 Well, good afternoon and welcome everyone. My name is Tyler Livingston. I work for the Minnesota Department of Education. Our team supports a number of educator effectiveness issues, including efforts to increase and diversify the teacher workforce. On behalf of the Department of Education, I want to thank our co-planers for this session, New America, and the Coalition to Increase Teachers of Color and American Indian Teachers in Minnesota. I want to express a deep amount of gratitude to all of our panelists and particularly our student panelists during today's session. And thank you to everyone for spending some time with us this afternoon to talk about approaches to grow your own. This week's session focusing on opportunities for our secondary students. So before we dive in, some session logistics. I want to let you know that this session is being recorded. We will be able to send a link to the recording as well as any resources like the PowerPoint that we share during the presentation for those who are interested in those pieces. Give us a few days to dot the I's and cross the T's and we'll be sure everyone who registered will receive a direct email providing that link to the recording and feel free to share it as you will. If you have questions during the event, there is a chat box if you hover on your screen and find the chat icon, you can open that up and feel free to send questions either to a New America who's coordinating the session today or to everyone. Last week we had a vigorous supportive community within the chat field itself while we were also walking through the presentation. So look forward to that here tonight as well. Next slide, please. So I referred to, in front of you, you see there is an agenda. We're right there in the welcome and overview and which Amaya Garcia will take over in a little bit here. My colleague Shelly will overview some of the prerequisites for concurrent enrollment programs. And then we have two sets of panel discussions before we wrap up and talk about some next steps for Minnesota. Next slide. Last week we had a session focusing on grow your own strategies and pathways for adults. And we talked about a lot of the work that Minnesota has to do and it is a lot of work. And we use this slide to summarize that work. Today we're focusing on students and pathways that students can pursue to explore teaching and work toward becoming a licensed teacher. A comment from this slide, in particular, the focus area, the fourth bullet here, we know that if we want to have today's students become tomorrow's teachers, we need to create spaces in our schools that are culturally responsive and inclusive and sustaining. And so that work can happen right now while our students are in pre-K through high school. And if you'd advance the slide one notch, our friends at the Minnesota Education Equity Partnership created this really clear graphic that takes away the jargon a little bit of educator workforce and talks about a teacher's journey. Like what does it take for a person to explore teaching? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for you? How would I find out and learn about teaching? To the next stage in the journey, becoming a teacher, participating in a teacher prep program or an alternative pathway to teaching. The growth step, I now have my license and how am I supported in those early career stages through mentoring and induction. And then finally, as a teacher, how do I begin to thrive in this profession? How can I continue to thrive in this profession? So that journey from left to right is a really attractive prospect for us to be thinking about in the whole career arc of a teacher. And then today I wanted to situate ourselves, and if you'd click once, you will see a little pop up here. Today we really are talking about that first step, exploring the profession and providing avenues to just learn about teaching and is it a good fit for me and what is teaching? And in some of these pathways for students, they also include some concurrent enrollment or dual credit opportunities to get started on that journey. Next slide, please. So we're talking about secondary students and we wanted to think about who are secondary students and what do they currently think about teaching? You can see on this slide the racial and ethnic diversity of students in Minnesota has changed in the last 20 years and it's changed before that as well. And if you'd click once more, you can see how the students of color and American Indian students break down into different racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota. This is data from this year. So Minnesota has 893,000 students. And excuse me, some of my own slides are in the way, 65% of those students identify as white and 35% currently identify as students of color or American Indian students. Now, what I really wanted to bring to you today is Minnesota students and their career goals or exploration and I just could not find that data for you today. But I have something that I hope will approximate, it's some national data. On the next slide, you'll see a graph that comes to us actually from the ACT. They do have some items asking students about their career goals or their aspirations. And one item they ask is for those students who are very sure or fairly sure about what they want to major in when they go to college. They gave them 19 different majors. What do you really want to major in? And you can see a trend that's concerning here. What was once a pretty popular major, a career in education, is falling down this list and consistently placing eighth in student ranking in most recent years. On the next slide, some more information from the ACT. They looked at all in 2015, they did a deeper dive study. Well, what does this really mean? What does this really look like for us? And the demographics, it's a little hard to read that table. It took me a couple tries when I was looking at it. That first row on the table is everyone who took the ACT that year and the racial, ethnic, demographic breakdown. And then it looked at, well, who from those groups indicated that they were interested in a career in education? And so one key finding we could take away is of those who indicated that they would like to be future educators. An outsized majority of those were white students in 2015. It did not have the same demographic makeup of those who took the ACT exam. So nationally, we have some work to do to share with students the opportunity, particularly students of color, the opportunities that are in the education field. And then finally, if you advance to the next slide, they also asked, and this slide gives me a lot of hope. They asked those students, well, what were your reasons for being interested in education? And you can see the top reasons that students provided. And at this point where I'll begin to transition to Amaya, I think if we build, grow your own programs, if we build experiences to help students, high school students, explore this profession that we love of teaching, we can tap into these things that students see as valuable. The working with kids inspired by their own teacher, passion for a subject area and wanting to make a difference. One thing lots have been said about every generation we've all been alive in. And one thing that's said about this generation is how interested they are in social justice and awareness and changing the world. So I think that's an opportunity for us to tap into. With that, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Amaya Garcia. Amaya is the deputy director of PK through 12 at New America. And she has been researching and writing about grow your own programs and policies across the nation for the past four years. Thank you, Tyler. Before I get started, we're just going to do a quick zoom poll to get a sense of where everyone is in their GEO journey. So we'll just spend about a minute letting you fill that out, and then we'll take a look at the results. So we have about a third who are still learning about GEO, about a third who already operated GEO program, and then a mix of early development, established partnerships, and identified funding streams, so who are kind of in the process of starting that work. That's great. Angela, you can advance to the next slide. And then the next one, please. So when we think about grow your own, what do we mean? Grow your own is a highly localized strategy. That's something that's really come across in the past four years as we've been setting these initiatives around the country. And so about two years ago, we brought together a group of GEO experts to try to help us come up with the definition of what we mean when we talk about grow your own. So the definition that we came up with is that grow your own are partnerships between educator preparation programs, school districts, and community organizations that recruit and prepare local community members, such as high school students, fair educators, and parents, to enter the teaching profession and teach in their communities. So for us, a big part of the way we think about grow your own is that these are programs for the community and grounded in the needs of the community. Next slide, please. So why would we want to start with high school students? High school students are seen as an attractive pool of potential teachers who will be invested in returning to teach in their home communities. And if you think about it, part of that is because they want to see change happen in the local communities, as Tyler alluded to, in regard to the social justice passion that many students have. Some studies suggest that early recruitment of middle and high school students is a more effective strategy than pulling from adult populations. And states across the country have created teacher academy programs and other pathways into teaching for high school students. Washington State, for example, has a teacher academy program called Recruiting Washington Teachers, and they specifically target their recruitment efforts towards students who are underrepresented in teaching. So they enroll about 81% students of color. And recently, they also started a special bilingual initiative that's aimed at expanding the pipeline of bilingual teachers by starting with the recruitment of high school students. Pathways to Teaching, which is another program which was developed by Dr. Margarita Bianco, who we are lucky enough to be joined by today, similarly places strong emphasis on encouraging students of color to pursue a teaching career. These efforts are important because of the data that Tyler shared and also other national trends in teacher preparation enrollment. Since 2010, we've seen enrollment in teacher prep declined by more than one third, and the number of students who complete a teacher preparation program has also declined. Moreover, we see enrollment declines among Black, Latinx, Native, Hawaiian, Pacific Islanders, American Indian, and Alaska Native teacher candidates as well. Next slide, please. So we tried to take a look at what Growerone looks like across the country to really get a sense of what's happening. And so what we found is