 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this one hour webinar. My name is Naomi Androsic and I'm a senior researcher and a policy advisor with Learning Policy Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that's committed to advancing evidence-based policy that supports equitable and empowered learning for every child. Today's webinar, we're going to explore the impacts of California's ongoing teacher shortages as well as recruitment and retention strategies that should promise in addressing the issue. We're also going to consider the implications of COVID-19 for the teacher pipeline and the educator workforce. I'd like to let the audience know once again that this webinar is being recorded, that a video recording and also a video recording will be emailed to you in a few days. And the slides are currently available in the link in the chat box. I'd also like to take a moment to thank, recognize our co-sponsors for their support with this webinar. Our co-sponsors are the California Partnership for the Future of Learning, the California Teacher Residency Lab, Edprep Lab, The Education Trust, and the Institute of Cities. For the future of the webinar, if you have any questions, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. And if you'd like to engage in discussion, can click the chat button and type the chat box at the lower right side of your screen. So with that, I'm going to hand it over now to LPI for some framing and opening remarks. Thank you, Naomi. And it's great to be here with everyone today. This is such an important topic. I want to also thank the entire LPI team who organized this briefing. It does take a village and we appreciate everyone in the village. As we all know, today we're in the midst of both a public health crisis and an economic crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities in California and throughout the country are caught between a rock and a hard place really figuring out how to mitigate the spread of the virus while also dealing with declining revenues and in families that they serve rising unemployment. Well, when throughout this crisis are longstanding systemic inequalities that communities of color and low income communities are hardest hit by. And these longstanding inequalities also show up in many other corners of our society, including students access to well prepared, diverse teacher workforce. Although California faces a widespread shortage, you will hear later that these shortages disproportionately affect students from low income families. Closing the achievement gap requires that we close the opportunity gap and access to fully prepared teachers. Students need access to these teachers always they needed it before the pandemic they continue to need access even more and will need to have the opportunity to learn from people who are in a stable, well prepared teaching force as we try to recover from the pandemic. You'll hear a discussion that will take us through some of these issues, beginning with a presentation of research on teacher shortages, but also potential solutions. And then we'll hear from some amazing panelists about the situation that districts are facing the evidence based strategies like teacher residencies that may be helpful in building a sustainable teacher pipeline. And most of the California context is relevant to the nation as a whole. We're excited to welcome our four panelists and I'm going to give you a brief preview of who you'll hear from. I'm thrilled that my friend and colleague superintendent Austin butener, who leads the Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to join us this morning he is a civic leader a philanthropist a public servant. And a business executive who has worked to make Los Angeles a stronger community. During this pandemic, you know Austin has stepped up around food for students in Los Angeles and their families around opportunities for summer school for distance learning for laptop access and connectivity, solving problems with the collaboration of educators in that district. And so we're grateful to have you here to help share this important work and give us a real time perspective on the workforce challenges you're facing right now. We'll also hear from my good friend Mary Sandy, the executive director of the California Commission on teacher credentialing. Mary is a leader with more than 25 years of experience working in education and government. She did start very young. She currently oversees policy related to teacher preparation and licensing to directs the agency that awards over 250,000 authorizations, including credentials each year. And 250 colleges, universities, and local education agencies. Mary is a visionary leader, she'll be sharing the important work the Commission has been doing to implement the recent state investments aimed at the state's ongoing shortages. In addition you'll hear from Gina Perry, who is the manager of teacher development in the Fresno Unified School District. She's been working for Fresno Unified for over 15 years as an elementary and secondary teacher instructional coach a teacher on special assignment who developed district wide professional learning and the Common Core curriculum. She's also been a coordinator for the Fresno teacher residency program, and she supports that program and general student teacher programs in partnership with Fresno State Fresno Pacific University, and National University. At least we'll hear from Geraldi Vega, an instructional coach at Young Oak Kim Academy in LA Unified. Geraldi is an alumni of the UCLA impact teacher residency program and worked in the classroom as a math teacher and a residency mentor before taking on her current role as an instructional coach. Once again, I want to thank all of our speakers for joining us today. Thank you to those of you listening. And I'll now hand it over to our wonderful researcher Desiree Carbert Thomas, who is also a policy analyst with LPI. She will be sharing research from two LPI reports, sharpening the divide how California's teacher shortages expand inequality and sustainable strategies for funding teacher residencies lessons from California Desiree take it away. Good morning. Good morning. As Linda said today, I'll be briefly sharing some key findings from two reports we've recently published. The first is sharpening the divide, which provides a district and county level analysis on California teacher shortages and the teacher workforce. And the second is sustainable strategies for funding teacher residencies written by my colleague Kathy Gunn and Karen DeMoth of prepare to teach at Bank Street College of Education. Their report includes case studies of teacher residencies here in California. And if you have any questions about either of these reports, feel free to drop them in the Q and a box and we'll try to get to them later in the sessions. So today I'll talk about California's deepening teacher shortage and what causes shortages and how shortages expand inequality. And I'll touch on some of the recent investments the state has made in the teacher workforce and the role that high quality