Getty Images

Helping education assistants obtain a teaching license is a win-win, both for the new teachers and for districts hoping to diversify their teaching workforce.

During literacy time in a diverse kindergarten class, small groups of children rotate through a series of activities, one of which is guided by Ms. Shera. It’s obvious that her students adore her and that she feels the same about them. She skillfully adapts her lesson to each group — one of them works with letters, another identifies sight words, and the last group practices reading a text. One student, who didn’t speak for the first month of school, gleefully shows off his Play-Doh Rapunzel, talking aloud with his classmates. There are smiles all around as literacy time ends. Ms. Shera tells the students they are brilliant and asks them to “kiss their brains.”

This is Ms. Shera’s first year as lead teacher. In Egypt, she had earned a bachelor’s degree in English, but after moving to the United States, she put off her career for several years, opting to stay home with her children until they were old enough to go to school. Hoping to become a teacher, she then got a job as an educational assistant. After six years working in this role, she knew she could lead a classroom effectively. The question was, how could she find the funding and support to obtain a teaching license? She imagined teacher prep programs would be costly, inflexible, and unresponsive to the needs of adult learners, but she never stopped believing in her own potential.

She found a way forward through an innovative two-year fellowship program offered by a local university, in collaboration with her district, and designed for teacher candidates who share the backgrounds of the students they teach. Today, she is a licensed teacher, adept at connecting with all of the diverse students in her class but especially skilled at working with emerging bilingual learners. She understands what it is like to move to this country as someone whose first language is not English, and she hopes her students will see her as a role model, somebody who has fulfilled her professional aspirations by building on what she learned during her time as a classroom assistant.

An expanded pipeline

In recent years, researchers have gathered strong evidence to suggest that a lack of teacher diversity tends to have harmful consequences for students of color — for instance, white teachers often hold them to lower academic expectations, discipline them more harshly than they do white students, and refer them less often for gifted and special education services (Dee, 2005; Grissom, Kearn, & Rodriguez, 2015; Wright, 2015). Conversely, evidence suggests that increasing teacher diversity tends to have significant benefits for students of all racial backgrounds, and especially for Black and brown students, for whom studying with even a single teacher of color has been associated with higher test scores, higher rates of retention in school, and greater college persistence (Goldhaber, Theobald, & Tien, 2019). And yet, for all the benefits of teacher diversity, the country has made little progress over the last few decades in diversifying the teaching profession.

One particularly promising approach to creating a more diverse teaching workforce is to create new pathways for paraprofessional educators, or educational assistants (EAs), to become licensed teachers. Our own institution, Lipscomb University, has been highly successful at helping a small number of EAs like Ms. Shera move into regular teaching positions each year, and we believe that our work can be a useful model for other teacher education programs across the country that would like to open more pathways into the profession for a more diverse array of teacher candidates.

Paraprofessionals represent a pool of passionate and eager candidates who are committed to working with children, have already spent significant amounts of time in classrooms, and have often developed considerable amounts of expertise in teaching and learning.

Lipscomb is a midsize liberal arts university located in Nashville, Tennessee, that graduates approximately 200 new teachers a year from its undergraduate and alternative post-bachelor’s licensure programs. The university is located near the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), and as has been the case in many urban areas, the city and student population have become more racially, ethnically, and  linguistically diverse. Nashville is home to immigrants and refugees from many countries, and more than 60 languages are spoken in the district. Yet, the racial and ethnic diversity of the teacher population has not kept pace with the demographic changes in the city. In 2020-21, 23% of MNPS teachers were Black, compared to 39% of students, and only 2% of teachers were Latinx, compared to 28% of students (Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, 2020). To continue supporting our local community and school districts, we have worked to prepare a more diverse field of teacher candidates.

We built this program on the idea that schools don’t have to look far to increase teacher diversity. Paraprofessionals represent a pool of passionate and eager candidates who are committed to working with children, have already spent significant amounts of time in classrooms, and have often developed considerable amounts of expertise in teaching and learning (Villegas & Clewell, 1998). In many ways, they are already teachers, providing support to students all day, every day. They just don’t have a license — yet.

