Tips for Successful Submissions to the AACTE #DEIHandbook
AACTE wants to celebrate your successful strategies to diversify the profession and professionally develop your faculty and staff. We plan to share members’ strategies in a handbook focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This handbook will be distributed to congressional leaders and their staff during Washington Week 2020. The handbook will also be located on the AACTE website for our members to share their successes with one another.
Now that you’ve read about the Handbook, you’re likely planning your submission. We want to support you every step of the way. Below are a few tips for a successful submission to the DEI Handbook.
Strand I: Faculty/Staff Professional Development – This strand embraces strategies that support faculty and staff professional development in the areas of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy and practices. Examples of these strategies may include, but are not limited to, supporting faculty in incorporating culturally responsive and sustaining practices in the development and execution of coursework, encouraging faculty and staff participation in anti-racist professional development, self-assessment, and self-interrogation.
Tip 1: Be sure to identify the infrastructure that supports the professional development. Who has championed this work for your educator preparation program (EPP)? How is the work being funded? How is the work being valued?
Tip 2: Outcomes can be described in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Be sure to specifically describe why you measured success the way you did.
Tip 3: This strand addresses faculty and staff, but we want to know if your professional development had outcomes that positively impacted your students as well.
Tip 4: If you are partnering with faculty from a different member institution in your strategy, we would like to highlight your successful network. Let us know who is involved in your strategy.
Tip 5: Think broadly about your approach to culturally responsive and sustaining professional development. For example, recruiting diverse faculty and staff requires anti-racist practices embedded in each step of the process. How is your campus supporting faculty and staff in these areas?
Strand 2: Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Educators – Research increasingly shows that all students benefit from having a diverse educator, yet the educator workforce remains overwhelmingly White. This strand encourages strategies that support the recruitment and retention of a culturally and racially diverse educator candidate pool. These strategies may include, but are not limited to, Grow Your Own programs to reach more racially diverse candidates, financial incentives to reduce the barriers to entry and completion of educator preparation programs, and inclusive approaches to demonstrating competencies for entry and completion.
Tip 1: Be sure to explain how you recruit and sustain your faculty, staff, and students. Outline the practices that are unique to recruitment practices as compared to retention.
Tip 2: If you are a TEACH or Teacher Quality Partnership grant recipient and you’ve collected data on candidate’s after they have graduated from your program, we want to hear about their successes as well.
Tip 3: Don’t forget about your para-professional pipeline. Many of our successful para-to-pro programs support diversifying our educator workforce.
Tip 4: If you are partnering with another institution to diversify your candidates, we want to know how you established and sustained the partnership.
Tip 5: Remember the audience reading your strategy may not be an educator. Describe your work so that it is consumable by someone outside of your discipline.
Members are encouraged to submit strategies to the handbook. Strategies are due August 21, 2020 at 11:59pm.
Tags: advocacy, diversity, equity, inclusion, Washington Week