teacher residencies can play. We analyzed the most recently available data from 2017 18 on factors that reflect and influence teacher shortages in California districts such as the percentage of beginning teachers or teacher turnover rates. These data are available in an interactive map on our website. And what this map shows is that shortages aren't uniform across the state. Some districts have a stable workforce of experienced educators, while others are contending with high turnover rates and are relying on teachers who aren't fully credentialed. At the state level, we can see that California's teacher shortage has continued to worsen when districts can't find a fully credentialed teacher. The state allows them to hire underprepared teachers to fill those positions. So this is a key indicator of shortages. This chart shows you the significant increase in the number of substandard credentials and permits issued over the past six years. These now total more than 13,000 and have tripled since 2012. If the pandemic increases demands for additional teachers to accommodate physical distancing requirements, for example, this could further exacerbate shortages for districts already struggling to find fully credentialed teachers. Perhaps most concerning emergency style permits have increased about seven times. These permits require the least teaching preparation and are growing at the fastest rate. Individuals don't need to demonstrate subject matter competency and typically are not yet even enrolled in a teacher prep program. Early indications suggest that shortages could get worse in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which case districts may continue to hire teachers on substandard credentials at even higher rates. Many California districts are interested in providing students with a teacher workforce that reflects the rich racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the state. And a wide body of research shows that being taught by a teacher of color is associated with benefits to all students with students of color, especially black students experiencing boosts in academic achievements, graduation rates and aspirations to attend college among other benefits. Currently, teachers of color make up 34% of California's teacher workforce, which exceeds the national average of 20%. However, 9% of districts have no teachers of color and about six in 10 districts have fewer than 20% teachers of color. Again, the national average. So we've talked about the state's deepening shortage. Now we'll talk about what seems to be causing it. Based on our previous research, California shortages are caused by a decline in teacher preparation enrollment, increased demand for teachers, and most significantly, teacher attrition and turnover. And I'll talk about each of these. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs has dropped precipitously, 75% in recent years. And there's been a slight uptick. Since 2013, reflecting in part, some of the significant investments the state has made to address shortages. At this rate, however, it would take another 17 years to get back to the enrollment levels we had in 2001. At the same time as teacher prep enrollments have dropped, demand for teachers is increasing. Each year, districts submit a report to the state that estimates the number of teachers they expect to hire. These estimates have increased by more than 40% in the past few years. In part, districts hire more teachers to reduce student-teacher ratios and return to stacking levels that we had before layoffs during the Great Recession. As districts hire more teachers, as districts make decisions about how to reopen schools safely, they may in fact require even more teachers and staff. The vast majority of demand is driven by teacher attrition. 9 out of 10 teachers hired are hired to replace a teacher who has left public school teaching in California. Our turnover rate in the state is 12%. That includes 9% of teachers who leave public school teaching in the state and another 3% who move to teach in another district. Our attrition rate is a bit higher than the national average and twice as high as some high-achieving school systems. These rates also vary considerably, with some school districts seeing turnover rates under 5% and others that lose more than a quarter of teachers each year. This is why it's important to understand the nature of shortages in our state, not just because they put stress on the whole education system, but because they contribute to already stark opportunity and achievement gaps for our students. Districts serving more students from low-income families have higher turnover rates. They hire more new and beginning teachers. And these teachers can certainly be an asset to a growing district, but we also know that students benefit from a stable and experienced teacher workforce. These districts also hire more teachers on substandard credentials and permits. In some of our districts serving the most students from low-income families, more than half of new hires have substandard credentials or permits. And these conditions have costs. Research points to costs of more than $20,000 to replace a teacher who leaves an urban district. Districts with the most new hires had turnover rates twice as high as districts with fewer new hires. Not only are teachers without full preparation generally worse for student outcomes, but research indicates that these teachers leave at two to three times the rates of fully prepared teachers, creating a revolving door of teachers that further contributes to shortages. All of these conditions have significant impacts on student learning. In fact, LPI conducted a study of districts in California where students of color achieved at higher levels than their peers and found that of the school level factors, the two most important predictors were teacher qualifications and experience. Specifically, the percent of teachers holding substandard credentials is significantly associated with achievement, especially for African American and Latino students. In recent years, the state has made several investments to address teacher shortages, though these were made on a one-time basis, and it takes time to see their effects. You'll get to hear from Mary Sandy in a bit about some of these investments, but one that I wanted to slide for you is the California Teacher Residency Grant Program, which the state created in 2018 in order to feed funding to residency programs throughout the state. Residencies are a model that can help to address teacher shortages and close opportunity gaps. They address shortages and targeted areas. Many residencies recruit teachers into special education, STEM subjects and bilingual education. They reduce teacher turnover by producing teachers who stay in the profession. And finally, they increase teacher diversity by providing financially feasible pathways for candidates. Nationally, 45% of residents in 2015 were people of color, more than double the national average of teachers of color. In order to achieve these outcomes, it's important that residencies are high quality. High