Paraprofessionals are hourly employees, whose average annual pay is approximately $20,000 in MNPS, and they tend to be a more diverse population than licensed teachers. According to district human resources data, in 2017, 55% of the more than 800 paraprofessionals employed by the district were people of color. Strategies to increase the number of teachers of color require programs to identify pools of possible candidates, and paraprofessionals represent a group that is easy to identify and connect with and that can have a short turnaround time to enter the classroom as a lead teacher.

Like Ms. Shera, many of the teaching candidates we work with are simply looking for help in obtaining their teacher license. Teacher licensure is an expensive process, often with a price tag of $10,000-$15,000, which tends to be prohibitive for workers who earn meager hourly wages (making no money at all when school is not in session). Also, many EAs are unaware of existing pathways and resources available to adults interested in becoming teachers. Many struggle to decipher the educational jargon they encounter in teacher  preparation programs or to make sense of the complicated licensure requirements they must complete. And many EAs belong to historically marginalized and underserved communities that have long felt unwelcome in traditional teacher preparation programs.

From the start, we’ve aimed not only to respond to the varied needs of the EAs we work with, but also to tailor our program to fit the specific staffing needs of local schools. For example, we’ve encouraged principals to identify EAs who seem to hold the potential to become lead teachers, and we’ve invited those EAs to apply. Principals know their student populations and their Eas, and they are often able to target individuals from within their neighborhoods or communities who have deep understandings of the students’ experiences. We host on-campus information sessions to introduce these potential candidates to our program requirements, and we support them through the application process, which culminates in on-campus interviews and mini-lesson teaching demonstrations. Further, we’ve obtained a state grant that allows us to provide scholarships — covering both the EAs’ tuition and the cost of their first license qualification exam — which dramatically reduces the financial barriers that have long prevented candidates from pursuing licensure.

During this initial startup phase, we’ve selected four candidates each year to join our two-year program. All candidates already hold bachelor’s degrees, so the curriculum begins with an online course to help them prepare for graduate-level writing assignments. Then, during the first year, candidates take graduate coursework at night, while continuing to work as paraprofessionals during the day, earning their regular income. In the second year, they are placed in the district’s priority hiring pool and transition into full-time paid teaching roles as part of our state’s alternative licensing pathways, with mentoring and coaching from both their school colleagues and their university faculty.

Throughout the program, we spend time supporting these teacher candidates in the habits of mind, skills, knowledge, and dispositions of teaching; coaching them through the hiring process; and helping them prepare for certification exams. They also receive individual mentoring and access to university resources such as mock interviews, résumé support, and Praxis tutoring. But perhaps most important is the intentional focus on developing strong relationships among cohort members, previous fellows, and university faculty. Cohort members have a group chat just for their cohort, as well as an all-cohort group chat with staff members, and all cohorts gather annually for dinner at a faculty member’s house. Cohort members also participate in the interview process to select the newest cohort. All of these activities help build a collegial professional community that they can turn to as they begin their new career. As candidates of color or minoritized backgrounds at a primarily white institution, it is especially important for these students to have a strong network of affinity, support, and collegiality.

What kinds of support do paraprofessionals of color need?

Each year for the five years of the program’s existence, we have gained new insights into how we can better support EAs of color transitioning into lead teacher roles. To some extent, that has led us to tweak and refine the academic, financial, and logistical supports we provide to help individual students succeed in their coursework, pay their bills, complete our program, and obtain a teaching license. Increasingly, though, we’ve come to understand that for most of our participants — as for many of the other students of color enrolled in our teacher-preparation programs — the most daunting challenges have to do with three themes in particular: identity, confidence, and tradition. While this particular program continues to be small in scale, we believe that these lessons are relevant to teacher-prep programs across the country and can serve as cornerstones to scaling up the work.

