I am so excited to have my first ever guest post, and I scored big! Professional blogger, incredible teacher, and my fellow Hope Street fellow Meghan Everette, recently relocated from Alabama to Utah. She is a very passionate educator and is involved in many organizations. I have asked her to explain what Teach to Lead (or TTL as the cool kids call it) is. Take it away Meghan.
I am a veteran teacher, but new to Utah. A family move brought us west from the Gulf Coast of Alabama this summer and we’ve been enjoying beautiful hikes and our first real winter! I’m currently a K6 Math TOSA in the Salt Lake School District, so I spend a lot of time working with teachers, modeling lessons, and working on our upcoming math adoption. This is my fifth year blogging for Scholastic Top Teaching and I’m an Influence Leader with ASCD. This is my second year as a National Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that aims to engage teacher voice is policy decisions. Through the work of the fellowship and ASCD, I gathered up some good friends and amazing educators and applied to Teach to Lead.
Teach to Lead is an initiative jointly convened by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, ASCD and the U.S. Department of Education. Through the Teach to Lead Summits, educators spotlight and advance the groundbreaking, teacher-led work that is happening in states, districts, and schools across the country. Summit attendees are selected by submitting a team proposal with some kind of plan for tackling an education issue. The plan could address something as local as a single school, but could be as far reaching as a global project. Attendees are partnered with critical friends that help guide the teams through completing a logic model to break down the education issue. Teams leave with an action plan to enact over time with the ongoing support of those involved, key connections made to stakeholders through the support of Teach to Lead, and the critical friend.
This fall, our Teach to Lead team comprised of Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellows and ASCD Emerging and Influence Leaders created a plan to advance educator voice. We know there are plenty of educator advocates out there, but many don’t seem to self-identify as advocates. On any given day, in any school around the country, you could walk in and find educators engaging in discussions from what curriculum is the best to who should be the next Secretary of Education. Go visit a youth sporting event and you’ll see your community educators defending school board decisions or convincing parents that their teacher isn’t crazy after all. So, we know that advocates are out there, from the classroom to the stateroom, but how do we get them active? How do we equip them with the best practices for making their voice heard? And ultimately, how do we get more educators effectively involved in decisions about education?
Our team hopes to find just that. We’ve created a multi-year plan that ultimately will help put educators in the best possible position to influence education decisions. The first step of this plan is to engage educators in providing feedback about current perceptions and attitudes around a variety of education topics. That feedback will help inform the design of engagement activities and events to help grow more effective educator advocates.
The first step is getting educators, no matter their current position in education, to take the educator survey. The hardest part will be finding those educators that don’t generally engage and getting their voice as well. We need to hear from those educators that aren’t involved just as much as those that are easy to reach so we can build opportunities to engage all educators.
I ask that you please take the survey yourself and share this important survey with members of your professional learning network and on your social media outlets, using suggested language and image below and/or your own perspectives.
Because Meghan is awesome, she made it easy for my readers to share her survey by drafting some social media language you can simply copy and paste.
TWITTER:
Make your voice count! Take the educator survey now: http://bit.ly/ttlsurvey
It only takes 5 minutes to make a difference. Add your voice to the educator survey: http://bit.ly/ttlsurvey
Check out this short survey from a #TTLSummit team on educator perceptions and attitudes: http://bit.ly/ttlsurvey
Educator voice matters. Make yours heard. Take the survey: http://bit.ly/ttlsurvey
Fellows @TeachDB17 @bamameghan and @laurenpstuart Need your help. Take this short survey now! http://bit.ly/ttlsurvey
Thanks so much for sharing your TTL experience and welcome to Utah!
Cheers!
Tabitha
The Utah Teacher 