Grow Your Own Educator Toolkit Overview

Raven DeRamus-Byers

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs, which recruit and prepare community-based teachers, are a promising strategy for easing local teacher shortages and for increasing the racial and linguistic diversity of the teacher workforce. Given the rapid growth of GYO programs across the country and increasing interest from policymakers, we see a need for resources to support program development, implementation, and sustainability.

This Grow Your Own Toolkit is an evolving collection of research, policy, and practice resources to promote the creation and implementation of high-impact GYO programs in communities across the nation. This toolkit is focused on programs and partnerships that support adult community members, such as paraeducators, to enter the teaching profession.

Over the past five years, New America has been engaged in comprehensive research and analysis of GYO programs and policies. We established a GYO Educator National Network in 2021 that brings together programs from across the country. We believe that GYO provides a framework for how to improve teacher preparation programs for the benefit of the communities they serve. Through its focus on who is recruited into teaching and how to remove barriers and promote teacher candidate persistence and success, GYO facilitates partnerships grounded in the needs and realities of local schools.

Using the Toolkit

The resources in this toolkit were developed by a team of policy experts and practitioners, and thus are useful to people with different relationships to GYO. As the strategy is highly localized and dependent on the needs of individual communities, this toolkit does not encompass every aspect of designing, implementing, and evaluating GYO programs. Rather, these tools are meant to supplement your team’s practice, research, and advocacy efforts with high-level considerations for effectively implementing GYO.

Where to Start

The toolkit is divided into five sections to align with different phases of the GYO development process.

• The GYO 101 section covers the fundamentals of Grow Your Own. The resources here detail what makes a high quality GYO program, as well as the policies and practices needed to support programs.
• The Program Design and Funding section offers insight into how to build, implement, and sustain a successful Grow Your Own program, and includes guidance on funding operations and building strong partnerships between stakeholders involved in the process.
• The Candidates section outlines strategies for recruiting, retaining, and mentoring both teacher candidates and the educators who prepare them in Grow Your Own programs.
• The Advocacy section provides some of the tools necessary for practitioners to advocate for Grow Your Own in their locales and beyond, including important information to know about GYO and its impact, sample GYO legislation, and tips for writing and speaking about GYO.
• The Data and Evaluation section presents strategies and frameworks for researching and evaluating Grow Your Own program growth and impact.

To download the toolkit overview document, click the button below.

New America

This guide highlights five essential elements of high-quality Grow Your Own programs.

Amaya Garcia and Jenny Muñiz
March 18, 2019

This blog post outlines five essential policies and five essential practices to support Grow Your Own programs for bilingual educators.

New America

This short video explains the fundamental elements and goals of Grow Your Own strategies and practices.

Amaya Garcia

This brief outlines key features of Grow Your Own program models and where to begin when designing a Grow Your Own program.

Raven DeRamus-Byers

This quick guide explains the purpose and features of an effective memorandum of agreement for building strong partnerships in a GYO program and contains sample MOAs.

Amaya Garcia

This comprehensive data table displays Grow Your Own policies and funding streams in the 50 states plus DC.

Alexandra Manuel

This document describes how to build and sustain strong partnerships among GYO program partners.

Amaya Garcia and Elena Silva

This reference guide highlights federal grant programs and other funds that can be used to support Grow Your Own.

Kevin Entrekin

This document describes considerations and strategies for recruiting teacher candidates to Grow Your Own programs, as well as strategies for retaining and supporting them.

Amanda Kibler and Jason Greenberg Motamedi

This working paper details ten mentoring competencies for school-based cooperating teachers and university supervisors, as well as twelve instructional competencies for teacher candidates and university instructors. For more information, contact Amanda Kibler and Jason Greenberg Motamedi.

Christie McLean Kesler and Richard Dunn

This guide addresses the elements and importance of high-quality mentoring in Grow Your Own programs and specifies the responsibilities and needs of all mentors involved in a teacher candidate’s preparation.

Raven DeRamus-Byers and Amaya Garcia

This document contains compelling points one would want to make about Grow Your Own and why it is a worthy investment. This document can be used with Considerations for Effectively Testifying in Legislative Hearings.

Raven DeRamus-Byers

This guide lists key factors to consider when testifying in legislative hearings, and provides a testimony template using the GYO Talking Points.

Raven DeRamus-Byers

This customizable Grow Your Own presentation slide deck offers speaker prompts and Grow Your Own talking points for any user advocating for a GYO program.

Riker Pasterkiewicz and Kevin Carey

This video describes the fundamentals of opinion writing, including what op-eds are, important considerations for pitching an op-ed, and how the op-ed publication process works. It can be used in conjunction with the Op-Eds 101: Outline that offers guidance on writing an op-ed.

Riker Pasterkiewicz and Julie Brosnan

This template offers guidance on how to write a compelling op-ed about a Grow Your Own program. It is meant to be used with the Op-Eds 101: Video.

Maika Moulite and Amanda Dean

This video training provides tips and best practices to help build awareness and engagement with GYO programs

Jason Greenberg Motamedi

This document offers guidelines for evaluating Grow Your Own programs and an example logic model.

A related video presentation examines key strategies and questions for GYO program evaluation and research. This complementary worksheet can be used to help structure an evaluation plan.

Ann Duffett

These guidelines outline suggested ways to stay connected with GYO program candidates in order to help document program impact.

Raven DeRamus-Byers

This list highlights selected resources on aspects of the teacher pipeline relevant to Grow Your Own educator programs and strategies.

Other Organizations to Explore:

• CEEDAR Center
• EdPrep Lab
• Educators Rising
• National Center for Grow Your Own
• National Center for Teacher Residencies
• New Teacher Center
• Opportunity Culture
• Pathways Alliance
• Prepared To Teach
• Tennessee Grow Your Own Center