“By ensuring that AI literacy is at the heart of our digital literacy program, we’re ensuring that we can not only mitigate the risk of AI, but seize the opportunity it creates to help improve the way we learn and the way we work,” says Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat from Delaware, who co-sponsored the bill with Rep. Larry Bucshon, M.D., an Indiana Republican.

The bill, which would amend the Digital Equity Act, defines AI literacy “as the skills associated with the ability to comprehend the basic principles, concept and applications of artificial intelligence, as well as the implications, limitations, and ethical considerations associated with artificial intelligence.”

A main goal of the bill is to help schools teach students to use the rapidly advancing technology safely and ethically.  Grants created by the proposal would help district leaders and other education organizations:

• Provide teachers with training and certification to drive AI literacy efforts in schools.
• Send teachers to courses, workshops and conferences related to artificial intelligence instruction and course design.
• Schools without resources for computer science education would get assistance in using best practices to develop and design AI course materials for computer science classes.
• Create partnerships with the private sector to expand AI education.
•  Build school labs that provide students with hands-on AI learning experiences.
•  Develop virtual learning platforms for remote and individualized AI instruction.

“Every administrator, teacher and student should know how to use AI and how AI works because when you understand the underlying fundamentals, you will be better able to use AI safely, effectively, and responsibly,” Pat Yongpradit, chief academic officer of Code.org, said in a statement.

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The Biden Administration is distributing nearly $370 million in grants for retention, recruitment, and career advancement through its Education Innovation and Research and Teacher and School Leader Incentive programs. Schools in North Carolina, for example, received $24 million from the latter fund to work on staff shortages.

The state’s second-largest district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, is putting $7.7 million worth of those teacher retention grants into its Teacher Leader Pathway program over the next three years. This advanced career track offers exclusive professional development opportunities—and a chance to earn an additional $18,250 in salary—to educators with a history of high student achievement.

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Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s program is also being developed as a model to help other districts implement similar recruitment and retention initiatives, WFAE.com reported.

In Indianapolis, Perry Township Schools in will spend $6.4 million over the next three years on teacher effectiveness bonuses and stipends for master teachers. Administrators also plan to hire two more literacy coaches to support teachers working to help students who have fallen behind in reading, the Indianapolis Star reported.

“We need more innovative approaches to supporting the return and retention of outstanding, well-prepared, well-supported educators who meet the needs and reflect the diversity of their students,” said James Lane, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the federal Office of Elementary and Secondary Education  “These funds will catalyze more of these approaches in schools across the country.”

Accordingly, nonprofit K12 organizations have also been awarded federal grants to drive staffing efforts in multiple districts. The Center of Excellence for Educator Preparation and Innovation in South Carolina now has $26.7 million to help the districts in Fairfield and Georgetown counties raise student achievement through recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers.

The institute’s initiative, which is based at Vorhees University, an HBCU, will focus on improving teacher evaluation procedures, raising performance-based compensation, creating a principal collaboration network and hiring more instructional coaches for new teachers.

How states are helping

In Illinois, Quincy Public Schools will receive $630,000 over the next three years from the state’s board of education to provide bonuses to new hires, $450 stipends for special education teachers and assistance buying classroom supplies. Quincy’s new teachers can earn $750 at the end of their first year, $1,000 after the second and $1,250 after the third, Superintendent Todd Pettit told the Herald-Whig.

“We’re pleased with the collaboration we’ve had with the teachers union to be able to come up with the incentives we have,” Pettit said. “You want to be able to cast the net wide so you’re giving something to everyone and not just the new teachers and recruiting.”

Illinois’ grants can also be used by districts to help teachers with housing stipends, down-payment assistance and loan repayments and other living expenses.

New York recently awarded nearly $12 million to support two-year teacher residency programs in multiple districts. The incoming educators will gain classroom experience alongside established teacher mentors. A new state law also requires New York’s education commissioner to work with colleges and universities to guide districts in retaining and recruiting more teachers of color.