that states across the country are facing teacher shortages in key subject areas such as STEM, bilingual ed, special education, but also grappling with the lack of racial and linguistic diversity in the educator workforce. GUIO is a widely embraced strategy for addressing both of these issues and most states have at least one GUIO program, but tremendous variety exists in program design and strategy. Pathways for high school students are the most common form of Growerone program across the country. A total of 47 states, plus the District of Columbia, offer at least one type of program to expose Growerone high school students to careers in education. Many of these programs are offered through career and technical education or as concurrent moment. And then there's a subset that are more like future teacher clubs that are just sort of trying to get kids interested but aren't necessarily providing some of that hands-on learning that happens in other programs. However, we can say nationally there is also a lack of programs that create a full pathway from high school through college and into a teaching career. We also lack data on how many high school students enrolled in these programs actually go on to become teachers. So as a field, as educators, as researchers we have some work to do to making sure that once we get them interested in high school that we're creating opportunities for them to go to college and earn their degree and come back to the district to teach. Now we're gonna move to our first panel which is gonna be moderated by Dr. Elena Silva and we are gonna be joined by high school pathway program leaders from both within Minnesota and outside of Minnesota. And so we're excited to hear from them. Thank you, Elena. Thank you, Amaya. And thank you, Shelly. That was great to just to hear that rundown. We at New America, I'm the director of pre-K-12 education at New America. I work closely with Amaya and she and I and others at New America are trying to grow our own teachers all over the country. So it's wonderful to be with all of you here representing Minnesota. We're trying to do this nationwide and we're trying to do it in a number of ways. And so one thing I just wanna mention before we go into this is that New America has this effort to network programs, GYO programs, educator programs. And then we also have a youth apprenticeship initiative which is called the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship. And those are high school students. It's particularly relevant to this part of GYO. Those are high school students who are employed, paid employees by employers. And so employers are partnering with districts and with higher education. So it's a triangle if you think about those three pieces. And we actually have one of our network members on the youth apprenticeship side is in Minnesota, the LEAP program, LEAP initiative for the Project for Pride and Living. So many of you folks may know them. That's not specifically an educator pathway. So to be clear, the youth apprenticeship work, there are a couple of network members we work with that do educator pathways, but the Minnesota one is not and most of them are not. So there's this question of how these worlds are colliding all of these efforts to try to get high school students to both college and career ready. And in particular, this educator pathway and how would we do that? So I mentioned the youth apprenticeship because it also just keeps coming up as one of these other models for us to consider. So I'm gonna start in here because we've got a great lineup of folks. I don't know that all of the folks have been able to join. So I'm just going to start. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves. If I could, I'd like to start Dr. Margarita Bianco, you founded Pathways to Teaching. And I know folks, some folks may know it, others not, but this is a pre-collegiate high school program aimed at getting more students of color to move into teaching as a career. Would be great to just hear your story about the work you're doing and the knowledge that you've started to gain. And I'll from there, move on to you, Grisel Escobeda is someplace and I'd be great to have you just follow directly after Dr. Bianco, if that's possible. Well, good afternoon, everybody. And thank you so much for this invitation. I'm really thrilled to be here, especially thrilled to share the platform with one of our Pathways to Teaching instructors and students who will be on the panel later. So I wanna talk a little bit about what prompted me to start Pathways to Teaching and then I'll tell you a little bit about the program. So what prompted me was first as I'm first generation identify as multiracial Puerto Rican Latina. And so what prompted me in thinking about my own experiences, I never had a teacher of color in K through 12, right? The only people that I saw that looked like me, Latina women in schools were either serving food or cleaning the bathroom. So becoming a teacher wasn't something that I didn't see anybody who looked like me in that position. So it wasn't something that I ever really thought about. And then really even through my college trajectory from undergrad through my doctoral work, I only had two or three faculty of color. So my personal experience certainly influenced why I developed the program. So about Pathways to Teaching, I spent about two years really thinking through and reading and researching all I could about what inspires or encourages individuals of color to become teachers. And I used that knowledge to create this program. So Pathways to Teaching was explicitly created to encourage high school students of color to consider becoming teachers. Now, one of the things that was mentioned in the slides earlier, there were lists of things that students have said about why they wanna become teachers and that they've been encouraged to become teachers by teachers. That's not true for many students of color. So the research will bear out that for many students of color, they're not ever encouraged to become a teacher and especially not encouraged by their teachers. And so that's why Pathways to Teaching was really important to me as well. Given that many students of color don't always have a real positive experience in school and the research bears that out as well, it's really hard to try to convince a young person of color, especially young man, to become a teacher and come back to the same space that hasn't been welcoming or kind to you. So I've taken what I know about the experiences students have in school and tried to help young people understand those systems of oppression that happen. And I've been, quite frankly, racist systems in school that push them out. And so I try to have students really understand that and unpack that and encourage them to become teachers to come back to their community, to write some of those wrongs in and for their communities. The curriculum is all grounded in critical race theory. So it's really very research-based in terms of what we do, how we do it and why we do it. We now have a paraprofessional certificate. So students can take three classes to earn a parapro certificate. We have programs all over the country, started in Colorado, we've got programs in Duluth, Eden Prairie and Burnsville in Minnesota, but all through the country as well. So I'm gonna make sure that everybody has my contact information and I'll upload a flyer for people as well. And I'm happy to answer questions later. But again, thanks so much for allowing me to be here today. Okay, so my name is I work at St. Claude State. I am the coordinator for recruitment and retention for teachers from diverse background. I started, we started our concord and enrollment for education courses. I wanna say back in fall of 2017, and our focus was definitely to recruit students of color into the field of education. We have since kind of branched out a little, we have a day of an educator where we invite multiple districts to come and bring their students and the students get to visit our campus, take a few kind of like mock classes, like half an hour classes of education and then really get to know other students in the area who are interested in education. And we also have our future teacher academy, which we have partnered with St. Claude School District. And that is a student takes a concord and enrollment. So they take a class to get credit. They get college credit as well as high school credit. And they also get to come to campus and live on our dorms for a week. This happens in the summer. We were very successful the first year we ran it. The second year we couldn't have the camp due to COVID. So we instead did a book club where we chose the book stamped and we read it with our students to talk about racism and some of the systematic things that we have to deal with. And then this year, COVID permitting, we will be running the camp again on campus and the students get to explore what college life is like for a week. They get to take a class, they get to live in the dorm. So we really feel like that has been a really successful program because for many of these students, this will be the first time they ever step into a college campus. So I'm happy to share my information as well. And I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. And I know just that you are half of the partnership with St. Claude area school district. So just for a moment, I wanna see if, I don't know if Mr. Muhammad has been able to join. I think initially he wasn't able to. So just wanna give a moment and see if he's here. I don't think he was able to make it in. I think he texted me. So, but I'm happy to answer any of the questions from the district perspective as well or put you in contact with him. Thank you so much. That's wonderful. So just to move along, let's go to Dr. Josh Starr. Josh, you have spent much of your career in districts as a district superintendent in various places. But for the past five years or so, you've been leading PDK. If you could tell us a little bit about that and specifically educators rising, which is a key part of its work and is trying to get high schoolers into teaching. Yeah. So first, thank you for inviting me here. I gotta tell you, it is just inspiring to hear how so many folks are coming at this from different angles. And I love being in a space where we can just sort of learn and pool resources because there's so many people doing so many things. And I am a true believer that if you're gonna heal the world then you gotta be a public educator. And we actually find with a lot of students in educators rising that, and I think someone touched on this earlier, about half of our kids just always wanted to be teachers. Maybe they had a teacher that really helped them as they were coming up or they had a sibling who had special needs and they saw the power of a teacher. About the other half of our kids are more like I was. And I had no intention of being a teacher. I was really interested in social justice issues. I was really interested in service. And then I realized, again, if you're gonna heal the world, you gotta go into public education. And