Identity

Changing from a paraprofessional role to a lead teacher role is no small transition for anyone, but it can be especially fraught for paraprofessionals of color who are entering a predominantly white teacher workforce that may expect them to assimilate to white, middle-class norms (Chopra et al. 2004). University faculty and district leaders need to recognize that their teacher candidates’ identities deeply shape their experiences and mindsets in ways that may put them at odds with the prevailing school culture.

We’ve seen some of these conflicting cultural values at play among our own teacher candidates. For example, because people of color are more likely to speak openly about racism, they can be labeled as “aggressive” when they are simply being direct (Tapia, 2016). A desire among professionals of color to make important decisions as a group and to value relationships over punctuality may look like “neediness” and lack of independence to their white counterparts, while white professionals may seem cold to their colleagues of color (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 2012). And aspiring teachers from working-class communities may have been taught not to bother authorities, but to just work harder, which may lead paraprofessionals transitioning into teaching to avoid bringing up significant challenges to leaders who could help (Calarco, 2014). Candidates of color at all levels in the industry face these challenges, but EAs of color often feel them more acutely due to the intersection of their racial or ethnic identity and their class background. This can be compounded for EAs who may have had interrupted college careers or who graduated many years ago and are uncomfortable with reentering higher education.

To avoid the feeling of isolation that can arise from these culture clashes, candidates of color need relationships with mentors of color. They also need to hear leaders openly acknowledge their lived experiences and to see that they are willing to examine how their practices are governed by white cultural norms. There is no point in recruiting more candidates of color without addressing their experiences in schools. We center these experiences by having our EAs read Dreamkeepers by Gloria Ladson-Billings as they begin the program, by openly discussing race in our gatherings, and by connecting them with older fellows in the program for mentorship.

Confidence

Our EAs of color often come to us after having experiences in schools that have lowered their self-confidence. Rebuilding their confidence has been a critical part of our program. Their differences have too often been framed as “deficiencies,” perpetuating a sense of individual inadequacy, even as they must battle systemic and pervasive inequities.

A compounding factor for EAs of color is that current systems often fail to recognize their unique strengths that are deeply needed in this field. Many EAs develop strong relationships with students and learn basic instructional skills without an education degree, yet their leaders do not take the time to point this out. EAs are aware that they bring key strengths to their schools — they develop instructional strategies as they work with students, are often given responsibilities beyond their pay grade to develop and lead lessons, and often provide critical connections between families and schools (Chopra et al, 2004). However, they are still hourly employees who receive little to no formal professional development or recognition from their districts. The nuances of working in an hourly assistant position often foster a mentality of subordination and inferiority that takes time to overcome.

This feeling can sometimes metastasize early in the licensure process as candidates take licensure exams and coursework that may not reinforce their strengths, while pushing them to read and write at graduate levels, which can decrease their confidence. Several of our students almost gave up as they struggled to pass licensure exams, which seemed far removed from their lived daily experience interacting with students in the classroom. This is compounded by the imposter syndrome that many educators of color already experience. It helps to explicitly address with EAs that their time in the classroom has given them a head start to growing into a master teacher. Teaching is a craft that takes years to develop, and no one starts out excellent at all the skills. Giving EAs this support and affirmation is important throughout the entire program.

Confidence building also involves setting candidates up for success. In our program, careful pacing has proven helpful. Teacher candidates complete three semesters of coursework. They complete six eight-week courses. In their second year, they transition to the role of lead teacher and spend one semester receiving mentoring and one semester completing the edTPA, which is the final requirement for candidates. We encourage our EAs to stay in the support role for their first year of coursework and to move into a lead teacher role only after they’ve finished coursework. Taking the transition at this pace allows them to focus on their coursework in the first year without also making the transition to lead teacher.

Tradition

A traditional view of teacher quality places a high emphasis on test scores and GPAs as the best indicators of quality of candidates, and this limited view of teacher quality can sometimes be used to push back on efforts to diversify the teacher workforce. Some of our strongest candidates could be overlooked in processes that focus on their undergraduate GPAs or test scores. Especially for teacher candidates with more than three years of work experience, a school transcript is of limited value for measuring their professional potential.