Higher ed also lends a hand

Teacher preparation programs at several universities are also receiving grants to send more new and more diverse educators into the K12 workforce. The University of Central Oklahoma College of Education and Professional Studies will use a $2.45 million American Rescue Plan Act grant to help 120 teachers complete their master’s degrees. The university’s “Accelerated Cohorts for Teacher Success” program helps teachers pay for tuition, fees, textbooks, background checks and graduation fees.

Kansas State University’s College of Education has received a $3.9 million federal grant from the Supporting Effective Educator Development program to help six school districts in Kansas and Nebraska hire more highly effective teachers of color to serve culturally and linguistically diverse students.

Kansas State’s Project RAÍCES—Spanish for “roots”—will not only help preservice teacher candidates complete their degrees, it is also providing the six districts with professional development that emphasizes “biography-driven instruction.” This framework trains teachers to leverage students’ sociocultural, linguistic, cognitive and academic assets.

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“They are embracing some different practices we’ve put in place to take the really good things to the next level and improve the things that need to be improved,” says Mendez, who was previously principal of Seymour Middle School in Seymour Community Schools.

He has devoted a lot of his energy toward his teachers and to offering more intensive instructional coaching, in particular. He hired four full-time coaches this year to provide embedded professional development through one-on-one co-teaching and observations. “We always say we need to grow ourselves to grow our kids,” Mendez notes.

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Mendez also created instructional coaching residencies that pair coaches with a different teacher each week, for an entire week. In some cases, the coach may teach and ask the teacher for feedback. Along with improving teachers’ skills, the more comprehensive PD should also help North Central—Indiana’s largest urban high school—retain its educators.

“Teacher support—the most important piece—is giving them the tools and coaching them up in instructional capacity so they’re successful with their students,” Mendez explains. “It makes them more confident. It lets them know they have somewhere to go if they need help and are lost vs. some models where they have to go outside the building.”

How to be a great simplifier

Another high-priority project for the school year is aligning the high school’s course offerings with more intentionally guided career pathways that go beyond traditional CTE. The goal is to grow into areas such as engineering and biomedical fields that are highly relevant for today’s students. “Getting that engagement from them will help with achievement and give them options when they go on to college,” he notes.

That drive to help students succeed after completing high school comes from Mendez’s experience working with high-needs schools. And once again, teaching is the key to helping students in these schools defy expectations and break cycles of marginalization. “I always tell teachers in job interviews that we need people who believe a student’s circumstances don’t have to dictate the outcome,” he continues. “Whether they come from a house of drugs, a house of poverty, a house of trauma—that does not sentence them to a life of the same.”

The key to motivating staff to achieve these goals is for a principal to be “a great simplifier” who can take difficult concepts and help educators find a comfortable place to start. “It’s partly simplifying incredibly complex things, but also talking about ‘why this school exists,'” he asserts. “This is the one profession that helps create all the other professions. It’s being a storyteller about our kids—who they are, what they need, what they want to be and what their dreams are.”

An important part of the narrative is detailing the reasons behind the actions leaders are taking and the goals that are being set. However, exploring the flip side can also have a significant impact. “One of the powerful pieces is talking about, ‘If we don’t do this, what happens?'” he explains. “If we aren’t all in, what happens? If we don’t grow ourselves, what happens? Who gets hurt if we don’t take these steps?”

One of the biggest challenges he’s contending with is building students’ social-emotional skills so they feel safe to focus on academics. Digital literacy is a crucial tool in this effort. He and his educators are teaching students how to handle the responsibilities that come with “the ability the grab information from anywhere at any time.

“They are growing up in a world that moves much faster than what a lot of the adults had to deal with when they were growing up,” Mendez concludes. “They have exposure to a lot of things earlier.”

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“A quality student teaching experience with an effective mentor is equivalent to an additional year of experience for a new teacher. But student teaching experiences can vary greatly,” writes University of Michigan researcher Matthew Truwit, author of “Increasing Teacher Preparedness through Effective Student Teaching,” a new EdResearch for Action report.