a lot of our kids are activists. They are ready to jump in feet first. I actually fear as a former superintendent that we're not ready for our kids. We see that all the time with teachers of color that they get pushed out of schools. And I fear that some folks who are more my age and look more like me are just not ready for the generation that's coming up that we're preparing and rising. So that's sort of another piece we're working on. But just real quick, educators rising, we're in all 50 states. We have 36 state affiliates. We are a full blown CTE program for high school kids to get them on a path to becoming teachers. We started a few years back with the way the model works. We have chapters all over the country that just do a lot of great work, go to competitions, and some of them even use different curriculum. And then we have a full blown curriculum with 57 modules and micro credentials, teacher training and things like that, that really get kids on a path by starting junior year in high school where you're in a classroom with a teacher. Oftentimes, and someone mentioned this earlier, how important relationships are. Oftentimes it is that inspiring teacher that taps someone on the shoulder and says, hey, have you ever thought about becoming a teacher, right? Kids take courses for a year in the class and then they do a clinical supervision, their senior year. We've actually seen some schools start in ninth grade, some schools are even starting to expose kids in middle school and some schools have flipped it where they do the clinical supervision first because once kids get exposed to that kind of teaching buzz, they become more inspired to do so. We're now starting to work with states and regions on a more holistic approach where we're bringing in philanthropy, state departments of education, as well as, of course, institutes of higher education to create kind of a seamless approach. We have our Ed Rising Collegiate Program that works with college kids because we realized dual credit is a huge incentive. We're working more and more on that. And then I think I mentioned earlier, we also have our state conferences and national competition because we're a CTSO where kids come together and they learn from each other and they learn with experts. 52% of our kids are students of color. So we are literally changing the face of the next generation. And we are just eager to be working with and partnering with others who are doing great work. And I'll put our website up, you can see as you go in to our curriculum, we have units on anti-bias instruction. We have units on classroom culture formative assessment. And we really try to give students, real research-based standards-based introduction to what it means to be a highly skilled professional teacher while we also inspire them to serve their communities. A little more than 60% of teachers work within 20 miles from where they graduated high school. So it is a local enterprise and we find that by working with local jurisdictions on their strategy, we're gonna be able to increase the number of kids who pursue education and particularly kids of color who pursue it. So that's what we're doing. And I'll put some things in the chat box about what we're doing. Thanks so much. It's great to get the national perspective and hear more about advising. Let's go over to Dr. Barry, Dr. Tim Barry. You're the interim dean of the School of Urban Education at Metro State, if I have that right. And you've developed a concurrent enrollment program, I believe with St. Paul. Could you tell us a little bit about that and more broadly how these kinds of school university partnerships are working? Thank you. Like as mentioned before, I'm very happy and honored to be here. I really appreciate the comments, especially from the panelists who have spoken and called out some of the why in terms of a system of racism and what rights of primacy and education as to what this critical conversation is centered around. Yes, so I am new, relatively new. I can't really claim that because just so y'all know, a year in the life of a dean is like 10 years and anybody else is like, so I've been there for one year but it is longer than that. And but here's what I can say. By the way, it's actually South St. Paul Public Schools. That's one of the district. And now actually just to update, we are embarking upon two new arrangements, both with Hopkins and St. Louis Park for the next fall. But let me just say this around what we've done so far as relatively new. First of all, our program, which started in 2000, 2001, had basically a mandate from the legislature and actually a mission, a charge to increase the numbers of Black, Brown and Indigenous students in education and teaching, particularly. And so as a result, our enrollment is by far the most racially and ethnically diverse teacher preparation program in terms of our student demographics. And so in terms of the current enrollment, and by the way, our faculty is the same. And I'm saying that intentionally because what we are doing with current enrollment with South St. Paul is living out our mission in terms of calling attention to these dynamics. And so we started with, we have two foundation courses that were basically offering education foundation courses in South St. Paul and urban education, multicultural education is one of those. And then intro to urban education is the other course that we're offering. But let me just say that aside from the academic is the real life and lived experience aspect of this arrangement. And so what I have been saying and so to answer the question about how we can look at this more broadly is an understanding, and now just y'all just go with me. This is a love project for me too. I might add that this is a love project and it's a love project born out of my own hostile treatment in the K-12 education system. But I love enough in order to be able to try to facilitate opportunities for outcomes to be different for those who come after me especially for black males particularly in our education system. And so what we have done is said that not only is it important to meet all the credentials in terms of the high school or the district teacher or the course, but to do that in terms of racial and ethnic demographic makeup, if you will. So when possible, it's important to have that teacher be a black around teacher in the course. Now fundamentally for me, I will say this and then I'll stop is that I'm also gonna use my inner Frederick Douglass to agitate a little bit because I'm reading the chat, right? Here's the thing, all these barriers that exist with the credentials, often preclude teachers of color from delivering the courses. I'm just gonna call that out. And so one of the ways that we're asking is this thing, let's think differently. Okay, so if it requires somebody on paper to have these credentials, how about a co-teaching model where you can have, for instance, if there are black males or black females or Latina who are maybe in roles that are even not even classroom teachers necessarily yet but have an inspiration or aspiring, how can, let's think about co-teaching, right? And then the other piece of that to me is the way that we are trying to design our things going forward is concurrent enrollment is not, in fact, in my view a grow your own that has a sustainability that everybody thinks it does because it's not the beginning, it's the middle. So we are having conversations of why don't we have, particularly black males which is where I center a lot of my work around in education, well, because they get checked out and disengaged in third grade. So now we're asking people to engage them in high school and you might get a few, but that's not the beginning. So the real organic way is to build programs that engage with them in third grade and students in third grade and let it go all the way up through the concurrent enrollment process. And so we are actually having conversations about the depth of our partnerships so that we can do that because, you know, I'll close with this. It's like an urban has this mantra in many ways. So Tupac said, did you hear about the roles that grew from the crack in the concrete, proving nature's law is wrong. They learned to walk without having feet, funny. It seems by keeping his dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air, long live the roles that grew from the crack when no one else even cared. Here's the thing about that. The growth doesn't start in high school, right? It starts at the beginning from the roof but the problem is the concrete. So we celebrate those roles is when they can all go all the way through but we must also question and in fact bust up the concrete so that we can nourish the ground for these students to flourish in this environment. So that's been my message to anybody that wants to partner with us. That's my mindset and I would hope that that can be their mindset going forward. So thank you for the opportunity to share. Thank you for that, for your insights, your words. And, you know, I think in particular it's something that we see across on partnerships that if both sides, both pieces, both parts, the sides of the partnership don't have that same sense that this is both a cultural and a structural fight then it can't work, right? Like both sides of the, both pieces of the partnership all pieces of the partnership need to be on the same page. So appreciate you pointing that out and certainly appreciate your, all of your words. I'm gonna move to Mr. Claibor or Arthes. I don't know if Claibor, if I'm saying your first name correctly, correct me if I'm not, but you've, I know put a lot of effort toward trying to improve the representation of people of color and teaching and of course, one of the things that's been mentioned already and that we know is that the problem of under-representation compounds over time and this is something that we just heard about where you have young people without role models and teaching, we have both cultural and structural barriers and they, we just see this happening again and again. So if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about the work that you're doing to try to change this and why it's so important. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so my full name is Claibor Ivan Ortiz-Sinche. Shout out to some of my Latino, Latina family here. I'm originally from Ecuador. I came to the US when I was about 10 years old and I mentioned that because I think one of the issues that we have, right, is this idea of sometimes kind of newer immigrant students and first and second and third generation. And so we have different things happening. For example, one of my, what Dr. Bettina Love would call murdering, my spirit murdering that happened in K-12 was in my ninth grade class when I was in an IB classroom, I was recruited to be in IB because of being a valedictorian in middle school and coming in and sitting at the back and just like Dr. Barry talked about, I was one of those roses, right? Because he, Tupac also says, of course, we have broken petals, right? So I came in baggy pants, cholo looking, right? With my mushroom haircut back then, that was the style. I sat at the back and the teacher came over and said, are you lost? Without knowing who I was, without knowing my name, without knowing, even asking, right? Any other, but are you lost, right? And I looked at my schedule and I said, I don't think so. And he said, let me see it. He looked at it and saw all pre-IB courses, right? And we know from the research that 86, 87% of all students in post-secondary education courses or any AP or IB courses are white students. And so he immediately said, well, I think these classes are too hard for you. You will never graduate. You need to go talk to your counselor or your mom because you're just not gonna be able to do it. I graduated with a 3.8 GPA. I took all seven IB tests, top 100 students in my class, full scholarship to the EOVM. And I came back later as a content lead in the social studies department for Minneapolis Public Schools to say, hey, remember me? I'm your boss now, kind of. And so that to say that, as we think about the experiences, at that moment, when I heard those words, the reason why adding bust out or adding knock him out or throw a chair at him, which should have happened, right? Because he was doing a microaggression to me. And I see Raelyn smiling because he's like, I wanna do that too. Is because as a recent, not a recent immigrant, but as an immigrant student, I saw education as a privilege, right? Like back at home in Ecuador, I had to walk three miles to get to kindergarten. So to be in a school for free and getting a bus to me, I was like, oh man, this is my privilege, right? So I didn't bust out because of that. My son on the other hand, who's now in high school, when he hears things like that, that is trying to kill his spirit, he does bust out, right? And so now he's labeled as a trouble kid, as a kid that has problems. It's not that he has problems, but for him, education is no longer a privilege, it's his right. So he's demanding that his education be written, like be done in a way that is culturally responsive to him. And so for him, it's no longer about accepting that the way it is, but he's like, I want it to be in a different way. And I'm gonna speak about what I need to see in my education because I am entitled to the best education possible. And yet those students are the ones that we've labeled as misbehaviors, as problem kids, as at risk kids, right? All of this deficit language, instead of saying, those are the students that are saying what they need, we need to listen to them. We need to ask him, oh, what is it about this class that you don't have, that you don't like? Let's change it, right? And so my work has been based on those experiences. And I'm sorry, I'm gonna share a lot of stories because I'm a storyteller. That's part of being part of my heritage is I come from the Inca tradition, right? Part of my indigenous roots. This is the other story I'll share. And after that, I'll, I know that there's some questions that we'll probably get. When I had my daughter, so I have two older kids, my son is in high school, my daughter now is in middle school. One of the things that I believed as an educator, when I, you know, and I was an after-school coordinator, I was a family liaison, I was an associate educator, and then I got my teaching license, I thought high school, I thought middle school. When I was teaching middle school, I was teaching in South Minneapolis. And one of the things that I always believed was if I'm gonna teach in the school, it has to be good enough for my children. So I took my kids also to that school that I was teaching. My daughter was in kindergarten at that time, and you know, during my lunchtime as a teacher, I would go down and I would say, Miha, how are you doing, right? And mind you that all of this time at home, I would always tell you, tell my daughter, like Miha, your skin is so beautiful. Miha, you're so smart. Miha, you could do whatever you want in this life, right? Two weeks, that's all it took. Two weeks, I come down into the lunchroom and I say, Miha, how are you? And she's kind of like down and she's almost wanting to cry and I don't know why. And I'm like, Miha, what's wrong? And she looked at me and she said, Papi, what do you do here? Because in two weeks, all she has seen around her were white teachers. And so for her, I couldn't be a teacher. But she's like, what do you do here? Because I know you can't be a lunch person because you dress too nice and nothing against lunch people, right? And she's like, what do you do here? And you could see in her eyes that she was ready to get the news that, like I'm a volunteer or something. I get none of those things are bad, but for her, she couldn't feel proud of her dad. And when I said, Miha, I'm a teacher. She's like, yeah, my dad is a teacher and all the kindergarten kids are like, he's a teacher. We're all high fighting and the people, we're all red. We're all red. No talking during lunch, right? And the kids are like, we don't care. We're having a party. That to say that representation matters. Having teachers that look like you matters. Having people that understand where you come from matters. The reason I was a little late, I was talking to one of my students and she was saying how she was just telling me her story. And it was very similar to mine about growing up in a Latino household with our, having to take care of little brothers, little sisters and how hard that is now with COVID. And I totally get that. Cause even though we didn't have COVID when I was growing up, I had to take care of my little brother as well. And she was like, you know, if you were white, I could never tell you these things because you probably want to call child services on me. Like, because I'm taking care of my brother, right? And because you don't understand that culture piece. And so, you know, what I've tried to do in my time. So right now I'm working as a faculty member at Minneapolis community and technical college, recently rebranded to be Minneapolis college. I teach all of the education courses here. I have done, you know, I do a little bit of concurrent enrollment as well. So I worked with Minneapolis public schools. I worked with St. Paul public schools. I'm also working with other school districts to think about and look at pathways for us to have more teach the color. But I will say this before, you know, I kind of let it open up for questions. And I recently read this. We're trying to harvest something that we haven't planted. What I mean by that is that we're trying to get students to think about teaching when we haven't planted in their hearts that they can be teachers. And so it's very hard for students to see themselves as teachers. When we haven't said you could be a teacher from day one and you could be anything you wanna do, right? And so we have to begin there. We have to plant those seeds first. We have to begin to tell young people that they can be anything and everything they want. We have to tell young people that they can be the next educated, right? And again, from my work with young people or students that I have in my education classes, half of them, usually most white students they're going to the teacher and say, I had a great teacher and that's why I wanna become a teacher. And most of my students of color say, I had a horrible teacher and that's why I wanna become a teacher because I don't want kids in my community. I don't want my little brother. I don't want my little sister. I don't want my cousin. I don't want my nephew. I don't want my, you know, my grandkids to have that horrible experience with that teacher. So that's why I wanna be a teacher but shouldn't it be that all of our students come into teaching loving because they've had great teachers because they had great experiences because they had great opportunities to see themselves as educators. And again, I think most of our students are more than ready. They are ready to take that but we need to provide those opportunities for them at an early age like Dr. Barry was saying, right? Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. And so, you know, and I think one of the issues or one of the problems with concurrent enrollment that I see is that we're trying to get them at the high school when saying, you know, well, you know, do you wanna be a teacher? If you were to ask me in high school, I wanna be a teacher, I said, no, no, I don't wanna be a teacher. Why would I go back to a place that traumatized me? Right? Why would I wanna go back with teachers that were mean to me? And yet because, and I think, you know, Josh was talking about this, he said, this is a love, this is a healing and loving profession. And so for me, it was about the love that I had for my kids, the love that I have for my community, the love that I have for my future generations that I want to go into teaching. And, you know, reimagine, reimagine what teaching can look like. I'm excited not because of what we have but what we could have. And I think we need young people for that. We need young people to reimagine what education should be, could be and needs to be because, you know, we can't keep doing this, right? Minnesota has been at 4% each of the color for the last 20 years. Obviously, we're doing something wrong. You know, and Einstein said, if you keep doing the same thing, in San it is in the same thing and expecting a different result. It's time for us to do something different. And I think part of that has to be starting at a younger age, getting everyone, getting all of our students to have great experiences at school. And a lot of that is with and has to do with, I think, our initiative and hopefully the fulfilling of that promise to have ethnic studies courses out of many of our high schools. Thank you so much for that. That's so helpful. And I want to touch on one thing that you said, well, there are a lot of things but one thing in particular about how we would change this. I mean, in Minnesota, but Minnesota is not alone. This is what we see across the country. A lot of these numbers, a lot of these patterns. But there's something about, there's structurally there are problems. And so I'm seeing in the chat also a lot of questions and comments about that. And so I'm wondering if each of you, and I'll just open this up to all of you. What are the biggest structural challenges, the barriers we need to take down? There's obviously a lot. So, I mean, we could probably name many of them but if you all could try to think about in the work that you do, what is the biggest challenge or something you see in the way where students that might be interested? So there's obviously a lot that we're losing because they're not getting that sort of motivation, the inspiration and what they need when they're young. But even for those who are interested, there are these barriers they're hit. Some are financial, some are in the articulation of course credit came up and coursework. If you all could think about in name what those big challenges are and if you have a way that you've worked around that or that you've been able to fix that. I'll open it up. Who wants to take it first? I'll