quality residencies consist of strong partnerships between districts and universities. They tightly integrate coursework with classroom practice. They require a full year working alongside an accomplishment for teacher. They recruit diverse candidates, often in shortage areas. They provide financial support, often in exchange for commitment to teach for a certain number of years. They place cohorts of residents in teaching schools and many offer ongoing support after residents enter the teaching workforce. One example of a residency here in California is the North Coast Teacher Residency Consortium in Humboldt County. Humboldt is a primarily rural county. In 2017, 17% of teachers were new hires and nearly one in five of those was hired on a substandard credential or permit. Through the California Teacher Residency grant program that I mentioned earlier, Humboldt County Office of Ed and Humboldt State partnered to develop a special education focused residency. They recruited special education paraeducators already working in the county. These parents were able to shoot their jobs and salaries while gaining high quality clinical experience and taking aligned coursework. The inaugural cohort had 10 residents in 2019, eight of whom were paraeducators, nine of 10 of those residents were hired full time this past fall and the 10th resident is still working as a paraeducator. Funding through the Teacher Residency grant program is already beginning to make a difference. And you'll hear more from our panel about teacher residency programs such as the programs at Fresno Unified and LAUSD, which has several. We'll find more information about the research I've shared in the full reports available on our website and I'll now hand it back to Naomi who will facilitate our panel. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Desiree, for giving us that grounding in the research on teacher shortages and also on residency programs. Before we start, I want to take a minute to remind those of you in our audience that if you have any questions, please continue clicking on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Before we begin to engage in discussion, you can click the chat button and type in the chat box in the lower right side of your screen. Before we jump into our panel, let's take a moment to quickly reintroduce ourselves to our wonderful panelists. We have with us Austin Butner, who is the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mary Sandy, the executive director of the California Commission on teacher credentialing. I have here is Dr. Sarah Perry, who's the manager of teacher development at the Fresno Unified School District, and Geraldie Vega, who is an instructional coach at Young Oak Kim Academy in LA Unified. So thank you to all of our panelists for joining us. And with that, let's go ahead and dive into our first question. Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Sarah Perry, the executive director of the Los Angeles Unified School District for Superintendent Butner. I'm hoping you can provide us with some context that helps us visualize what some of the strategies we've been hearing about actually look like on the ground. LAUSD has taken a proactive approach to building up its teacher pipeline with several teacher residency programs as well as other initiatives designed to address key barriers to recruitment and retention. So I'm hoping you can provide us with some practical context and priorities. Sure. And thank you Naomi and thank you to the entire team at Learning Policy Institute for your leadership on this topic. This is, this is the ballgame for us. The quality and training preparedness of teachers in the classroom is what we build our whole enterprise on, making sure that students have that connection to their teacher. So this is the most important thing we look to on the horizon. This is what we're doing. And I'll start with the one you mentioned already, which is a teacher residency. So we have four programs now. Cal State Dominguez Hills, Northridge, Cal State LA, UCLA, trying to create a fifth at USC. Those who fall in the traditional model of a stipend living expenses and other support for students to enter these programs and we've more than 100 students in those programs. The one that we're looking to add with USC at the moment targets teachers of color in particular black males. And so we acknowledging the point that Desiree made earlier. We have to look to the diversity of workforce as well, not just the quality and capability of everybody who's in the classroom. The second thing that we're doing is to try to grow our own where possible so in complement to what we do with our university partners. We have a couple of programs we've been educators of tomorrow program where we work with high school juniors and seniors to tutor and explore the career that they might find in teaching and we help support them. If they wish to apply for TA positions post graduation. We have a district intern program where we take mid career or already working individuals who might want to transition to this field in particular for recruiting. It's hard to find credentials. I think of the math area for instance where people might realize that working with young children helping them grow and develop is actually more rewarding career than what they might have thought. They originally went into out of the university so we have that. You mentioned alternate strategies so we're looking at providing affordable housing. One of the things that we see as a barrier to recruitment and retention is the sheer cost of living in Los Angeles area. And we have teachers who commute more than two hours each way in normal times to the community they serve so the ability to live and work in the community. And to think of that as connecting the entire system of supports and creating whole communities where teachers can live and work in the community that they serve. We have connected mentors for young teachers who mentioned attrition so it's not just into the pipeline it's what are we doing to make sure that first five year gap where so much of the turnover occurs that we're connecting all of our young teachers with a mentor who can help them if they're struggling with an issue who can help them benefit from their prior experience. And then lastly and we'll talk later I think in the discussion about what the pandemic means for all of us. But we're seeing an opportunity to create partnerships with employers in the community because they've seen so much dislocation so we have an ongoing partnership now with Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce where we and they are working side by side with some of the larger organizations in Los Angeles who may see their own businesses upside down so think of the hospitality industry for the moment. We're very experienced people in those industries realize the future is not what they thought there and want to take a second or further look at what they might do in a classroom and they're bringing experience they're bringing a different set of life experiences and we can connect them