There is little evidence teacher shortages will ease anytime soon. In Nebraska, for instance, teacher vacancies more than doubled (they rose by 114%) between 2011 and 2023, leaving the state with 769 unfilled positions last year, the Omaha World-Herald reported. The number of high school graduates who entered teacher preparation programs rose to 4,149 in 2020-21, compared to 2,822 in 2017-18. Yet, only 1,350 students completed their programs in 2020-21, the World-Herald noted.

Truwit notes further that the nation’s teacher workforce is “greener than ever,” as the number of first-year educators has doubled over the last 30 years.

Also, policies in many states are working against raising the quality of student teaching programs. For instance, only about half of all states require a student teaching experience to last at least 10 weeks and it has to be “full-time” in even fewer.

“Alternative [or job-embedded] programs, which produced about 23% of new teachers in 2019 (nearly 35,000), typically involve a much shorter period of student teaching—or even none at all—before candidates become teachers of record,” Truwit adds.

Why student teaching matters

Superintendents should know that districts that offer robust student teaching experiences are likely to eventually hire those educators full-time. “Surveys of new teachers show that the student teaching experience is the most important part of their preparation,” Truwit asserts.

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Truwit details five evidence-based strategies school districts and teacher training programs can leverage to better prepare new educators to thrive in the classroom:

1. Incentivize effective teachers to serve as mentors.
2. Provide mentors with professional development on coaching.
3. Collect frequent feedback from the student teachers and their mentors.
4. Place teacher candidates in schools with low turnover, effective faculty and collaborative environments.
5. Place candidates in grades, subjects and schools in which they may later teach.

Truwit also described some practices that have proven not to work:

• The length of candidates’ student teaching experience alone does not seem to impact their initial instructional effectiveness.
• Recruiting mentors based solely on years of experience does not guarantee they will be effective mentors.
• Relying heavily on available teacher effectiveness metrics—such as observation ratings—for selecting mentors may provide an incomplete picture of effectiveness and can introduce bias against teachers of color.
• More instructional effective mentors appear to produce better student teachers but this does not appear to alter if, where or for how long candidates are employed.
• Small stipends may not be enough to affect which teachers choose to become mentors.

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For one, the principal’s impact on learning growth is “significantly larger in scope” than that of teachers, say the authors of “Redefining the Role of the Principal: Innovative Approaches to Empower School Leaders,” a new report from the Aspen Institute that looks at the new ways principals are being empowered by their districts.

That impact is magnified when principals create strong learning climates that promote high expectations for students and teachers, continuous analysis of student data, and a culture of accountability, the researchers assert. While the principal workforce is more diverse than it was 30 years ago—and is now majority female—it still does not reflect the racial-ethnic diversity of the student population.

Moreover, a staggering 85% of principals reported high levels of stress compared to just a little more than a third of the general workforce that said the same. Finally, principal turnover leads to teacher turnover, which can also depress student achievement. “While teachers are facing formidable challenges right now, districts cannot afford to lose sight of school leaders,” the researchers counseled in the report.

Against this backdrop, states and districts are taking steps to redefine and empower principals.

Redefining the role of principals

The Aspen Institute’s researchers detailed what four districts and one state are doing to help principals improve their craft and focus on instructional leadership. The report also notes “why principals love” each of the initiatives:

1. More capacity to focus on strategic priorities, District of Columbia Public Schools: A newly created, school-level leadership position—the director of strategy and logistics—oversees administrative tasks such as operations, enrollment, facilities, security, food and nutrition, and inventory. This frees principals up to work on academics, culture and climate.

“Prior to the creation of this position, principals in DCPS reported spending nearly half of their time on building management, and teachers reported a lack of administrative support as a primary reason for departure,” Aspen’s researchers wrote.

Why principals love it: They have more time to focus on instructional leadership and other strategic priorities.

2. Responsive PD for principals, Cleveland Metropolitan School District: Professional development now zeroes in on areas where principals have the most impact. PD has shifted from procedural updates and compliance to teaching, learning, and leadership. Also, the district’s PD provider regularly collects feedback from principals and assistant principals on content and scheduling.

