At some high-need schools on American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the teacher turnover rate is as high as 100 percent. There are plenty of reasons to explain why teachers don't return year after year—if they even make it through a full school year. In most cases, teachers are not born and raised in the tribal communities they serve. As a result, they are not accustomed to living in very rural settings—remote, really—that are typical of reservations. And because some 98 percent of the state's teachers aren't American Indian, these educators typically have limited knowledge of native cultures. Plus, many schools face extreme poverty and high drop-out rates (only 49 percent of the state's American Indian students graduated from high school in 2015). Isolated, overwhelmed, and unsupported, teachers quit. With that kind of turnover, it's next to impossible to help students make progress.
Sharla Steever and Scott Simpson have set out to move the needle on new teacher retention at reservation schools with an initiative called the WoLakota Project. Steever, a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT), was an elementary classroom teacher for 12 years and a Teaching Ambassador with the U.S. Department of Education. Realizing that there was little understanding of American Indian people and their needs, Steever helped the Department learn about education in Indian Country. In 2011, when then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Rosebud (a reservation in south central South Dakota that is home of the Sicangu Sioux), Steever created a documentary called Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education to highlight the pressing issues for reservation schools.
These issues are plenty, but among them are inefficient management of the federal Bureau of Indian Education (under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior); a lack of high-quality jobs on reservations for high school graduates; and native languages in danger of extinction as elders age and schools fail to pass down these languages to the next generation.
For his part, Simpson was a language arts teacher before moving to the post-secondary level working with teacher preparation. "I had the opportunity to work in reservation schools on a number of different things, but none of them really addressed … culturally responsive classrooms, and the cultural and language needs of students."
Understanding History and Culture
The WoLakota Project began in earnest during the 2012–2013 school year when a group of tribal elders asked Steever and Simpson—who now work together as learning specialists at an organization called Technology & Innovation in Education (TIE)—to help bring newly created standards into classrooms. Called the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings (OSEU), the standards seek to teach students about the rich history and culture of South Dakota American Indians. They address concepts such as tribes' interrelationship with the environment, kinship systems for individual and group behavior, and history from oral and written accounts.
To begin, Steever and Simpson created video interviews with elders that teachers could use to teach the essential understandings. Plus, the videos served as valuable tools for non-native educators to learn about native culture from the experts—an important piece of the teacher retention puzzle.
In one such video targeted at teaching about tribes' use of land and natural resources, an elder named Vernon Ashley describes in vivid detail the fruit and wildlife he ate when he grew up along the Missouri River, including a nutritious mushroom called a tree ear. Other videos feature memorial songs and discussions about tribal identity and traditional values. With funding from TIE and the South Dakota Department of Education, Steever and Simpson spent time in classrooms modeling how to use the videos and related resources.
From there, the pair decided to gather a cohort of about 25 new teachers and mentors in a Courage to Teach circle. "We felt that this support would be helpful for the retention of teachers," explains Steever. Simpson says the cohort was designed "to help teachers become familiar with the OSEU, plus gain some familiarity with the cultural elements of the communities they're working and living in." They also launched a mentoring program that paired experienced educators in the state with novice teachers serving in the highest-need schools. With this backing, Steever and Simpson hoped to increase retention.
Investing in Teachers as Leaders
The WoLakota Project is one of many projects to come through Teach to Lead's pipeline. A joint initiative by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, ASCD, and the U.S. Department of Education, Teach to Lead seeks to build teachers' leadership capacity to raise student achievement.
The current push for teacher leadership aims to give teachers a voice at both the school and policy levels to drive decisions that affect student learning. But the face and job responsibilities of a teacher leader vary depending on whom you ask. To some, teacher leaders lead from within their classrooms without giving up the important work of educating students. To others, the definition of a teacher leader isn't as straightforward. Some teacher leaders serve in hybrid roles; others, like Steever, leave the classroom and use their experience as instructional experts to tackle larger issues—perhaps to return to the classroom at a later time.
Teach to Lead has organized seven summits to date with the purpose of amplifying the voices of teacher leaders. Educators from around the country are invited to apply to attend a regional summit to begin or advance their leadership project. Teach to Lead selects several dozen projects for each summit. For a weekend, those selected teachers and the teams of colleagues they bring with them work through guided activities and hash out plans to bring their projects to life.
Although the WoLakota Project had established roots by the time Steever and her team attended a summit in Denver in January 2015, she found that Teach to Lead helped them bring the project to scale. "We developed our model, created our pitch, verbalized the issues, and clarified what exactly we were trying to do," she says.
At the summit, each team is matched with a "critical friend," who asks probing questions and helps to move the team along in its work. Steever's team, for instance, was matched with a critical friend who connected them with other educators invested in educating indigenous populations around the world.
