers are leaving schools and the profession en masse. That, combined with the racial reckoning taking place this year has prompted many leaders to reflect on their hiring processes and look for ways to recruit more Black teachers. If you are looking to diversify your teacher workforce or are assessing your hiring process, here are 9 things you must consider.
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Equity | School Leadership | Teacher Retention
We’ve talked a lot about the need to improve teacher retention. During the pandemic, teachers are feeling burned out, unsupported, and dissatisfied with their jobs and lack of recognition. A survey this summer showed that nearly 30% of teachers are more likely to leave the profession now due to the pandemic. To add to the problem, there’s been a 35% decrease in the number of college students preparing to be a teacher over the past decade. So the supply of potential teachers is going down at the same time that the demand for teachers is potentially going to skyrocket. This happens for a variety of reasons that we could spend a whole week writing about. While that problem is enough to raise some eyebrows, we want to dig in beneath the surface a bit to talk about an even more pressing problem: equity, or the lack thereof, and its impact on teacher attrition.
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