A broader view of quality will encompass teachers’ ability to understand student and community backgrounds and strengths and to form relationships with students, qualities that the paraprofessionals of color in our program have in abundance. When selecting candidates for our program, we de-emphasized transcripts and looked more at answers to essay questions and the interview process, which included teaching a sample lesson in front of current and former scholarship recipients.

Where to start

We believe our program can be a model for others, but establishing such a program takes time. School and district leaders hoping to diversify their teaching pipeline can start by taking small steps now, such as by conducting classroom observations of the EAs already working in their schools, or by asking teachers to identify EAs who would be likely to succeed in a regular teaching position.

The pathway into the teaching profession often begins with something as innocuous as an adult telling a student that “you’d be a great teacher.”

The pathway into the teaching profession often begins with something as innocuous as an adult telling a student that “you’d be a great teacher.” Such simple, off-the-cuff remarks can go a long way to addressing the fear that one might not be cut out to work in education, or that one lacks the patience, creativity, and intelligence to be a good teacher.

The same goes for paraprofessionals. All too often, EAs are more or less invisible to most of the teachers and administrators in their schools. But they represent a vast, untapped resource in K-12 education, one that can help us not only to fill teacher vacancies but also to diversify and strengthen the profession. That’s why it’s so important for veteran teachers and school leaders to reach out to and engage with EAs, pointing out their strengths, commending them for the value they add to the classroom, and raising the question of whether they might want to obtain a license and move into a lead teaching position.

So too should school leaders speak candidly with EAs about the challenges they will face if they aspire to become lead teachers, including the coursework they will have to take, the licensure exams they will have to pass, the job searches they will have to navigate, and the tenure process they will have to get through. And at the same time, it’s important to encourage those EAs — particularly EAs of color — to build the professional networks, create the support systems, and find the mentors who can sustain them along the way, helping them see their own potential and keep moving forward when the path becomes difficult.

 

 

References

Calarco, J. (2014). Coached for the classroom: Parents’ cultural transmission and children’s reproduction of educational inequalities. American Sociological Review, 79 (5), 1015-1037.

Chopra, R.V., Sandoval-Lucero, E., Aragon, L., Bernal, C., De Balderas, H.B., & Carroll, D. (2004). The paraprofessional role of connector. Remedial and Special Education, 25 (4), 219-231.

Dee, T. (2005). A teacher like me: Does race, ethnicity, or gender matter? The American Economic Review, 95 (2), 158-165.

Goldhaber, D., Theobald, R., & Tien, C. (2019). Why we need a diverse teacher workforce. Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (5), 25-30.

Grissom, J.A., Kern, E.C., & Rodriguez, L.A. (2015). The “representative bureaucracy” in education: Educator workforce diversity, policy outputs, and outcomes for disadvantaged students. Educational Researcher, 44 (3), 185-192.

Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. (2020). Chamber education report. Author. www.nashvillechamber.com/public-policy/education/education-report

Tapias, A. (2016). The inclusion paradox: The post-Obama era and the transformation of global diversity (3rd ed.). Hewitt Associates.

Trompenaars, F. & Hampden-Turner, C. (2012). Riding the waves of culture: Understanding diversity in global business (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. State University of New York Press.

Villegas, A.M. & Clewell, B.C. (1998). Increasing teacher diversity by tapping the paraprofessional pool. Theory Into Practice, 37 (2), 121-130.

Wright, A.C. (2015, November). Teachers’ perceptions of students’ disruptive behavior: The effect of racial congruence and consequences for school suspension [Conference paper]. Association for American Education Finance Policy Annual Conference, Washington, DC.

 

This article appears in the November 2021 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 3, pp. 17-21.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

default profile picture

Laura Delgado

LAURA DELGADO is the Pionero Scholars program director in the College of Education at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN.

default profile picture

Kristin Baese

KRISTIN BAESE is an assistant professor of instructional practice in the College of Education at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN.

default profile picture

Ally Hauptman

ALLY HAUPTMAN is an associate professor of instructional practice in the College of Education at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN.