Teachers are always looking for ways to help each of their students grow and develop. Yet as teachers, we have limited opportunities to grow in our own profession. We recognize the need for a variety of supports at different stages of our career and envision a profession that allows us to leverage our strengths to both improve student outcomes and increase teacher retention.
We created STEP (Supporting Teachers as Empowered Professionals), a teacher-generated policy toolkit that focuses on creating meaningful leadership pathways for teachers.
Recommendations:
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Create a pathway of career steps including: emerging teachers, professional teachers, lead teachers, and innovating teachers, each with additional leadership roles.
- Create the option of new school role categories: in-classroom, hybrid (teaching roles with significant leadership time away from classrooms), and out-of-classroom (ability to step outside of the classroom temporarily in order to expand their impact to a greater number of students and colleagues).
About the Teacher Action Team
We are a diverse team of 13 teachers who met over several months to review research on different national efforts to address teacher attraction and retention, as well as local strategies being proposed or piloted by UTLA, Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) and local charter networks. We conducted over 120 peer and administrator interviews to gather critical stakeholder feedback, and surveyed more than 300 teachers and school leaders.