with our district intern program or other residency programs to help make them great teachers. So it's a one on one is three type of thing so lots of things that we're trying I don't think anyone in particular is the answer. But if we're not all leaning in and thinking about this. We're not doing the best we can for students just looking to the horizon. This is our greatest challenge in public education. I think you know one of the things that resonated with me from your responses talking about not only the importance of identifying local drivers of barriers to recruitment and retention but also looking to partnerships as a powerful way to help address those issues. I'd like to take us now over to our next panelist Mary Sandy. I'd like to zoom up perspective here up to the 30,000 foot view and talk a little bit about what state state level initiatives have looked like. Mary you always do and such a great job at painting the big picture of state efforts to build the teacher pipeline. Can you describe some of the state's recent investments and teacher recruitment and retention what the outcomes have been, and whether you've seen areas of promise. Thank you Naomi and thank you to the Learning Policy Institute for your continued really careful work in this area. So California over the last five years has invested more than $300 million in to build new preparation pathways and to incentivize teacher recruitment. So, as you may or may not know, in the national audience, most of California teachers complete their preparation post-baccalaureate after they earn their BA degree, either in a one year student teaching based program or in a one to two year intern based program. So one of our earliest investments was $10 million to develop undergraduate pathways, particularly focused on recruitment of STEM teachers and special education teachers. This investment led to the creation of more than 90 new pathways, distinct pathways across our 80 institutions that prepare teachers. We had in our first program year last year 400 candidates enrolled in these programs and more than half of them identified self-identified as Hispanic or Latinx, about 25% white. So we're seeing a greater diversity in the population of prospective teachers coming through these pathways. Another $5 million was set aside for the Center for Teaching Careers, a center that provides a menu of supports for prospective teachers who are seeking programs for graduates who are seeking jobs for employers who are recruiting for new teachers. They kind of are a switchboard in California for resources, one stop resources. They have a website CaliforniaTeach.org that you can take a look at at your leisure. $50 million was set aside specifically for local solution grants. This was for school districts that needed to have different kinds of incentives that they could fund to recruit already fully prepared teachers. Up to $20,000 per teacher was set aside specifically for recruitment of special education and STEM credential holders. The funding was available for just over 3,600 participants. And most of the grants were being used for loan repayment or service scholarships. Those are the largest uses that districts put these funds to. They also had signing bonuses, stipends for special education teachers, professional learning community development, et cetera. So this was very much a local response initiative. Another $45 million was set aside for a very successful program targeting classified school employees. We were able to fund 44 local education agencies to support the preparation of 2,200, a little over 2,200 classified staff as they made their way toward a teaching credential. So far, 770 of them have done so and they're more in the pipeline and that continues to be a very productive local program for recruitment. About a third of the classified staff participating in the program, self-identify as Hispanic or Latinx and just over a quarter self-identify as white. So again, this is offering some diversity opportunity. We have the great opportunity this year or in the last couple of years to spend $125 million for the development of teacher residences. We had 38 grants that went out to local education agencies to partner with institutions of higher education in their region. The funds were split mostly evenly across special education and STEM. 33 of these programs are brand new. Some of them were grants to expand existing programs. Last year we had more than 200 residents enrolled in these programs. Just under half of them in special education, the resting STEM or seeking bilingual certification. Again, almost half of these participants self-identify as Hispanic or Latinx, 25% white, another opportunity to recruit locally for diversity. The final program I want to highlight here was the Golden State Teacher Grant program that was initially established last year with an investment of $90 million to provide up to $20,000 in financial aid to candidates who were enrolled in teacher preparation and agreed to serve for five years in schools experiencing chronic shortages. The funding was reduced this year to $15 million and focusing specifically on special education, but that's an important new part of our infrastructure. So take away here, these programs together address both short-term immediate needs for recruitment and long-term infrastructure development for us. Between the classified and local solutions grants alone, the state supported the recruitment of 4,500 teachers. The Golden State Teacher Grant will support an additional 700 special education teachers. That program is available right now. The undergraduate and residency programs are investing in and growing our infrastructure for the preparation of teachers. Residency programs in particular are significantly developing local education agency capacity to partner with teacher preparation programs. This turns out to be fairly critical. With that, I just simply like to say this is, we're experiencing shortages of funding at the moment. We were expecting this year to more than double those investments. COVID has interrupted that, but it's fairly certain that these programs will continue to be available. And as we come out from under the economic cloud of COVID, I will have the opportunity to expand them and continue to invest in bringing a more diverse teaching force into our schools. So I'll turn it back to you. Thank you, Mary. I think what's really powerful about what you're describing is just what can be and has been done with the state's prior investments in addressing teacher shortages. And I think it's a really nice lead-in to our next speaker, Gina Perry, who's going to help us do a deep dive into one of those strategies into teacher residencies. Gina, you've been deeply invested as a program leader in Fresno Unified's teacher residency program since its inception. Can you describe the program, how it got started, how you've been able to grow it, and what it looks like now? Absolutely. So the conversation actually started way before our residency program started between our superintendent and the dean at Fresno State University. And they