go, Elena. So I think there are a couple of things, right? One, when we pulled on this, one of the things we do with PDK is PDK poll. I think it was 2018, was the first time that a majority of Americans did not want their kids to become teachers and the argument and many, and we also had a lot of teachers in our poll and a lot of it was financial. Some of it was the kind of kids these days piece. But I think that the challenge is, so one of the structural challenges like high school schedules are packed and it's really hard to put in a credit bearing course and have a curriculum for it and all of that that actually gets kids to be inspired to become teachers. It's just high school schedules are packed. I think what we're finding with that rising is the matriculation into college is an issue. So we need state legislatures, we need colleges to provide incentives, whether it's dual credit, what one state university of Southern Maine is now accepting our micro credentials for credit, which is fabulous. So you need to build an incentives at the collegiate level and you need to have scholarships. The other thing I think, and I put a piece of it about this in the chat and Cleaver was right on about this, like we also have to recognize that not everybody is going to necessarily stay in room 307 for 30 years and teach the same lesson. And teaching can be a pathway into some other amazing careers. I know teachers who are also writers, teachers go into policy, teachers that become elected officials, teachers that become professors, there's all these things. And it's not that I don't want people to be teachers for their whole lives, but it can be a great entry into middle-class jobs. I remember when I started teaching, like I had a job, I was 22, I had a job, I had health insurance, so they got, this is great. Knowing that I wanted to go on and do something bigger, I ended up becoming a superintendent, but I was like, this is where I'm gonna start. And I think we need to reframe it in some ways. And I think that what Cleaver mentioned, I'll stop on this as well, we find with our program, the most successful programs, the most are when you have a teacher who has a good relationship with a kid. And it can be a teacher of color, it can be a white teacher, a teacher who's inspiring, who has a good relationship, who taps something on the shoulder and says, hey, have you ever thought about becoming a teacher? You seem like it, you might be really good at this. And that's oftentimes just when someone sees a young person as having potential, oh, wait a second, this could be something good. So I think that's part of what we have to do and part of the structural issues that exist. Can I jump in for just a moment? So Josh, I agree with you completely. The problem is that the research that we have in terms of how our students of color being encouraged to become teachers, it's not happening by their teachers, it's not happening at home, as you mentioned. Students of color are never told, you'd be a great teacher. So those messages don't get to them. And that's a huge problem. I think the other problem that gets created is we have these great programs encouraging students to become teachers and we wanna increase the diversity, but then we create barriers for them in the programs and have a 3.0 GPA. Well, some of the most engaged students that I have in the Pathways to Teaching program are the students that come to me with a 1.2 and are ready to drop out. Those are the kids that I wanna encourage and engage because, truthfully, they're gonna be the best teacher for that community. And so anyway, I have a problem with the barriers that we create as we're creating programs saying that we wanna do something, but then we don't let it happen in the way that it should. And I'll stop because I can go on for an hour about just that. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. I can kind of piggyback on that too. If you look at the work of Dr. Jeff Duncan Andrade, he talks about the students that are getting straight A's, the ones that are following the book will not change the world because all they know is to follow the rules and follow what is already there. It's the students that don't do that. It's the students that are pushing back against the system. It's the students that don't have A's and B's and C's because they're seeing the world in a different way and asking the questions that no one is willing to ask and looking at the world in a way that is not aligned to what is already there. And those are the students that are gonna change the world, right? And those are the students that are gonna come in and fix our system because if all we know is what we have, right? And if a student can resuscitate a whole book, that's awesome and you get a name in many classes but that's not what we're seeking as we're looking at how to reimagine our educational systems. And so for me, again, piggyback of that, I think it's important to not just look at who has potential because then teachers become the gatekeepers, right? So if as a teacher, I said, well, you know, I think this four group of kids have potential. Come in and talk to them. No, I want you to talk to all my students because it might be that student that's in the back of the room that's not quote unquote paying attention that here's something that sparks, right? We talk about planting seeds and this is an indigenous idea, right? Where it's from the Nawa tradition that says, they try to bury us but they didn't know we were seeds. And so we try to plant seeds in young people's hearts and that seed will grow at some point. It might not grow tomorrow for that student. It might not grow in a year. It might grow in three years where they're at an opportunity to say, oh, I remember I heard this about teaching. I'm gonna go in and look at it and then they have that opportunity to do that. So for me, I think a big barrier is the fact that we continue to create or we continue to give power to educators. And again, in Minnesota, we have 96% of our teaching force being white as gatekeepers towards the teaching profession. And so we need to remove some of that and create opportunities for students and families to understand how to become teachers in the state of Minnesota. We need to provide that opportunity and make it available in multiple language. We need to have that opportunity for them to understand what we mean by if you get a bachelor's degree. That doesn't mean you get a teaching license, right? Graduating college, you still have to pass a test. And I can give you my own stories that I got my undergrad from the U and I didn't wanna go into teaching because I heard about the test and I was like, I'm not good in test because up to that point in schools, I had been told that I wasn't good enough. And so I said, I don't wanna be a teacher and then someone lied to me, came to me and said, if you come to our program, you can get a teaching license and you don't have to pass the test. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do that. He lied, I still had to pass the test. I ended up passing it, right? But I think those are the barriers. Those are the ways in which at least we can create some opportunities for more of our communities to understand and know because it's just sometimes it's those process. It's that process of applying for FAFSA. It's that process of applying for scholarships. It's the process of understanding what a two plus two program is. It's the process of understanding that you're not getting a teaching license when you graduate from college but you still have to do another piece which is pass the test. It's a process of understanding then how to apply to MBE to get your teaching license. It's a process, right? So it's a lot of those process that we can do to just have it out there, right? To have an opportunity for our students to just see that information. And then it's the other pieces after that, right? How do we make sure that we provide more resources? Because when we're talking about equity is we need to give more resources to the communities that have historically been on the resource that historically have been marginalized, that historically have been neglected an opportunity to become teachers. I know who's probably getting close on time on this segment but if I may, I don't wanna be like, so with, yes. So all of the barriers that have been named, I don't wanna rehash those necessarily. I could add to that unless there's lots of them. But let me just say it this way, I think there's a more holistic frame that sometimes needs to be said when we talk about barriers. So for instance, so strategies and barriers, kind of that kind of thing or strategies to handle barriers is sometimes the approach. But strategies are no match for culture. Strategies are no match for the foundation for why we're in this place in the first place. So it was black history month. Like we've been here before. Like we had black teachers in the United States. What happened? They were fired after Brown versus Board. We had, so we had representation. They were let go. And then here's what it led to. In fact, which is the irony of that whole case. The whole thing was predicated upon what? Black children choosing the white doll. We live in an America where black bodies essentially are conditioned to make white bodies comfortable. So the ultimate barrier is in our body. It's in our very bodies. So we're gonna talk about how to approach the strategies if we don't do it in a somatic sense, then we're just talking about strategies and not talking about the deeper pathology of why we are literally conditioned to shrink as black and brown folk when a white person is present. And our students, our babies are not, they're not absolved from that. And so for me, one of the things about building with that particular thing is making sure that we account for the physiological processes that are necessary to uproot white body supremacy as we do the both end of coming up with, looking at and identifying the actual structural barriers in order to eliminate them and change them. And a lot of them have already come up in the chat. Like, but those things are born out of a deeper sense of what's in the body. And I know that's a lot to try to grapple with, but that's where we're at. And as educators, sometimes we gotta grapple with a lot. Thank you so much for that. So we're almost out of time, but I need for Grisad to also have a chance to have her voice back in here. People are snapping their fingers on the chat. I got like all sorts of questions that I can't get to, but y'all have been wonderful. Grisad, do you wanna jump in and add something? Well, I mean, I agree with everything that has been said. One thing that I think for most of us that do this work, it's what keeps us up at night, right? It's those things that we have to kind of keep thinking, how do we improve? How do we continue to help the students? For me, one of the things I think is, just when I realized our concurrent enrollment, I realized that our students of color were not being represented in that pool of enrolling in those programs. So we've created new sort of enrollment criteria for students who are talented, who just might not have that GPA, just like many of the other programs talked about. And another thing that's really important to me is be part of the community. So to really understand the community that I'm trying to support is I am involved in as much as I can be, and I want to hear their voice and I want them to tell me what it is, how can I support them? And I think a lot of times in different structures, we go in thinking that we already know how to support, but it's, how can I help you? So for me, it's really about that one-on-one communication with the family, with the student, to figure out, like some people talked about the FAFSA, this, the other, it gets very complicated, but I think it's that one-on-one support that I really enjoy in getting to know the students and their stories. Wonderful. Thank you all so much. I so appreciate your participation in this panel and all of your thoughts, and I wish we could talk for another three hours. We'll have to find another time. I don't want to miss a beat because I want to make sure that we can hear from the students and the teachers and Dr. Bianco is going to lead a conversation there. So I'm going to hand it over. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. This got me pumped. This was a good conversation about lots of important issues. So I'm thrilled to introduce, and I'm going to just let them introduce themselves very quickly. So we have Ms. Haley O'Hama, who's the teacher who does the pathways to teaching in Burnsville. We also have, oops, I just lost one of my screens here. Here we go. We also have Braylon Lane, and we have, I'm trying to remember the other student's name, Maryam. So I'm going to let them quickly introduce themselves, the name and what they're doing. So let's start with Haley. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm Haley O'Hama. So as Dr. B said, I am teaching at Burnsville High School, the Pathways Program. This is my third year with the program. I should have remembered that third year with the program. I used to be fortunate enough to co-teach with another partner at my school. And unfortunately this year with figuring schedules out, it's just me on my own, which has been awesome, but brought challenges of its own. And yeah, Braylon and Maryam are my students this year. So I'm sure we'll talk more, I'll let them introduce themselves. Braylon, why don't you go first? Hello, everybody. My name is Braylon Lane, and I'm an 11th grader at Burnsville High School. I am very passionate about the field, the teaching field and the education field. And I've always known that I've wanted to become an educator ever since I was, oh goodness, age four or five. So I'm really happy to be here. And I've just been super fascinated and loving the discussions that have just been happening. I'm just like popcorn. I love this stuff. I'm so glad to meet you, Braylon. Hi, everyone. Sorry. Hi, everyone. My name is Maryam Omar, and I'm currently a senior at Burnsville High School. And I'm also very excited to enter the education career path. And I've also been loving the discussion. Really important. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. So I have a couple of questions for our students and a few questions for our instructor. So I'm gonna start with the students. So a couple of things. I want you to tell us why you joined the Pathways to Teaching Program and how does our focus on social justice and our curriculum influence your decision to become an educator? So let's start with you, Maryam. Okay. So the biggest reason why I joined the Pathways to Teaching Program, well, like you, Braylon, I've wanted to become a teacher, I think since kindergarten. And I remember telling my mom that. And that idea kind of went to the back of my head because it's not really something that's brought up in school and I only revisited in sophomore year. And I have a lot of siblings. So that's definitely played a part because I've always known that I definitely want to work with children. And my English teacher last year, my junior year, actually signed me up for Intro to Ed because she knew that I wanted to major in education for my career path. And not only do I wanna learn more about teaching, but I also wanted to learn more about the education system. And I always wanted to come back to my community and make a change. In multicultural Ed, we do talk a lot about social justice, which I love because in school, we never really talk about social justice at all. It's kind of pushed to the side or just really not acknowledged. So Intro to Education gives us a clean environment where we can discuss about our feelings about that and also about how to change it. So it's not really just about lesson planning and things like that. It's also about the education system and the structural racism and everything that really goes into play with that. And I think the fact that we talk about social justice in Intro to Ed really just made me more passionate to become an educator because it just makes me see myself in that role now. And it's not really an idea now. It's more of a reality that I really do want to become an educator. Awesome, thank you. Okay, Brayla. Hi, again. So I joined the Pathway Program at Burnsville High School, mainly just wanting to, and at the time that I had signed up for the course, Introduction to Education, I was unaware had the fact that it was actually a pathway course in conjunction with another college. I was not aware at the time. So I really did just want to learn more about the profession of teaching and more about the gold of education. And then I got a couple of emails over the summer, basically letting me know that I had been accepted into the course and into the class itself. And I really thought that, I want to take courses that pertain to education because I have always wanted to be a teacher. And every time that I mention that I want to be a teacher to pretty much anyone, I get my main response that I get is you, you really want to be a teacher. You want to be a teacher. You don't want to be a rapper or something. And I say, oh my goodness, they did not just say that. But a huge part of it is I think, I have never had, I've never in my life had a black teacher ever. And so I really hadn't thought about it because when we think about, and I'm just saying Generation Z, children, students and kids in the K through 12 system, we never think about that type of stuff, right? We don't, because we've been molded this kind of idea that the teaching profession is a white profession and that's been molded into our brains. And we've never really questioned it. It's just what we've been doing since we were in K through six and now all the way into high school, now you start to get this idea of the problem that's happening. So that is a huge reason that why I want to become an educator because I think our students need more representation of themselves in the school because we go in our school buildings and we see representation of ourselves with our students and our peers. But when we look at our staff members, our administrators, our deans, principals and guidance counselors, our educators, teachers, professors, we see a very little amount, a very little amount of people of color and these positions. And so for that reason, I am very fascinated with the whole thing. So I really, really want to become an educator. Sorry, I babble. Thank you, I'm gonna come back to you for sure. I'm gonna jump over to Haley for a minute. So one of the things that you need to know is any instructor that teachers, any of the pathways to teaching courses goes through a week-long intensive training with me. And Haley came out to Denver a couple of years ago with the whole team. So Haley, I want you to talk a little bit about how that training and the program has influenced you as a teacher and how the curriculum with the focus on justice and equity and also trying to find out what pisses students off about their education and get that involved in the curriculum. So talk to us a little bit about that and what you got out of the training and how that influenced your teaching. I don't know if you saw both Breeland and Maryam crack up because Dr. B, I just introduced the things that pissed me off chart last week in class. So it's fresh in their brain. And that's one of my favorite things I took away, I think, from Dr. B's training. And really, I think that kind of sums it up overall. What I really learned from you was, I went to the University of Minnesota, got my master's degree in education, I did the whole thing. It was like social justice. And then my first year in the schools, my school is great, they're supportive, but it all of a sudden became very clear how taboo it was to bring up social justice issues, how very clear it was that like, maybe current events should be held lightly. And it felt like everything that I went to school for was like, oh, that's great, you learned that, but let's hone it down a bit. And especially going to the U of M, I mean, they were like, let's go knock down some walls, let's go fight. And then I got into a school and realized, oh, you actually do have to fight to use your voice and to really encourage kids to use their voice. So thankfully at the end of my first year, I got to attend your training. And when I heard like week long training in Colorado, I was like, what the educators don't travel for work. Like that's not what we do, what is this? And it was hands down, I mean, Matt and I have asked every year, like, can we go back, can we go back and can we share? And Dr. B, I'm still, I'm for it. Because we talk about all of these things that the panel had addressed all of those issues, but then Dr. B actually was able to give us tools to say, I mean, educators know these issues, but I think you kind of gave us the empowerment that nope, it's important that we go back and talk about it. Like forget what other people say, like this is why our kids need it and this is what our kids need. So I think the biggest thing I really took away from your training was just that sense of empowerment that, okay, I do know what I'm doing and this is a good thing to do. So I hope that answered your question, Dr. B. Yeah, absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your classroom and I want to let everybody know, if you get on the Pathways to Teaching website, there's a short video that one of your students, Haley, if you remember, and I don't remember her name, I got that clip on my iPhone and she was just so powerful about how the class changed her life. So talk to us a little bit about, I'm gonna actually bounce back to the students. How does a focus on social justice help you make sense of your own experiences and encourage you to become a teacher? So I'll start with you, Braylon, and then we'll go to Mariam. Simply a huge portion of this is, I rarely see any educators of mine. I do see some, but rarely any educators of mine and any educators that I've had in the past really dive into social justice issues and topics in the classroom. And it's more of that I never had it, kind of like when