District Policy and Practice

Equity Leadership Institute

What can schools and districts do to ensure that their students have access to a diverse teacher workforce? The Teach Plus Equity Leadership Institute brings together district teams composed of senior administrators and teacher leaders who work collaboratively to design and implement evidence-based strategies to more effectively recruit, support, and retain a diverse teacher workforce.

Teach Plus launched the Equity Leadership Institute (ELI) in 2022 with an inaugural cohort of six school districts from Arkansas, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The ELI brings together 70 senior administrators and teacher leaders from these districts in a network learning model to address educational equity through a more diverse teacher workforce.

Drawing on the Teach Plus teacher-led recommendations from, “If You Listen, We Will Stay: Why Teachers of Color Leave and How to Disrupt Teacher Turnover” and “To Be Who We Are: Black Teachers on Creating Affirming School Cultures,” the district ELI teams design, plan, and implement plans addressing district policy and practice and school culture and climate. 

For more information about the Equity Leadership Institute, please email eli@teachplus.org.

SEL Change Agent Network

As students, educators, and communities cope with the multiple traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing student and teacher mental health is a national priority. In 2022, Teach Plus launched the SEL Change Agent Network Fellowship to equip teachers to address and improve social emotional learning practices in their schools.

Teachers have the greatest proximity to students and have seen first-hand the social emotional needs and challenges that surfaced during the pandemic. Through the SEL Change Agent Network Fellowship, 37 teacher leaders in Colorado, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island will work with teams of their colleagues through Fall 2022 to collaboratively explore problems of practice around social emotional learning, develop clear and actionable plans to address these, and operationalize those plans using research-based best practices to benefit students.