The Spring 2024 Teach to Lead Summit focused on and aligned with the Secretary’s priorities related to raising the bar and improving the educator experience and elevating the education profession. The Effective Educator Development (EED) Division of the U.S. Department of Education, in committing to elevating the work of PK-12 educators, and in Spring 2024 hosted a Teach to Lead Summit in San Diego, California for school teams working to find innovative ways to encourage, invest in, and support teachers across the U.S. by pursuing strategies to increase teacher collaboration, reduce teacher workload, attend to dimensions of teacher wellness, and enact inclusive practices to attract and retain high-quality teachers. Project submissions including partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and minority-serving institutions were highly encouraged.

Participating teams at the Spring 2024 Teach to Lead Summit included 11 educator teams from nine states and the District of Columbia working to solve problems of practice aligned with:

• Recruiting and retaining a talented and diverse educator workforce
• Developing strong partnerships to build and sustain high-quality educator preparation pathways, including Grow Your Own and Registered Teacher Apprenticeships
• Enhancing efforts to improve working conditions and promoting a positive school culture, and
• Promoting career advancement and leadership opportunities through high-quality professional learning.

Attending teams engaged in collaborative problem solving to understand the root causes of challenges facing their schools, staff, students, and families. With the support of “critical friends” from six Regional Comprehensive Centers, and three organizations committed to improving educational outcomes (Discovery Education, Insight Education Group, and Spirit of Excellence Learning Systems), teams were guided through a rigorous process to identify a problem of practice, explore root causes, and develop a theory of change those grounds their work in a logic model. As experts in small group facilitation, critical friends also supported teams through a peer consultancy and activities designed to help teams identify strategies that, when implemented, lead to outcomes reflecting desired changes in their schools and learning communities. On Day 2, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Equity and Discretionary Grants and Support Services for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Dr. Bernadine Futrell provided a welcome and opening remarks before emcees oriented teams to the day’s agenda and preparation for peer consultancy.

Critical friends and teams were encouraged to “trust the process” over the course of the event, and their commitment and hard work paid off by Day 3. Teams engaged in an additional peer consultancy to test their project pitch and then shared their pitches and visual displays with attendees in a round robin Gallery Walk.