you're a parent and you want your kids to experience and have what you never had. It's kind of like that. I want to help future students be a part of conversations. I never had with my educators and my teachers. And that kind of helps mold that idea in your brain and in your head as a student that these are people that really don't care about me. These are people that are just here to earn a paycheck. They're just here. They're not really passionate about teaching. They're not passionate about this. They're not passionate about me. They just want to enter a numerical grade into my grade book and go along with their day. So that's a huge reason why social justice and the modern society of America has really put a big influence on me wanting to become a teacher because I think it would behoove of all students to be a part of conversations like this. Miriam. Yeah, Breila, I absolutely agree with you. It seems like it's always like a taboo topic to talk about social justice, which is really devastating because it affects everyone, especially students of color. And a lot of times we see current events like with what happened with George Floyd. And from my experience, I don't think we've talked about that at school. I think we've mentioned it maybe once, but it's not a topic that we delve into and just talk about what happened, why is this happening and really even to try to make sense of it. And I think the main reason why social justice is helping me become an educator is because what you said, Breila, I want to make such a big change and I want my future students to be able to have that conversation in an environment where they feel safe too. And I want my siblings to experience that as well, especially with multicultural ed. I've never, I'm so excited for this class every single day. And this is the only class where we talk about social justice and we can freely talk about our opinions and current events and everything. And that's really just my take on it. Excellent, thank you. Breila, now this question is for everybody. So Breila and Haley and Maryam. So if you had one thing that you could say to another student to encourage them to become a teacher in your high school, what would you tell them? Breila will go with you again. Like how would you encourage them? What would you tell them to do to think about becoming a teacher? Do you mean shed light on a positive about becoming a teacher or? If you were gonna encourage a friend, what would you say to them? Okay, to encourage a friend, I think that, and this kind of dives back into what I was saying previously, I think a lot of my friends feel the same way and that's probably because we're in the same generation, the same classes, the same schools, right? We feel pretty much the same way. And probably a major idea I would use to help kind of try and get them into thinking about the profession is the idea of being able to change students. I think about teachers that I've had in the past who have inspired me, especially Miss Ohama right now, thinking about teachers that inspire me right now and have inspired me. I would say, you know what? You have the chance to be one of those guys. You have the chance to be not only a teacher to these students, but also a friend to these students because sometimes they need that and they don't get that support from their students. And a lot of peers of mine have also experienced this type of behavior from our staff members. And so that would be a huge, huge, huge idea that I would bring into the conversation of just trying to get them into the profession. Excellent, Miriam? The biggest thing that I would say is that it's definitely a good thing to be involved because when taking this class, I feel so much more involved with my own education. And I feel like we talk about the next generation and we want to do it for others, but personally for me, I am so in touch with the education system right now with this class and really knowing about the structural racism and everything that's going on and the culture responsive teaching. And I think to encourage other students, the biggest way to do that is mainly to tell them that it is their own education. And I think sometimes we really don't acknowledge that because school is somewhere where we go to get an education and go to a college, but it's not something where we really understand like this is our education and we need to be the ones that make the change. Excellent, thank you. Haley, I'm gonna ask you this question a little bit different. So in terms of the challenges that you might experience or the pathways to teaching the course, right? So I'm unapologetic about making sure that there's no GPA requirement. Any student can take the course. So that brings both exciting opportunities, but also challenges. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, got lots of feelings on that. I think we've kind of touched on that in the panel that as open as we can make education at any level, there are always barriers and oftentimes racial barriers and oftentimes barriers that education can sometimes feel put in a box. And so I get my kids to the class and I say it doesn't matter what your GPA is, what your score is like, you're here, you're welcome, let's do it. But then I still get handed the course syllabus from a college that says you need to meet these requirements and you need to do it in this fashion. And I have some leeway there, but how do you take a student who, I can make connections with them. I hope that I do, I consider these two like friends. I mean, we have group texts and we just hang out, like I love them, but there's still that barrier of having that college requirement, but that does. I mean, when making a college curriculum, you don't always think about the students that I'm trying to reach at my level. So I think that that's one thing that I would definitely consider a challenge is just the classic think about syllabus time and common standards that we have to hit. I think it makes it exciting because I can, if I can reach my students in the correct way, I can show them that you did that, you still completed college. And I do have a college course and I do have maybe a little bit more leeway being in the high school setting and making my syllabus work for me. So it's also something fun that when a student can overcome that and do that, that we can celebrate that, I mean, even larger than that 4.0 student. Thank you so much. So I have about five minutes left in my section. So instead of me asking questions, maybe Elena, can you field a question or two from anybody who wants to ask the students or hear me a question? Sure, well, thanks. Let me see. So there's a lot of just blowing up of appreciation that's happening. Let me just scroll through here. Folks are interested in knowing. So we talked a lot about barriers. How about where you may be reaching back and helping others because we do see this as well that folks get through, but then there's this mentorship component where you really need the person that's just been through it to reach back down and help folks that may be considering it. So I'm wondering if maybe Braylon and Merrim, if you have had that experience or if that's in your mind that you might be helping the younger folks figure out how to come up and be teachers. Yeah, I feel like I can really relate to that, especially because I have six younger siblings. And so I always want to set, Braylon, oh my gosh, okay. But I always do want to set a good example for them and be the role model because I do have a lot of responsibilities, especially because I am the first generation, my family that is going to college. And I really want to make sure that my sisters and brothers just feel so empowered and inspired that they can do and be whatever they want to be. Because I feel like since we've been little kids, we've always been told, like, oh, you can amount to anything, which is true, but when we see people who look like us, then it just gives us such a bigger drive to succeed. And I feel like that's how I feel about that. When talking about younger people and the youth, I do, and this does relate, it correlates. I do, on the side, it is my hobby. I do make and release music. And my following is primarily younger people, younger than myself is my following. And so I'm sorry. And so my following with being primarily younger people, I have used my, I guess, I have used my following a couple of times this year to convince people of younger age to think about the profession of education, no matter where they are in the country. I have done that. And people are like, you still want to be a teacher, even though like you have X amount of followers on this social media site. And I'm saying, yes, I've always wanted to. I'm saying you can't just limit yourself to one dream. And people are like, you dream of becoming a teacher, you're right, I dream of becoming a teacher because I want to make that difference, especially to younger people. And I feel like I have, I'm kind of trying to mold younger, those younger people into kind of like what Mr. Orts is was talking about earlier, the younger people starting younger and making their way up. And they've got to get that in the back of their brain because nobody put that in the back of my brain. And when I was in elementary school about becoming a teacher, it was always a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or whatever. But primarily I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. And I'm like, why does nobody ever talk about this, you know? Well, Braylin, it sounds like a lot of people may want to follow and know about your work now and your music. So you may need to drop that in the chat so that you're going to have maybe some older followers now. Well, I just want to thank everybody. You know, and I especially want to thank Braylin and Maryam and Haley. So clapping for you. Thank you so much for joining me and participating. I'm so proud of all of you for your work. And thanks to the rest of you for listening. And unfortunately I'm going to have to jump off because I have a doctoral dissertation that I'm chairing in five minutes. So I need to run. But thank you everybody. And thanks for the invitation to be here today. Thank you so much. Amaya, we moving on? Okay, go ahead. Yep, we're moving on. Thanks Dr. Bianco. Thank you Maryam. Thanks Braylin. Let's move on to some policy actions that are happening at the state level to try to transform the state's teacher workforce. And so we're going to pass it on to Tyler Livingston to give some updates from the governor's office and from MDE. Thank you everyone. And what a tough act to follow. We are actually, if you go back one slide, I think there's a slide before this one. So there are a lot of policy efforts going on this year broadly to make schools more welcoming and inclusive spaces for children, for staff, for community members. And then I want to overview two that are particularly tied to programs for students to explore education careers. One is an expansion of the Grow Your Own grant. As many of you know, we currently have a grant in Minnesota that supports two pathways. One