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Why principals love it: Principals’ feedback helped create “rigorous and relevant learning opportunities.” Principals are now confident student achievement is also a priority for district leadership.

3. Support from content specialists, Tulsa Public Schools: Teams of content specialists now provide principals and principal supervisors with additional expertise. Principals also have access to a “School Partner Team” of central office administrators and, early in their careers, leadership development coaches. School Partner Teams analyze school-level data, determine strategic shifts and offer PD to improve outcomes.

Why principals love it: School Partner Teams’ serve as thought partners and content experts to expand principals’ capacity. Content leaders synthesize data to help principals make informed decisions.

4. Differentiated professional learning for principals, Long Beach Unified School District: Differentiated professional development covers “competencies and leadership dispositions that effective principals should demonstrate and the subsequent support principals need to achieve those competencies.”

Why principals love it: Principals receive support from coaches or principal supervisors who are former principals.

5. Evaluating readiness through authentic tasks, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education: The “Performance Assessment for Leaders” measures school leadership candidates’ skills in evaluating teacher effectiveness, analyzing data, and creating a professional learning community.

Why principals love it: The assessment prepares principals by emphasizing technical and adaptive skills.

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“We are working in environments where teacher and leader time is short, where privacy rules rightfully require considerable protections for sharing information, and where the capacity for data collection and analysis both within districts and within our organizations is limited,” write the authors of Measuring Teacher Professional Learning, a new report from the Research Partnership for Professional Learning. “This means that we try to develop and pick instruments that can meet multiple needs simultaneously.”

The biggest challenges facing PD include a lack of practical measurement tools, insufficient attention to equitable measurement, wide variations in data collection across districts, capacity constraints and general misalignment of research priorities.

Priming professional development

The researchers behind the report say they are optimistic that the PD field will see innovation in the near future. “We see tremendous opportunity to address some of the challenges by focusing on equitable and practical measurement, combining measures that elevate marginalized needs and voices with a process orientation around quick turnaround data for continuous improvement,” they write.

Sustaining and scaling PD requires school districts and their professional learning providers to determine which measurement tools best meet educators’ needs. School leaders should identify and publicize “the value of using practical and equitable measures, especially in helping educators improve their practice and classroom environments in service of equitable student outcomes.”

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Schools need to share data comprehensively with their partners, determine what new sources of data they need to tap into and allow their PD providers to compare data with other district clients. Several solutions are being tested by PD providers, including:

• Creating comprehensive frameworks for data collection: Teaching Lab tracks short-term goals by continuously analyzing data that is aligned to specific PD services. This includes participant feedback surveys and course assessments. Medium- to long-term progress is tracked by collecting data at the beginning and end of the school year with teacher surveys, classroom observations, and student surveys and student work samples.
• Embedding transformative social-emotional learning: City Teaching Alliance* (formerly known as Urban Teachers) uses “transformative SEL” to provide students with greater psychological safety to take intellectual risks when learning challenging content.
• Boosting internal and external capacity: Teach For America measures the link between teacher training, students’ experiences of learning conditions and improved educational outcomes. It uses the Cultivate for Coaches survey, which requires embedded coaching support for individual teachers. Teachers are encouraged to test new methods and techniques between surveys.
• Prioritizing equitable and culturally responsive measurement: Student Achievement Partners helps educators design instruction that capitalizes on the assets of historically underserved and marginalized students. Its “e² Instructional Practice Framework” defines high-quality instruction as being on grade level, joyful, culturally responsive and linguistically sustaining.
• Measuring beyond teachers’ instructional practice: The New Teacher Center‘s observations focus on classroom conditions that support social-emotional learning and learning differences. It is now developing a rubric to measure specific practices teachers can use to create emotionally, intellectually, and physically safe environments and to implement equitable, culturally responsive and standards-aligned instruction.

District Administration‘s Superintendent’s Playbook series examines how superintendents, principals and other administrators are solving common problems that today’s educators are facing. 

