December Newsletter - PESB Pathways and Workforce Development

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PESB Educator Pathways and Workforce Development 

December Newsletter


Happy Holidays!

We are pleased to share our monthly newsletter from the Educator Pathways and Workforce Development Team at the Professional Educator Standards Board. The Pathways and Workforce Development team focuses on educator workforce development, with specific attention to diversifying the workforce to better reflect the student population, addressing teacher shortage, and supporting navigation of pathways into the education profession.

Before you dive into our newsletter, I wanted to take a moment to share some exciting news - last week we celebrated the launch of our new website! We’ve focused on creating greater ease of navigation and making the website more organized, searchable, and user friendly. Please take some time to explore the website and familiarize yourself with it, and as always please share your feedback with us.

Wishing you the best for this holiday season and New Year!

Best,

Alexandra Manuel  

Interim Executive Director


CELEBRATING THE LAUNCH OF OUR NEW WEBSITE

We are so pleased to announce the release of our new website at https://www.pesb.wa.gov! This website has been designed to be more user-friendly, easy to navigate, and organized. With all various stakeholders in mind - preparation programs, school districts, current and future educators, board members, and our partner agencies - we’ve structured our home page to help direct you to find the information you need. We look forward to continuing to refine the site and are very excited to share our updated version with you.


GROWING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS INTO WASHINGTON EDUCATORS

The Recruiting Washington Teachers (RWT) Program is designed to grow our own diverse future educators who more closely reflect the student population. Curious about the impacts of this program? The PESB produces annual reports on this program using data collected from our RWT learning laboratory sites (currently Renton, Tacoma, Mount Vernon, and Burlington Edison school districts). The 2017 report was just released and is available on our website!

Additionally, the Board recently heard a presentation about the impacts of this program at their September 2017 meeting. Some highlights from the report about this program include:

  • 68% of students spoke a home language other than English
  • This year’s senior participants had a 99% graduation rate
  • 81% of students stated the program helped them “quite a bit” or “a great deal” to learn about serving as a role model for younger students

Please read the full report for more information! In the events section below, you will also see an event that will be held in February that will highlight these programs across our state and spark conversations about how to scale the great work happening in our RTW programs. 


PARAEDUCATOR BOARD UPDATE

The newly established Paraeducator Board is off to a great start, with its third meeting upcoming on January 10th and 11th. Materials from prior board meetings are on our website, as well as materials for upcoming meetings. We wanted to highlight the results from a recent survey connected to the work of the Paraboard below: 

Results of Paraeducator Survey: At their last Paraeducator Board meeting, the board received an overview of the results of the paraeducator survey, which was completed by nearly 5,000 paras across the state. Take a look at the survey to learn more about the demographics of paras, as well as trends around their professional and career development interests. A deeper analysis of the survey data will be presented during the January meeting by Education Northwest.


PESB GRANTS

PESB has many grants to support stakeholder capacity to build innovative programs and pilot efforts to diversify the workforce. Current open grants include:

  • Teaching Equity Network Fund - This is a recurring grant opportunity that builds off of the annual, statewide Teaching Equity Conference. The Teaching Equity Network Fund is supported by the Washington Education Association (WEA), the Center of Excellence for Careers in Education (COE), and the PESB. This fund creates an opportunity for stakeholders to develop and host their own "Teaching Equity" events, with support for up to $5,000.

UPCOMING EVENTS

SAVE THE DATE! Diversifying the Educator Workforce: Recruiting Washington Teachers

Date: February 7, 2018

Location: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: 500 5th Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109

The Diversifying the Educator Workforce (DEW) meetings focus on strategies to increase diverse candidates in the educator workforce and grow the next generation of future educators.

The event, co-hosted by PESB and The Gates Foundation, will focus on growing our own educators through Recruiting Washington Teachers (RWT) teacher academies. The RWT program has an overarching goal of growing diverse educator workforce that more closely reflects the population of Washington's students by introducing high school students to what a career in education looks like and the importance of their role in the future of education. This event will include discussions of the impact of culturally responsive teaching academies, the launching of the new RWT professional development, the design of innovative RWT programs, and breakout sessions lead by current RWT teachers and higher education partners.

Registration information will be forthcoming, and registration will be required in order to attend.

Questions? Email: pathways@k12.wa.us


ANNOUNCEMENTS

Reminder that the ProTeach Portfolio final submission deadline is June 28, 2019. Please visit our website to stay up to date on further details!


Enjoy the Holidays!