Corbin ISD was one of ten sites in rural Kentucky’s Southeast South-Central Educational Cooperative (SESC) region participating in NTC’s federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant, Catalyzing Innovations in Teacher Leader Development in Rural and Urban Settings.

Prior to NTC’s partnership, Corbin ISD did not have coaching staff or an infrastructure for job-embedded professional learning and teacher support. We worked with district leaders to establish a clear vision and approach for building a cost-effective and sustainable coaching program.

Beginning with one staff member participating in NTC coaching training offered through SESC, the district now has 22 trained coaches providing teacher support across the district, resulting in what staff describe as a system-wide “culture of coaching.” The district’s goal is to continue to scale coaching capacity to reach all teachers through professional learning communities (PLCs). District staff report significant improvement in state working conditions survey results and a positive impact on teacher practice and student learning.

NTC designed tailored pre-service professional learning and mentor training to support aspiring teachers in M-DCPS’s Grow Your Own (GYO) pathways, aligning with the district’s vision for teacher recruitment, retention, and development.

Our partnership with M-DCPS recently focused on enhancing district teacher recruitment efforts through custom professional learning for candidates in its Clerical to Teach (C2T) and Paraprofessional to Teach (P2T) programs. These initiatives provide pathways to full teacher certification for eligible staff, offering comprehensive support and the necessary resources to prepare candidates for the Florida Teacher Certification Exam.

Participants in the programs already play a crucial role in students’ lives, serving as vital liaisons in the classroom and between the school, families and caregivers, and the community. The C2T and P2T programs aim to strengthen the workforce by leveraging candidates’ deep community knowledge and school-based experience.

NTC developed targeted pre-service professional learning and mentoring to support aspiring GYO teachers’ transitions to new roles in the classroom.

Historically, Clint ISD did not have a system-wide instructional framework, and staff reported the need for greater instructional rigor and coherence to close learning gaps. Having aligned curricula enables districts to compare outcomes across schools and student subgroups to identify areas for improvement as well as effective strategies to build from.

Using the state grant “levers” of strong school leadership and planning, high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), and effective instruction, NTC first conducted a comprehensive instructional audit to develop recommendations and co-design a plan for building a coherent system-wide instructional framework for the district. This included support for curriculum and HQIM adoption and professional learning and coaching training for school principals and other school leaders to guide implementation. The goal was to develop strong instructional leadership teams at each school to support teachers in using HQIM associated with district-adopted curricula.

New Teacher Center (NTC) began its collaborative partnership with HIDOE over a decade ago to establish one of six “new teacher centers” in some of the largest districts in the United States. This work started with a partnership with the University of Hawai’i to provide professional learning for mentors of new emergency-hire special education teachers.

Over the next few years, NTC provided programmatic consultation, conducting focus groups across the state to assess existing induction practices.

The state’s induction program is now viewed by Hawai’i’s education leadership as the “heartbeat of the department.” NTC has supported the growth of a state induction program that reflects NTC’s induction model’s key principles and components.

NTC provides contextualized professional learning and instructional coaching for local curriculum. Since 2019, we have deepened our work on curriculum-based instructional coaching and professional learning through partnerships with Expeditionary Learning, Odell Education and Illustrative Mathematics 6-8.

Tennessee has undertaken a comprehensive math adoption process, which includes new math standards, a new instructional practice guide and curriculum implementation across all districts. Districts were awarded a grant for a two-year partnership to support this work.

• Year one focused on strategic planning and capacity building with school and district leaders.
• Year two focuses on supporting implementation and bringing to life each district’s vision for excellent math instruction under a statewide umbrella.

NTC supported seven districts — urban to rural — statewide with its proven relationship-driven personalized coaching approach to bring beginning, mid-career and veteran teachers through the change process. Teachers, instructional coaches, school and district leaders were able to unpack and roll out their districts’ adopted math curriculum, the TN Math Instructional Practice Guide and the TN Mathematics Instructional Focus Documents.