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“It forces collaboration between social studies, math, English and science teachers,” he explains. “They’re working together and our kids are getting the medicine they need—it’s not just about remediation, it’s about acceleration.”

Literacy growth rates had slipped to under 40% during the height of COVID but have now resurged to over 50% of students meeting expectations. Dignan’s main solutions are HMH’s Math 180 and Read 180 and the platforms’ new Flex component that helps teachers adapt instruction toward individual students’ learning needs, Dignan attests.

Principal Lori Webster and Reading Interventionist Alexandra Wilcox have made embedded interventions in both the methodology and the mindset at Mountain Mahogany Community School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Back in 2018, only 20% of the small charter school’s students scored proficient in reading. To boost literacy rates, the two educators have since had their elementary school teachers participate in IMSE’s training in the Orton-Gillingham multisensory approach to the science of reading.

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It incorporates writing, reading and talking, and the method is the same whether students are in their regular classes or receiving a push-in intervention in their classrooms. “I would love for more teachers to understand that this is not just additional work for them, this is in exchange for things that they already teach,” Wilcox says. “What I’ve noticed as our teachers have implemented it is they feel like we’re taking some things away because it is working.”

Mountain Mahogany is now recognized as a Structured Literacy Model School by the New Mexico Public Education Department. “What’s most rewarding for me as a teacher is seeing confidence grow,” Wilcox explains. “I see students go from ‘I can’t do this’ to ‘Oh, I can do this.’ It’s like cracking the code.”

Embedded interventions inspire independence

Teaching and assessing literacy is the top professional development priority at Wayne-Westland Community Schools and HMH’s Flex instruction has replaced disruptive pull-out interventions. “Even Pre-COVID, a large percentage of kids were coming in one or two grade levels behind,” Dignan points out. “As a central office team, we knew we wouldn’t be able to intervene our way out of it.”

More students are now catching up to grade level and moving on to accelerated instruction. Students are able to see the progress they are making as they are better grasping the texts and making improvements in all of their core classes. The adaptive platforms allow teachers to abandon traditional “stand-and-deliver” instruction and give students more autonomy and independence.

“Going through everything being virtual and combing back, some of the skills teachers picked up allowed them to become facilitators of learning and use more small group instruction in lieu of the traditional ‘For the next 55 minutes, you’re going to listen to me talk,'” Dignan concludes. “We’re moving way past that.”

District Administration’s Superintendent’s Playbook series examines how superintendents, principals and other administrators are solving common problems that today’s educators are facing. 

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“I’m a hands-on principal,” says Krause, whose school is part of whose building is part of rural Coffeyville Public Schools in Kansas. “I got to put my love for teaching reading into action.”

Her duties as instructional leader don’t end with the school day. After hours, she attends Student Improvement Team meetings and dives deep into the data to determine what each of her students needs most. “In order for me to suggest the best strategy to use with a child, I have to know each child,” she continues. “I spend many hours in classrooms building relationships with my students. I have to know about the whole child, not just what they need academically.”

Instructional leader in action

In the second part of her conversation with District Administration, Krause covered her school’s vibrant professional learning communities, rising test scores at her K6 school and classroom “chill-out zones.”

DA: How do you serve as the school’s instructional leader? 

Krause: “Utilizing our professional learning communities is a huge part of our culture. Teachers are provided an extra 40 minutes of collaborative planning each Wednesday to review data, plan instruction, create formative assessments based on the grade level standards, and set goals. During this time I make sure to celebrate all successes. Also during this time, we discuss professional development that is needed by the staff. It is imperative that I ensure my teachers have the resources they need to be successful.

I’ve requested to send teachers to workshops that cover classroom management, SEL, brain development, math, phonics, and phonemic awareness. I have also sent teachers to observe programs at other schools as well as observe teachers in our building. When we discovered there was a lack of phonics and phonological awareness instruction, I requested that the assistant superintendent and I take a group of teachers to observe a program being utilized by another district. We quickly determined that we needed to purchase the program 95% to fill the gap in our phonics and phonological awareness instruction.