The projects developed at these summits vary widely in size and purpose—from those focused on statewide initiatives to those aimed at instructional changes to benefit students. Sally Brothers, who serves in a hybrid role as both a teacher leader and high school English teacher at Arcadia High School in Rochester, New York, attended the Teach to Lead Summit in Tacoma, Washington, in September 2014. Her team—which included two other teacher leaders, her school's librarian, and her district's assistant superintendent—devoted their time at the summit to solidifying plans for a student-proposed multicultural course called Mosaics.
"We went there to figure out how to maintain this course and to make sure that it was successful this year," says Brothers. "We wanted to make sure that it included student voice and choice. Ultimately we wanted to have this in all of our district's high schools."
Brothers, also a NBCT, and her team completed a logic model that included their rationale for their project and short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes. As with many other projects, the plan that Brothers brought to the summit was not the same one she left with. "We knew where we wanted to go, but the summit helped us realize that to reach those medium-term and long-term goals, it was OK to change what we were doing in the moment," she says.
The result? The Mosaics course ran for the first time this school year at Brothers's school and included student-driven explorations into immigration, racism, and gender issues. Among the long list of student accomplishments this year, the class held a fundraiser to benefit Syrian refugees, attended a global citizenship conference, and held a Black History Month celebration. Students also contributed to the Public Broadcasting System's Re:Dream project, an online effort to share stories about the American dream. Demand for the course was so high that Brothers and her students started a districtwide Mosaics club for students who couldn't take the class. More sections of the class will be offered at two of the district's schools next year.
Leadership Labs
As you can imagine, one weekend of work at a Teach to Lead summit is not enough to grapple with some of education's most complex issues. Plus, teacher leaders can struggle with a lack of time and funding to get their projects off the ground or to keep them running. After the summits, Teach to Lead selects certain teams to participate in local Leadership Labs with the intent of helping them expand their projects and bring key stakeholders into the discussion.
Lesley Hagelgans's If Project was the first Teach to Lead project to be fleshed out in a Leadership Lab. In 2014, the 8th grade language arts teacher from Marshall Middle School in Marshall, Michigan, became concerned about low-performing students and what the school could do to tailor interventions. As a first step, she developed a data system to provide targeted interventions to at-risk students. Four classroom teachers from the school compiled the data—a painstaking process of transferring information from handwritten records into Excel spreadsheets—so that every student had a three-year data profile. "You no longer had to wait for that first test to get to know your students and their abilities. We were handing it to teachers the week before schools started," says Hagelgans. Realizing that many of their students come from poverty, Hagelgans and her team also provided professional development to teachers drawing from Ruby Payne's research.
The team attended the first Teach to Lead summit in Louisville, Kentucky, in December 2014. As Hagelgans tells it, the summit moved the project out of its "toddler" stage by establishing goals for the next three years. The project was chosen for a Leadership Lab the following month. Because the U.S. Department of Education has a certain power of convening, the If Project team members found themselves at the table with representatives from their state's education department, school board members, teachers, parents, superintendents from across Michigan, and representatives from local colleges and universities.
What came from the experience was a fruitful discussion about how the community could provide wrap-around services for the project and students. A local college offered to begin a partnership by which their preservice teachers would take courses at the school and help in classrooms. Another university proposed the idea of building a health clinic near the school where its interns could work and Marshall's students could receive medical and dental services. Teachers offered to voluntarily run an after-school program, which they still facilitate today, to provide students with extra help outside of the school day.
If the project was in its toddler stage in 2014, then it's probably in its adolescent years today. Much like the middle school students she teaches, Hagelgans's project has growing pains, especially as the district annexes a nearby district and faces a substitute shortage. She hopes to one day add a teacher instructional coach to help interpret data and a community liaison to assist families. For now, there are only so many resources, especially as she and her teammates carry full teaching loads. Challenges like these speak to the need for systematic approaches for both defining and supporting the work of teacher leaders.
Still, the numbers are pointing in the right direction. In March, the school found out it is no longer among Michigan's "Focus Schools" that have the widest achievement gaps. "I'd like to think our work is part of the reason," Hagelgans says.
Change Agents for Students and Teachers
Steever and Simpson of the WoLakota Project are also starting to see the fruits of their labors. They don't have enough data yet to determine just how much progress they've made with teacher retention, but there's some early proof. Of the roughly 60 new teachers who have taken part in the first three cohorts, all but a handful have stayed. In addition, many of the mentees from the first cohort will soon become mentors to new teachers.
One teacher in particular proves why Steever and Simpson are change agents for students in reservation schools and for the educators who serve them. Olivia Olson was a member of the project's first cohort as part of her Teach for America placement and is now in her third year of teaching. "She told us the first year that had she not had this support, she'd be gone," Steever says. Since then, Olson has developed book clubs for parents, Zumba classes for the community, and knitting classes for students. Her students' test scores have skyrocketed. "Her principal told us, 'This woman has transformed what's happening with the kids in our school.' It's truly a transformation, and it's because one teacher chose to stay."