pathway is largely for paraprofessionals to do a teacher residency model. And the other pathway, the topic of today's conversation, programs for secondary students to explore teaching and it also would support concurrent enrollment or dual credit types of programs. The governor is recommending, and I'm going to let actually Paul Spies who follows me go into the details of this program. The governor is increasing funds to this program, is recommending an increase of funds to a total of 3.5 million annually and is expanding one of those pathways for adults. And again, Paul will walk through the details. The coalition that Paul represents brought that proposal to the governor's office and the governor is carrying exactly that language. I did see a quick comment in the chat while I looked over grant applications. One of the challenges of any grant program in Minnesota is the timeline of the legislative session and when we can make a new round of application available. This proposal fixes that timeline by extending the length of time that participants could access those funds. So this year, when the legislative session closes, our team will need about two, three weeks, we'll go as fast as we can to create the new grant competition and then it's between a three and five month process. So that's the timeline dilemma we face annually. And by all means, please contact me and I can go into further detail about that. And then on the next slide is a new program. This program is inspired by the governor intended to do a statewide tour and do a lot of community engagement around this issue and the pandemic happened. So instead convened a task force that brought about some recommendations the governor's education round table it was called. And that task force suggested the creation of this educator career pathway program that offers three competitive grants for districts and charters. One of which is really directly to continue expanding concurrent enrollment dual credit kinds of programs. Also includes funding for tuition incentives for credentials and a separate pot of funding to do some matching efforts. So again, these are two proposals in the governor's office and I will hand it over to Paul Spiece who will walk through the coalition's work. Thanks, Tyler. Thanks to the panelists today. It's been outstanding, hasn't it? Next slide please. So thankfully we have something, Braylon and Emariam and Haley and our teacher education panelists called the Increased Teachers of Color Act. It's a comprehensive set of legislation for E-12 and higher education that's designed us to change the system in ways that so many of our panelists today spoke about or needed. We've had an increased teacher of color act since 2017 and this year's bill is bolder and bigger than ever. Next slide please. So we're trying to do something unlike any other state in the country with such a systemic change in legislation that addresses the state barriers to increasing teachers of color and American Indian teachers. Our proposals have a component that addresses the need to attract and prepare more teachers of color and American Indian teachers or Toka'i to increase program completion and increase retention. We need to start moving the needle. We've been stuck at 4% but you know moving the needle is gonna be just 1% is a net gain of 650 teachers a year. Finally, before switching slides, look at the bottom of this one. It says that in 2016, we were able to amend several statutes that all students shall have equitable access to effective and diverse teachers who reflect their student diversity in schools. And Braille and I remember you mentioning you never had a black teacher. That's an injustice. Many of our panelists spoke of the same. That's an injustice. You should focus on this statute that says you need to have equitable access to effective and diverse teachers who represent you. Next slide, please. So as Tyler mentioned, the increased teacher of color act a big section of it. There's 21 sections in our E-12 bill and three, four sections in our higher ed bill. This E-12 bill includes three sections. One is focused on secondary school students. And this is not only for the concurrent enrollment classes but future teacher clubs like in efforts and service learning opportunities like educators rising in teacher cadets. Next slide. So you see here the three things that the grants would support besides intro to teaching concurrent enrollment grants which we propose an increase of funding from 350,000 per fiscal year currently to 500,000 per fiscal year. But the other grow your own grants options are again these future teacher clubs or service learning opportunities, wrap around services to support students of color who are enrolled and successful in post-secondary enrollment courses and scholarships to graduating high school students who are a color American Indian to pursue their post-secondary education. Next, please. Last week we had a panel and conversation about GYO programs for adults. So the legislation also talks about strengthening those grant programs for residency programs. These are highly intensive programs for adult employees of school districts. Next slide, please. And expanding other types of grants for grow your own programs for adults. Currently, there aren't pathways for adults in GYO in Minnesota that are state grant funded or adults who don't have their bachelor's degree yet for instance. So this would allow for tuition scholarships and stipends to help those folks become licensed teachers and earn their bachelor's degrees as well as for people who already have degrees and they're coming back to school but have a different approach to the programs. So these types of programs in our bill along with many others to address the climate and curriculum in the school to address the barriers for scholarships to address the barriers for teacher retention. All of these things are in the increased teacher of color act. Next slide, please. You can see the demand just from the last two fiscal years in the top line there for grow your own. You can see that in the last two years there was just under $3 million available but there was about $6 million requested from the grants applicants. There are twice as many applicants as there were recipients. So there's high demand and this event tonight as well as the event last week showed that we have even more demand because I think we're close to like 200 people who participate in these events. So this is outstanding and we need your help to support and advocate for these bills to pass. Next slide, please. So you can see Tyler mentioned that the governor came in with $2 million increase our bill asks for $8.5 million per fiscal year for grow your own programs. And if that sounds like a lot of money, my friends, this is only all of these things that you see are $22.5 million for the E-12 bill for the increased teacher of color act. That only represents two tenths of 1% of the total education budget for the state of Minnesota. Two tenths of 1% we can do better as a state. We need your support to help advocate for this legislation. Next slide, please. So what can you do? What can you do? I'm putting in the chat some of these websites and these links for you to grab and these things will be shared after the event by New America. If you wanna learn more about the increased teachers of color act that first link there at our website, there's a whole bunch of information about the increased teachers of color act. This coming Wednesday, February 24th, in six days, we're having our second hearing of the increased teacher color act, the third hearing actually for the E-12 bill, but this time in the Senate Education Committee and that is an important committee because the Republicans lead the Senate right now in the majority and Democrats lead the house in the majority and to have bipartisan legislation like we do for the increased teacher of color act is a good sign. And to get a bill hearing when there are hundreds of other bills that aren't being heard in this legislative session is a good sign. So we hope that you are interested and tune in to our bill hearing next Wednesday, February 24th. How do you do that? You sign up to be a part of the coalition and I'll put that in the chat as well when we're finishing up and I'm answering questions. I wanna point your attention to the youth social media competition to raise awareness about the increased teachers of color act and to increase action. And Braylon, again, I'm gonna mention to my friend what you got going on with your music and trying to inspire other youth to become teachers is exactly what this social media competition is about. So hope you and Merriam consider participating in this and other youth that you know who are part of your class as well as others who aren't. And everybody else that last link there increase your voice and let it be heard. Now is the time to make a difference and to get more funding and important policies passed for the state of Minnesota address these main barriers. Thank you all. I'll take any questions if you haven't. Angela, you can go to the next slide, please. Let's see if any questions come in. So other resources stay connected to the work is you can stay connected to the state's efforts by signing up for MDE's Educator Workforce and these letters. I'm sorry. Sorry Amaya, you're muffled for some reason. We heard about two sentences. Microphone will just turn low sometimes on me. So these are just ways that you can stay connected with the state's efforts, with the coalition and then again with New America and the work that we've been doing on Grow Your Own for the past couple of years. I wanna make sure that I thank Angela and Elena for being such great colleagues and helping with tonight's event. And I also wanna make sure that we thank the McKnight Foundation who is helping to fund the work that we've been doing looking into Grow Your Own at New America. Thank you all for joining tonight. I don't know if Paul and Tyler have any last words to say, but we are very excited about this work and hope that the coalition's efforts pay off and that you see some strong policy changes in the state. Yeah, I would just add, I just put in the chat there, Paul Gunderson had a great comment about money supporting candidates directly and that's in our higher education bill. So scholarships called the Minnesota Spiring Educator of Color Scholarship Program, up to $10,000 a year for up to $25,000 total while you're in college, as well as student teaching stipends up to $7,500 during student teaching. So those things are all part of the Increased Teacher of Color Act. We hope that you join the coalition and support this bill passing. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Okay, I think we're gonna, we can leave the chat that people are still dropping things in but we can wrap up if folks don't have questions but drop them in the chat if you'd like, but otherwise just a huge thank you to everybody involved in this work. It's really important and we appreciate you taking the time coming together and supporting it all. Thank you very much. Have a great evening.