The key to the success of implementing the new program was providing my teachers with the training they needed to confidently teach the skills as well as stating my expectations for the implementation. Some teachers needed more support than the professional development they received, so I arranged for them to observe another teacher and assigned them to meet weekly with our instructional coach.

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As stated earlier, implementing the PLC process has had a huge impact on the success of our students. During PLCs, I also collaborate with my teachers on the best practices they should be using to meet the needs of all of their students. Analyzing the data leads to the discussion and importance of differentiation and rigor. Progress monitoring and record keeping can often be overwhelming, so I used my love for Excel to create a document for my teachers to use.

We are a K6th school, so we have eight PLCs each week. We have a PLC for each grade level and a PLC for my special teachers.

What are the most exciting things happening at Community Elementary School? 

A huge success for Community Elementary this year is that our state test scores went up. We had 20 more third-, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students scoring a 3 or 4 on the state math test. Of those 20 students, 10 students scored a level 4, which is very difficult to do. We had nine more students score a level 4 on the ELA test than we had in 2022. Our goal is to have 10 more students scoring a 3-4 on the math and ELA tests.

What are the keys to your leadership philosophy, and how do these contribute to the school’s success?

My philosophy is that all students can learn when provided a student-centered education where teachers, students and administrators are held to high expectations. However, I firmly believe that the purpose of education goes far beyond knowledge—it is about empowering students to become lifelong learners, critical thinkers and responsible citizens.

Creating an environment that is nurturing and inclusive—and that recognizes and caters to each student’s unique needs—interests and abilities is imperative in accomplishing these goals. Doing what is best for students will always be the deciding factor in every decision I make.

How have your job/responsibilities changed over the last few years?

A huge focus is placed on social-emotional learning, not just academics. I have to ensure that my teachers have chill-out zones in their classrooms to help regulate their students. For me, it’s finding tools for my toolbox to deal with students suffering from trauma. What works one day might not work the next day or even the hour.

Unfortunately, school safety has a different meaning than it did in the past. We used to focus on practicing our fire and tornado drills. Now, due to the growing number of school shootings, we have to focus on keeping our students safe from intruders.

COVID was a huge curve ball. Students and teachers had to practice social distancing, so students were no longer allowed to play outside as a grade level. They could only play with the students in their class, so play areas had to be created on the playground. Coverage for this was no easy task. Not to mention when the students had to be remote and the teachers had to teach via Zoom or Google Meets.

What are the biggest challenges Community Elementary School is facing right now?

Mental health is the biggest challenge we are faced with at CES. Many students come to us with trauma and a high ACEs score. They are experiencing stress, anxiety, neglect, abuse, and other mental health issues that can impact their learning and overall well-being. We unfortunately aren’t experts in this field and lack the resources we need.

Read part 1 of DA’s interview with Angie Krause.

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One of the most important factors in student achievement is high-quality teachers. Excellent professional development and coaching help teachers to become the best educators they can be and offers them the kind of support that makes them want to stay with their district. Since we began using video coaching six years ago, we have seen consistent growth in student achievement, including year-over-year growth in English language arts and math for 2021-2022. Here’s how we help our teachers constantly grow and learn to master their craft.

Aligning PD across the district

Professional development must be relevant, intentional and focused to improve teaching and learning. If it is not relevant, intentional and focused, teachers end up meeting for the sake of meeting rather than to share resources and tools they can use in the classroom to improve instruction.

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Six years ago, we began using video in our instructional coaching. Our teachers record their own videos and choose which ones to share with their coaches or professional learning communities. This has had a range of benefits, such as improved self-reflection about their own practice, but it also ensures that the support they receive is focused on areas they would like to improve and relevant to what is actually happening in their classrooms.

At the beginning of our video coaching journey, our PD was disjointed and happening in separate silos. PLCs would meet and talk about one thing. The instructional leaders in each building didn’t even meet as a group focused on curriculum or academics, but just as a management team.

Now, we have a common vocabulary and common district-wide goals. Teachers in their PLCs are still talking about what’s happening in their classrooms, but it’s within the context of the goals we are all working towards. Rather than being siloed, everything works to support the other pieces, and we have a process in place to help improve student outcomes.