had to have very transparent conversations. And one of the things that came forward is we need to stop blaming each other and really come together of like, how are we going to fix this? How are we going to better our pre-service experience so they're coming prepared to teach in the Fresno Unified context? And one of the things that surfaced from that conversation that has shifted all of our thinking is that for the university, they have the pre-service candidates for 16 to 18 months, but for the district, we have them for 30-year careers. That's our hope. And so we want to make sure that when we're preparing them, we're preparing them as a district is the end user, which then led to truly being able to have collaborative conversations around what a partnership is. And they started that by having partnership walks and they calibrated on what was expected of teachers within the Fresno Unified context using our California standards for the teaching profession and also rubrics from the university. And this happened across multiple universities. Then what we like to call it is it shifted even further when we got the Bechtel grant and the teacher-quality partnership grant, which then built the Fresno Teacher Residency. And that's where it began. We started with an emphasis on STEM, but when we acquired the CTC grant, we moved into special education and bilingual teachers. And the three objectives for all of these grants have been to recruit diverse teachers to make sure that we are training them and preparing them to work in Fresno Unified and that we are retaining them and building them as teacher leaders within our district. And so the residency was a part of a larger picture and that is our pipeline programs that we offer in Fresno Unified. In Fresno Unified, we have the teacher academy, which starts at the high school level. Once those candidates graduate at the high school level, they can move into a para-academy or grow to teach. And once they have their bachelor's, they can move into the residency program. And then we have teacher leader opportunities such as national board certification, which we currently have some residents entering into that. And then in induction, we have full-time release coaches and we have three current graduates that are induction coaches, so they're moving into leadership positions. And really what the residency has helped us do is recruit teachers of color. We have 86% is our average for residency program with our retention rate after more than three years of teaching, being at 88% retention. Right now, currently, through our pipeline programs, we are hiring, through all of our pipeline, 52% of our new hires come from our pipeline programs in teacher development. And so we have to have a very close partnership with our universities, but also with human resource within the district as well, to know who is it that we need to have in spaces with students, what are our shortage areas, and then how do we hire strategically to ensure that students are getting the best teachers in front of them. Thank you, Gina. What I'm hearing is that Fresno is not only taking an evidence-based approach to recruiting and retaining teachers, preparing them, but you're seeding it within a much more broad spectrum of grow your own initiatives to tap into your existing positions you have in the district and take people who live there, who want to be there, and moving them into teaching positions, teaching preparation. I'd like to do a little bit more digging into Fresno Unified before we move on to our next set of questions. One of the things we lift up about your program in our residency report is the district's very intentional effort to weave its residency into its whole school improvement work. So can you tell us what the rationale was behind that work and what the emerging outcomes have been? Absolutely. So we start actually before they even begin the residency experience in early, in late May and early June, by introducing them to the district where we work on, you know, how do you engage with kids, what are the expectations of the district, what are our, we work with human resource and how to engage with kids, professionalism, growth mindset, all of those great traits that we want our teachers to have. Then what we do is we start with a, what we call our speed dating event, where our mentors get to meet their residents for the first time and they actually have a hand in choosing who they'd like to host in their classroom and that gives our mentor teachers ownership. Then at the end of July, before teachers start, because every school starts at a different date, we want to make sure that we introduce them and that's our mentor night. And on that night, they get introduced to their residents, who they're going to host in their classroom, and it's always the university and the district in space together, talking about expectations, norms, co-teaching and the experience they're going to have for the remainder of the year. With that, we move into the school sites now, so that the residents start before kids even start. So they're with their mentor teacher at a school site. And what's important about this experience is that we actually cluster our residents. We cluster them in very large groups to be at one site. And that came about when we started our NGEI grant, where we actually clustered 25 residents onto one elementary school site. And we did that intentionally because we wanted to see the impact of what it would mean to have one mentor all year long at one school site. And what we found from that experience was that our students were growing academically in both mathematics and in English language arts and in our district assessments, but also in state assessments. And this was over a two year period. And so we saw great gains from that academically. What we ended up doing after the two years is saying, okay, now we've got to take this onto other school sites. Now, let me hear at the school site was not very happy with us for that move. But what we did then was we said, okay, this doesn't just have to live in residency, because we also house student teachers. We can also do this with a regular student teachers. And so now what we do is we cluster at sites both residencies and regular student teachers coming through the general pathways. That's great. Thank you. I'm hearing that, you know, not only do you treat you treat your teacher candidates or residents like they are key members of staff, and not just trainees but that you also view them as key players and efforts to improve your students from day one when they enter your schools. So I think that's really nice preview or lead into the question for Geraldine. Geraldine you were a resident in UCLA's impact program you lived and breathe that experience. So what I'm hoping to hear from you is whether you can describe your path into the residency program give us some information on how it was structured and what you found impactful about your residency. Okay, yes, I want to. So I'm going to start with my path to residency. I was an undergrad at UCLA it was a math major. I finished my