How to Use This Toolkit

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.