What is the TIP 2.0 Program?
Torace Innovators Pilot (TIP) Program was created in the spirit of collaborative innovation. Each cycle we identify a particular focus area of innovative work and look for partners who are willing to collaborate on the design and implementation of a program with the goal of developing and sharing cutting edge best practices with the field. To learn more about previous TIP partners and TIP 1.0, click here.
This year’s focus is on leveraging existing preservice mentoring work to help strengthen teacher leadership and aspiring leader pathways.
Background:
Torace grew out of our prior consulting and research work related to K-12 human resources strategies. Much of our work involved doing a detailed examination of our district partners' educator pipelines from paraprofessionals through teachers and school leaders to deputy superintendents.
Across the country, from districts small to large, we often identified two areas that were constantly under-leveraged:
Student teacher
Teacher leadership
These two pieces of the “pipeline” are critical: the first is a key pathway into teaching, and the second involves both the retention and engagement of experienced teachers as well as the internal pathways for those teachers who are interested in school leadership. Moreover, these pieces are also related: hosting student teachers can be an important part of the teacher leadership pathway when managed with intentionality.
The Guiding Vision
A lot of work goes into the process and supports for making clinical placements and for cultivating aspiring leaders; but what we saw repeatedly is that with a little more coordination, structure, and collaboration, efforts could be much more powerfully deployed without requiring significantly more resources.
Leveraging Existing Mentoring:
Intentionally placing practicum field experience students, as well as student teachers and residents, can increase the breadth and depth of experience of future teachers and create better matches
Scaffolding mentoring roles can create a leadership pathway from lighter-touch and lower-stakes mentoring through more demanding and more critical interventions while expanding the pool of potential mentors
Creating single larger pools of potential mentors at each stage in the pathway (not segmenting pools with similar qualifications by program) increases the opportunity to make intentional matches
Cultivating larger pools of mentors provides more leadership opportunities for experienced teachers that align to their interests and qualifications, and also creates more of an opportunity to make good matches
What We are Looking For
We are looking for districts interested in innovative strategic human capital practices to partner with us to develop a coherent mentoring pathway at their institution. We will help you understand the strengths of your current practices, identify opportunities to build on what you have that are aligned to your goals and values, and help you to design and implement those changes.
We are looking for K-12, Elementary, or High School Districts with the following characteristics:
Between 20 and 125 school sites
Currently hosting between 25 and 350 student teachers
Currently hosting some practicum or other students completing field experience whether currently placed centrally or not
With many years of collaborative consulting experience, our team will work closely with your team to create a vision and action plan that works for your content and supports your goals. We will customize an Enterprise Package of Torace tools to support the work.
This is real, high-value work. We will want an executive sponsor at your institution (Chief Human Capital Officer, Deputy Superintendent, or Superintendent depending on institutions size and org chart) to support the work and it must be aligned with your strategic plan. If there are multiple programs that involve site-based mentoring (as opposed to central mentoring staff), it is beneficial to have as many of them included in this work as possible—collaboration rather than siloing and competition is key. It is also important to have leads from any of the teams who touch this work to be part of the conversation, including current placement coordinators, people who select and train mentors, if that is done centrally, and others who are working on leadership development.
TIP Partner Commitments
Executive sponsor with commitment to strengthening educator pipelines and leadership development
Team collaboration for program design (bi-weekly calls during design phase from between 1 to 3 months depending on complexity)
Readiness to implement researched-based best practices for placement
Participate in a case study to share learnings with the field
TIP Partner Benefits
Free program design support and project management
Free subscription to Torace Enterprise Package for one year
Free early access to new and experimental platform features
Free consultation and recommendations for second expanded implementation if a sequenced rollout was planned
50% off second year tool subscription with no obligation to renew
Interested in applying to TIP 2.0? Learn more on our How to Apply page. Have questions? Take a look at our FAQs page.