second year. My course was trying to get a little bit more difficult I began really doubting my ability to be a university. I was even considering dropping out at some point, and only because I just was getting all wrong with not being the top student that I used to be back in high school. But luckily that summer I took a course called Mexican American schooling, and I felt like that was my story. I learned about how students of color struggle, and not because of their abilities, but because of the bigger systemic issues we have. And that began my hunger to learn more. I couldn't believe that was barely stumbling across kind of courses, which is on the final I'm so thankful that now I think studies and for card in high school, because I had a week to college to kind of get to And so I can continue searching for these type of courses which led me to the education studies minor, and then that's how I learned about the UCLA impact urban residency program which became my goal after that I knew I wanted to pursue that program. My program, the way of the structure, it's an impact teacher urban residency program which in its name itself you know it's titled to teaching an urban school, and they also have a commitment to social justice. So that really like resonated with me and this program in particular is a residency program that the year and a half long. And you get your preliminary teaching credential and a master's in education. And I was paired with my mentor, a few weeks before the USD school year started. So, I met up with my mentor. We planned the class, we organized the classroom we decorate it. So really got to see everything that it takes from day one if you don't just come into the classroom and it's already that for you like there's a lot of work that goes into that intention about how you put your desk where you put certain things. All that thinking was amazing to see for me like wow this is like what you really do you don't just come in. And then I got to see the whole year I was there working with her I took over two classes at some point I was in charge the teacher in charge of two classes. And just like Gina had mentioned with her what they do with personal I choose introduced as a teacher from day one. I really own that. My mentor introduced me to the entire school stuff I was welcomed by everyone by our principal there. And one of the things that helped me be successful during my first year of teaching was everything that I learned that I saw being there every day with the students with the faculty everything I took all those into place with me when I started the school year I introduced myself to everyone I knew the things that I needed to do to get me a good start my first year of teaching. And one of the things about this recipe program as well is that I did receive a grant it was about $10,000 for my to cover tuition costs. And that was huge for me, I was already in debt from my undergrad. And so the fact that this was going to cover most of my master, I was like, really thankful for that and I probably would have reconsidered had I not received that much financial aid because I wouldn't have wanted to go into more debt. And also, it does require the commitment like the three year commitment to teaching in an urban school. And that's, you know, that was really important in also keeping here in L usd because I'm from Santa Ana, which is in Orange County. So I could have looked like we may be gone back to you know my community where I grew up, but la usd and it'll be coming my second home. Seeing there I did my undergrad in LA, and then I started this master's program again in LA so I ended up staying because of that three year requirement and I just wanted to keep calling it home. So that was like really important. And one of the most impactful things about this residency program. Like I mentioned, it really gives you an all coincide of what it takes to create a safe learning environment from the beginning it's not just a great lesson teaching is a lot more than that. And I think that some of the numbers that Desiree mentioned earlier, why we don't have maybe we have some big dropout rate just because like if teachers are only seeing observing a future for three weeks observing it's nothing like being in live in action. And the day to day like you get to be in the classroom you might make mistakes so then you have your mentor right there supporting you and you adjust immediately for the next class that you teach so you get to make adjustments within your day you don't have to wait an entire year to learn and grow and be better. So those things were the most impactful because as a new teacher I knew that when I started my first year and I struggled, I knew that I can see persistent mutation, because with dedication time work and not getting up adjusting. Eventually things are working out and lining up. And then that's what gives me hope like I knew that it could be done because I did it with my mentor. So I would be working at it asking questions thinking for health and not give up, and those little things like that that you wouldn't get to see other way is what really helped me I think be successful in my years of teaching. Thank you for that description of what your residency program was like and what I'm hearing or there's sort of two big categories of things that were really helpful in your residency program both the depth and breadth of your preparation and that close mentorship and clinical experience all the professional learning stuff that you got, but also the just the financial support which opened the door for you to get into that that professional learning space and into the teaching profession. Next question is for you to now instead of talking about sort of what your prep was like I'd like to hear more about what you're doing now so after several years in the classroom as a math teacher. You became a teacher leader, first as a residency mentor while you were teaching and then most recently stepped into becoming an instructional coach. So what motivated and prepared you to take on those roles. So, while I was teaching. I got to work during my seven and a half years teaching I can work with three student teachers. During that time, I began mentoring during my fourth year of teaching, which if you kind of think about that is pretty cool for me because my perception of how long you needed to be a mentor was maybe 10 plus year 15 years and that's great. And the fact that like I was asked to come in at the fourth year teacher was really awesome because like you can start building your online alumni cohort very early on, and then after that I still has three more during my seven years of teaching. And one of the reasons I motivated to be a mentor was because I wanted to get back to my program I had such a great experience there. And the program really I felt supported me in my years of teaching that I wanted to be able to do to that fact I was nervous to taking on I wasn't right away like I'm excited to be a mentor because again I didn't feel like I was ready. But because it wasn't a program asking for me so you know what