The Strengthening the Educator Workforce Pipeline project focuses on supporting education stakeholders to use geographic information system maps to understand factors that may be affecting educator shortages and identify and share effective locally developed practices with peers. As part of this work, the project team recently completed updates to the geographic information system map, including making refinements to the map and reporting on the most currently available data in each map dashboard. In addition, R12CC facilitated a community of practice of Colorado education stakeholders focused on strengthening the state’s educator workforce pipeline. The final session supported the community of practice teams to develop action plans to address aspects of the educator workforce pipeline relevant to their context.
Recent efforts also include collaborating with key Colorado Department of Education (CDE) staff to lead a breakout session at the school administrators’ conference on the geographic information system map and sharing opportunities for Colorado schools and districts to engage in a second planned community of practice.
As work proceeds in the fourth project year, R12CC will continue to support Colorado education stakeholders to strengthen the educator workforce pipeline through customized data analysis, a learning community, and educator recruitment and retention specialists’ support sessions.
R12CC is also supporting CDE to update the Colorado Dropout Prevention Framework. The project team facilitated a series of workshops with CDE to gather input on the revised dropout prevention framework. Based on stakeholder feedback obtained during earlier workshops and focus groups, R12CC created a draft Role Guide describing potential responsibilities for district leaders, school leaders, and individuals providing direct support to students relative to each of the framework’s seven strategies.
Building from version 2.0 of the revised dropout prevention framework recently completed, R12CC will collect additional external stakeholder feedback on the framework and continue to engage with CDE leaders to produce a finalized framework with content and format revisions. To help inform and strengthen implementation of evidence-based strategies for dropout prevention and student reengagement, R12CC will also identify strategy-specific implementation stories from Colorado districts/schools to highlight in the final framework.