Keeping coaching non-evaluative

At Decatur MSD, it’s important to us to keep teacher evaluations and coaching separate. One of the most successful components of coaching for us has been self-reflection. Teachers are hard on themselves, and when they watch videos of themselves teaching, they immediately start asking, “How can I improve? What could I do differently next time? How could this lesson have gone better?”

If their coaching sessions were evaluative, they would shut down and lose that reflective piece. They would take their score and move on. Evaluations tell teachers how other educators see their practice, and may even cause defensiveness. True coaching helps practitioners reflect on their performance, warts and all, and focus on becoming better within their discipline.

That doesn’t mean that coaching is non-critical. We do a lot of advanced coaching where teachers are asked to submit video segments focused on specific classroom experiences or challenges. They receive feedback on those, both positive and more constructive, and over time their PLC members and instructional leaders will look to see improvement in areas where they’ve struggled in the past.

When it comes to walk-throughs to evaluate teachers, we allow them to make videos instead of having an administrator visit their class to watch them. The point is not that teachers shouldn’t be evaluated, but that professional growth activities should be focused on development, and never discipline, to ensure a safe environment for taking risks and sharing.

Encouraging educators to learn from each other

Since we began using video for teacher growth, we’ve realized that it provides an excellent opportunity for our teachers to learn from one another. Our own folks are the best experts available on teaching at Decatur MSD, so whenever we spot someone using peer-to-peer academic feedback for example, or the gradual release model in a video, we add it to a library of exemplar videos we’ve been building.

A library of in-house exemplar videos is powerful because teachers hold a lot of “street cred” with one another. Anyone can come in calling themselves a consultant or an expert, but when it’s a teammate they work with every day, who gets results they actually see in the classroom with students they know, it carries more weight.

Teaching Channel, which provides the video platform we use for coaching and PLCs, also includes a library of more than 1,500 videos featuring teachers in real classrooms across the U.S. They carry similar street cred to our in-house videos because the teachers in them are in the trenches with our teachers, even if they’re at different districts.

While it’s nice to learn from each other, it’s also important to get ideas from outside to avoid groupthink, get out of ruts, or simply to try new ideas. Many of our administrators at the building level are also using videos from this library in their own professional development efforts. Just as with teachers, it’s helpful to have examples provided by colleagues who face the same challenges we do every day to get a better understanding of solutions that have worked for real educators and students.

Hardworking teachers who feel supported and encouraged to grow are critical factors in improving student achievement. If you have district-wide alignment in goals and language and regular meetings focused on exemplary practices to provide tools and techniques teachers can take back to the classroom, it’s only a matter of time before your teachers begin to grow and learn to better help your students to bloom.

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New guidelines to help states and districts create teacher apprenticeships were released Thursday by the U.S. Education and Labor departments. The latter agency has allocated $65 million for registered apprenticeship programs in education and other professions. The Department of Education, meanwhile, is providing an additional $27 million in funding for educator preparation programs.

“Providing opportunities for future teachers to earn while they learn has created an affordable and exciting pathway into the teaching profession that can help states build a talented and diverse pipeline of educators at a moment when doing so has never mattered more,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

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Over the last year, the number of states with registered teacher apprenticeship programs has grown exponentially, from two to 21, Cardona added. The new apprenticeship guidelines were developed by The Pathways Alliance, a coalition of education organizations focused on improving teacher preparation. States and districts can follow the guidelines to expedite the launch of apprenticeships and align their programs with K12 teaching standards, the Biden Administration says.

Just over half of the Department of Education’s $27 million investment in educator preparation will fund Teacher Quality Partnership grants, which are targeted toward improving teacher training programs. The remaining $12.7 million in Supporting Effective Educator Development funds will help districts develop and disseminate best practices for teacher preparation and career advancement.

Finally, the Department of Education’s new “Raise the Bar” policy brief details how several states are enhancing their recruitment, preparation and retention initiatives to tackle teacher shortages.

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