I could do it I could do it I'm going to be do my best I'm just going to have someone else to reflect like so that was one of the reasons I motivated me. And I just really loved it because you get to work with another person who's just as passionate of you to another adult in the classroom. My students only benefit and the fact that they're there will be the entire year. That's why my students can benefit if I only had someone for like a week or two. I don't know how much impact I would really have on my students. I really love this model of the whole year that I get to work with someone help them develop season girl and then they help me as well because they're bringing in the latest from their program their education program so I'm getting to hear everything. And then as a mentor. We all we have like monthly meeting so when we all met up with our student teachers and we have professional development. I feel like during these like three years of me being a mentor, it's almost like I was still continuing an education program, because I was still still embedded and reflecting and learning and applying these strategies and growing. So that was like one of the things that really motivated me to continue being a mentor. And then one of the other things I wanted to mention was that as an instruction to coach the reason I decided to be an instruction to coach that I didn't want to leave the classroom I love the classroom and I love working with other teachers. But I think I realized that maybe I can impact more teachers and more students at the same time is I took on this role of being an instructional coach. And so far, I mean my second semester of being an instructional coach, and it's been such a great learning experience and I have pushed myself to work with teachers. Most recently, our PD just this past Monday, I got a group of eight team lead teachers and my team lead group, we presented to our faculty, our digital citizenship plan. And just the feeling that after this presentation that we had after this PD, my group of teachers were saying they felt so empowered that it felt so great to like present this to their colleagues. The feedback we got, we got from our survey. It was just like such a great plan PD I love hearing teacher voices. It was amazing so the fact that this was so I was able to do this online with them. It kind of validated the point that I'm in the right place I want to continue doing this and in that way impact even more students through working with a group of teachers. Thank you. I mean it sounds like you're the preparation you got when you were a teacher candidate prepped you not just to work in the classroom effectively with students but also later on to work with teachers as a teacher leader so I appreciate that perspective. I want to take a little bit of a turn now we heard from our registrants. Those of you in our audience that you wanted to learn more about the pandemic implications for the educator workforce. So the next couple of questions are going to create some space for us to explore those issues. This question's for you, Mary. The impacts of COVID-19 have been felt far and wide across families communities and institutions. What are you seeing in terms of the pandemic's effects on teacher preparation. And what do you think the key challenges might be in the months ahead. As we all know well in our own practice COVID-19 has had it has overturned everybody's apple cart. Every educator at every sector is working on their pivot. How do we, how do we keep our operation going how do we keep contact with students. And these are very big questions so in the teacher preparation space that the biggest challenge we're seeing right now is finding placements for student teachers and we just the commission just to release the letters signed by our state superintendent our state board president mother darling Hammond and our chair really underscoring the need for partnerships and the need to keep a pipeline of teachers coming in. This is clinical work teachers have to be prepared to some kind of clinical exposure to young children they can't or to the students are going to teach they can't get there without that. So while districts are very absorbed right now and just making sure that all of their systems are go, finding a space for the teaching force and training is critical. Turns out, I think that residency as a structured model are ideal for this moment just as there will be has been saying that you know the opportunity to spend this time for a whole year reinventing practice with a whole new set of assumptions is just critically important. In addition, the student teachers come in as an extra set of hands, teachers who are doing their work in Zoom with breakouts groups, etc. To have student teachers with their skill sets coming in to work with you synchronously and asynchronously huge opportunities. But we do understand that there have been there have been some challenges some student teaching programs are telling me that they have to make 40 phone calls to get one placement. The bottom line, however, is that the stronger the partnership between an LEA and their preparation partners, the easier it is, the smoother this pathway is and that really is an important I think take away from this conversation that if we have good strong partnerships we're going to be able to maintain this work. And this is really a critical time for that. Thanks, Mary. I think once again partnerships come up as being being something really critically important that came up and I'm superintendent butener and your opening remarks to the first question. And I think it just continues to show your response Mary that partnerships continue to be really deeply important right now in the current moment. So panelist questions for you superintendent butener, as someone who leads the second largest district in the country. Can you talk a bit more about key staffing challenges that districts may encounter in the coming months because of the pandemic, and what you think might be needed to mitigate those challenges. I'll start with the most important which is we have to make sure whatever we're doing at a school, it's safe and appropriate. Safety first, and I've made a pledge to all of our educators I wouldn't ask them to do anything that I myself wouldn't do. And that includes being in a safe environment at a school. I've adopted a set of practices which I think helps at the best possible standard in schools. It's not just the cleaning and the sanitizing and the social distancing and the masks. But it's a system of testing for coven and being able to follow up to identify quickly and isolate those who may have tested positive, keep them from spreading the virus to others and partnerships are an important part of that as you mentioned to me. Three great universities Stanford Johns Hopkins UCLA to biotech companies to health insurers, one tech giant and a partridge in a pear tree it's taking all we can find to bring that because it's not what schools normally do but in a pandemic. It's our responsibility to make sure first and foremost that everybody's kept