Grow Your Own: Teacher Pipeline

CELL has been a longtime leader in skilling up teachers with regard to dual credit. Recently CELL has begun focusing on broadening the credential attainment we support, expanding to special education and English learner licensure.

However, the pool of teachers available to attain advanced credentials is shrinking due to the teacher shortage. CELL intends to work on the teacher pipeline through innovative practices and advocacy that have been proven to be effective in other states. Specifically, CELL supports the creation, implementation, and sustainment of three models, impacting different points of the teaching pipeline:

Expanding the teacher pipeline can include Grow Your Own programs (High School Students and/or Paraprofessionals) Rural Teacher Corps (Current College Students), and Shared Teacher Cooperatives (Current Teachers). CELL was previously awarded a grant from the New America Foundation to explore Grow Your Own Programs (GYO) and expand GYO best practices through statewide communities of practice. This grant has a specific emphasis on diversifying the teacher population in rural, Hispanic districts. We have collaborated with our state’s department of education on several workshops over the summer for planning new GYO programs within Indiana’s high schools. Grow Your Own programs target high school students or current school professionals that lack appropriate education requirements. These programs engage individuals in teaching specific activities, clubs, and work-based learning to encourage persistence in the teaching pipeline.

Additionally, CELL received a planning grant from the Rural Schools Collaborative to plan and develop Indiana's first Rural Teacher Corps. RTCs are a strategy to recruit current college students into the teaching field and provide intentional rural education training and support. Often, it is more expensive to try and gain experience for a student in rural areas because commuting is expensive from a financial and time perspective. Stipends and scholarships are often employed to curb the expenses of rural student teaching.

Finally, CELL has spent time organizing a statewide community of practice to spread ideas and models around districts working together to share teachers with one another. We believe this model has great potential to alleviate teacher shortages in the immediate future. GYO and RTC are typically long-term solutions because students may not be able to teach during their years of education. However, a teacher in one district could immediately teach in a neighboring district if the appropriate MOUs and salary sharing can be achieved.