Special Report
Recruitment & Retention

National Network Seeks to Get More H.S. Students Interested in Teaching

By Elisha McNeil — January 25, 2016 4 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

With schools across the country struggling to find enough teachers and diversify their staffs, some communities are looking more seriously at the idea of “growing your own.” If you can’t find the teachers you need, the thinking goes, develop them.

That’s essentially the idea behind a newly relaunched program associated with the professional association PDK International. Educators Rising, formerly known as Future Educators Association, is a national network working to help school systems guide young people on the path to teaching starting in high school.

Launched last August, the free service connects teachers and school leaders with expertise and resources to support them in preparing students interested in teaching—and ultimately in building stronger local pipelines of future educators.

Grow-your-own programs are not a new idea in K-12 education. They have a long history in some communities, particularly as a vehicle to prepare racial- and ethnic-minority educators and those for hard-to-staff fields. But they’ve often been fragmented in approach, small in scale, and reliant on uncertain support.

Whether Educators Rising can change that dynamic remains to be seen, since its current cadre of student participants has yet to enter college.

But the organization believes that bringing cohesion and stronger resource support to local efforts can help create a new—and currently much-needed—"front end” in teacher development, according to Dan Brown, a former teacher who is a co-director of Educators Rising.

“There’s an apparent self-interest for communities to grow their own [teachers], and we want to provide an army of support in the background to help them do that well,” Brown said. “I hope that we’ll be able to get to a place where every community is really thinking proactively about growing their own highly skilled teachers, and Educators Rising aims to be a national partner to help with that.”

Educators Rising currently has some 11,000 members, including both student-participants and the teachers and administrators who lead the program at their schools. The network is operating in some 850 high schools and has partnerships with 11 states and two regions, in Boston and New York City. Forty-nine percent of the 10,000 student members are racial and ethnic minorities—a rate that far outpaces the 17-percent minority makeup of the current U.S. teaching profession.

Exploring Possibilities

The schools affiliated with Educators Rising provide the on-the-ground implementation, creating and running their own teacher-preparation co-curricular programs or elective courses at the high school level. The courses are often integrated into schools’ career-and-technical-education programs or offered as extracurriculars.

At the national level, the organization provides crowdsourced and curated lesson plans, teaching materials, and other resources, including a virtual “campus” feature that houses teaching-practice videos and connects members with experts and other stakeholders. The curriculum includes courses on human growth and development and curriculum and instruction, as well as a teaching internship.

Educators Rising also offers national conferences, competitions, scholarships, an honors society, and—starting this year—a micro-credentialing system to help students document the skills they’ve mastered. (Additional support services, such as mentoring and job-search guidance, are available to student members when they enter college.) In addition, the group is working with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on a set of standards for what students need to know to become successful educators.

“We provide students and teacher leaders with leadership training, opportunities to partner with organizations and work in communities, and encourage innovation,” said Rachael Mann, the coordinator of Educators Rising’s Arizona affiliate. “We train our students to look beyond what currently is happening in education and explore all of the possibilities of what could be.”

Aubrey Gray, a senior at Pickerington High School Central in Ohio, near Columbus, and an Educators Rising participant, said the program has given her a better grasp of her career direction.

“I’ve learned a lot of the basics about education, such as equity and classroom management,” Gray said. “I’ve learned so much from being able to actually go out and observe classrooms and spend time with students and teachers in their real, day-to-day routines. I cherish my observation days, and they make me even more excited about having my own classroom one day.”

Generating that kind of enthusiasm about a profession that is often disparaged is key to Educators Rising’s mission.

“The core of our vision from the beginning has been about engaging bright young people with a rigorous, authentic, hands-on opportunity to explore teaching,” said Brown. “Our goal is to catalyze a movement around the central idea that there’s power in teaching.”

A version of this article appeared in the January 27, 2016 edition of Education Week as Teaching Network Grooms H.S. Students

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Mathematics Webinar
Pave the Path to Excellence in Math
Empower your students' math journey with Sue O'Connell, author of “Math in Practice” and “Navigating Numeracy.”
Content provided by hand2mind
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Recruitment & Retention Webinar
Combatting Teacher Shortages: Strategies for Classroom Balance and Learning Success
Learn from leaders in education as they share insights and strategies to support teachers and students.
Content provided by DreamBox Learning
Classroom Technology K-12 Essentials Forum Reading Instruction and AI: New Strategies for the Big Education Challenges of Our Time
Join the conversation as experts in the field explore these instructional pain points and offer game-changing guidance for K-12 leaders and educators.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Recruitment & Retention Download DOWNLOADABLE: A Recipe for Creating a School Culture Teachers Don't Want to Leave
It takes the right combination of hiring the right people, supporting their growth, recognizing their good work, and having fun.
Principal David Arencibia chats with a student as they make their way to class at Colleyville Middle School in Colleyville, Texas, on April 18, 2023.
Principal David Arencibia chats with a student as they make their way to class at Colleyville Middle School in Colleyville, Texas, on April 18.
Emil T. Lippe for Education Week
Recruitment & Retention From Our Research Center What's Keeping People From Becoming Teachers? An Eye-Popping To-Do List, for One
Ninety percent of educators say that the demands of the job make it harder to recruit and retain teachers.
1 min read
Illustration of a Black woman with her eyes closed and clouds and lightning bolts surrounding her big hair.
iStock/Getty
Recruitment & Retention Teacher Autonomy Isn't Dead. Here's How to Achieve It
Award-winning teachers and other experts suggest ways to build and maintain this cherished professional freedom.
5 min read
Illustration of a teacher using a pencil and writing to post-it notes with goals noted attached to a bullseye.
iStock/Getty
Recruitment & Retention Q&A Behind the Podcast That's Trying to Entice More People of Color Into Teaching
New York City uses outside-the-box strategies to recruit and retain educators of color.
4 min read
Kabir Saad
Saad Kabir, who works on recruitment for New York City public schools, started a podcast to help entice people of color into the classroom.
Courtesy of Saad Kabir