safe. The second is training training training, and it was great to hear to all dimension training and the new tools and technologies I find every time I visit a classroom. If it was just two weeks ago, the world's changed about every two weeks. And I'd love to have that conversation, but we took three different opportunities to try to give every educator a chance to be trained about how to use the tools and technologies how to engage students online, starting with in March, while students continued to learn all 35,000 of our credentialed educators participated in learning about the tools and technologies we did it again in the summer, where we not only gave an opportunity for students but we learned and we piloted some very different things for instance, for middle school students. We created a class together with fender where 1000 students received a free guitar and our teachers led instruction online and they continue to participate. By the time January rolls around will now have a total about 5000 students enrolled and someday when we're back together we're going to bring those students and their teachers to the Hollywood Bowl and it'll be magic. But we're finding ways to use the tools and technologies differently. We in Snapchat created a partnership with Alicia Keys where students can be met where they are. So Alicia Keys talks about a book the students can download it for free with the technology we provided and some funding that we've raised from philanthropy. And I might start a book club but I got to admit for our high schoolers Alicia Keys talking about something she's read and connecting to the lives of students, I think is a little more authentic to our students. We might be proactive and make sure that the conditions are right and the people are trained, but we're also mindful that in this environment. We don't know what the next month or the next six months look like whether there are more retirements, whether people can't put themselves or choose not to put themselves in risk, as we might have a number of early students. We don't know that we have to plan for that and as we think about the pipeline therefore going forward. We need as much flexibility as we've ever had to make sure that we have substitutes who can support teachers, as we think about what hybrid return to schools might mean that needs more expertise more people to help the breakout rooms, that might be in a classroom and helping students who might be online at the same time. So the complexity of what is happening in a classroom has grown enormously just in six months. And so we're finding if we can do everything we can to keep it safe, keep training and sharing ideas and practice we created a YouTube channel of our own, just to help classroom educators share practice with each other. Because in this time, it can't wait for some of the traditional approaches, bring it back refine it, think about the next school year as a time for training and again to pick up under all these point. This is a real time exercise so we can provide real time feedback of what's working, or where the challenges are, each one of our classroom education is going to be better positioned to help their students. Thank you for that superintendent butener. I think, you know, my, my colleagues at LP I know have been working really hard in the background to answer many of your questions through the Q amp a box, but we'd like to turn now to panelists Q amp a we probably only have one time for one question, because the discussion has been so rich and thank you to our panelists for that. This question is for, you know, Mary, Gina, Dralde, if you want to comment on this superintendent butener spoke to how coven is impacting L usd. I wonder if any of you might be able to speak to this question as well as it's, you know, it's come up in our Q amp a what impact has coven had on teacher retention, and some of the pipeline programs that you're working on. Maybe Gina you could take a first stab at that question. Yeah, for us, and the planning started in April, like, once we're going to shut down it was like okay we don't know if we're coming back or not, what are we going to do. Because what we had was immediately we had people dropping out of the program, we had applied, have been interviewed, been accepted, and now they've lost their jobs and they can't continue in residence. So we went into, we've got to be prepared to be in the space for the long call. And so we started to recruit our mentor teachers and the selling was like Mary said earlier, it's a second set of hands, but we knew it had to be more than that and so we started recreating our co teaching handbook. And this is sort of in the weeds of the work but it was important because they needed to have concrete examples of what that virtual space was going to look like with those second pair of hands. And so we went in and I'll just give you a brief example, what does parallel teaching look like online. That's a co teaching strategy, you'll have one on one room teaching one thing, and then you'll have the resident in the other room teaching the same thing. So there had to be a lot of co planning happening as well too. So we had these definite and concrete examples we recreated our entire handbook, and at that meet your mentor night that we talked about earlier. And that was where we introduced everything to everyone. We did have to do a lot of recruiting at the very end because we did have residents dropping and then we also had to recruit mentor teachers that said this is too much for me. I'm in a space that I don't even know what I'm doing I can't teach others how to do it and we used it as a space where that's great because that means you're going to have a lot of think allows, and new teachers need to hear that it's not just magic right. There's a lot of work that goes into it and they need to know what that is. Thank you Gina. I at this point I want to acknowledge that this very rich discussion has taken us to the full hour. That's allotted for this webinar. So unfortunately we don't have any more time for other questions but to those of you who asked questions that we weren't able to get to during the webinar. I hope that you will follow up with us and we'll do our best to follow up with you and the coming days. Thank you again to our presenters to everybody who shared your time and your expertise and your energy with us. So before we close out I'd like to again thank all of our speakers those of you who have joined us for this webinar. I'd also like to extend our gratitude once again to our co sponsors the California partnership for the future of learning. The California teacher residency lab ed prep lab the Education Trust West and bank streets prepared to teach a recording of this webinar as well as all the resources we share today will be sent out to everyone via email. So access the slides for this webinar at the link in the chat box. And finally, I'd like to mention that when you exit a survey will appear in your window, and we'd appreciate your feedback and with that. Thank you again to everyone and we hope you all have a wonderful day.