Region-wide collective impact on the Hispanic teacher pipeline Open Access

The vital importance of strong university-school partnerships in teacher preparation has long been demonstrated in the literature (Phelps, 2019). What has received less attention are the collaborations beyond the university-school dyad that contribute to improving educational quality – that is, partnerships across higher education, business and philanthropy that are focused on moving the needle on core educational issues in a particular region. One approach to these cross-sector collaborations to address pressing social issues at a regional level is “collective impact” – an approach to systemic change defined in part by “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” (Kania & Kramer, 2011, p. 36). Collective impact involves a backbone support organization – in this case, the university and local community foundation – and includes four additional key features: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication (Kania & Kramer, 2011). Region-wide collective impact initiatives have been seen in places from Cincinnati to Colorado to Los Angeles, tackling complex social problems such as cradle-to-career educational opportunities, prescription drug abuse and homelessness, respectively (Edmonson & Zimpher, 2014; Ide, 2020).

While collective impact provides a lens for understanding vertical and horizontal change efforts across sectors, organizational change theory provides a framework for understanding the internal dynamics of change within an organization. Fullan’s (2015) work on educational change leadership highlights the multidimensional nature of change and underscores the importance of creating a common vision and aligning organizational structures to support long-term improvements. Teacher residency programs that are co-designed with district partners and reinforced by a larger educational support system can be seen as a critical lever in this process. By situating teacher residency models within the school setting and by driving them through shared planning and decision-making structures, residency programs foster a more collaborative environment and ensure that new teachers are supported by a team of coaches and mentors from both the university and the school district. This approach aligns with Fullan’s emphasis on developing a collaborative school culture that avoids the limitations of more superficial versions of professional learning communities (Fullan, 2015). As a result, teacher residencies can support both high-quality teacher training processes for highly skilled educators and serve to reinforce and support broader systemic change.

This collective impact effort is situated in El Paso, Texas, which is part of a US-Mexico border metropolitan area that includes a binational population of more than 2.5 million and a county population of more than 800,000. The region encompasses nine school districts serving a PK-12 population of more than 160,000 students, more than 90% of whom are Hispanic, more than 75% economically-disadvantaged and nearly 30% emergent bilingual (Texas Education Agency, 2023). The EPP that represents a key player in these region-wide teacher pipeline improvement efforts is based at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a large, public, research-intensive Hispanic Serving Institution with a student population of more than 25,000, of whom more than 80% are Hispanic and more than 50% are first-generation college-going. The teachers prepared at the university are more than 90% Hispanic on average and more than 60% Pell-eligible – mirroring the broader demographics of the region and its school districts.

The origins of the region’s teacher pipeline improvement efforts date back to the formation of the Educator Pipeline CoP in early 2019, when several key stakeholders representing the university, local philanthropy and school districts came together to discuss prevailing issues in teacher preparation and retention in the region. Several pressing needs were identified by school districts, resulting in the prioritization of two key action areas: (1) strengthening teacher preparation and (2) strengthening the mentorship of new teachers. The CoP became the surrounding support structure for the co-design and implementation of a year-long teacher residency between the university-based EPP and district partners, which began as the Miner Teacher Residency in 2019–2020 with two campuses in two districts and was fully scaled by 2023–2024 to all education majors and post-baccalaureate candidates, who completed residencies in seven partner school districts in the region. The CoP also served as the support structure for a philanthropically funded new teacher mentorship program – which became the Miner Teacher Mentorship Program – where university-based clinical faculty provided direct mentorship to new teachers in three rural/quasi-rural school districts.

The residency efforts were initially supported by technical assistance from University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (US PREP). In the earliest stages of planning in 2019, the internal team leading the university-based EPP (including the authors of this paper) mapped out a strategy to scale the residency over a five-year period; by 2024, all education majors and post-baccalaureate candidates completed a residency as part of their degree plan. Stipend funding for teacher candidates was supported by the local community foundation, a local education non-profit and the local workforce board. Later stipend funding came from the state and school districts, combined with personnel funding from two federal grants from the U.S. Department of Education through the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) program and the Augustus F. Hawkins program. The new teacher mentorship program was supported by the local community foundation and later expanded to additional district partners with federal TQP funding.

In examining the implementation of the partnership-based residency at scale, we draw on a descriptive case study approach utilizing a self-study lens (Loughran, 2005). Self-study in teacher education refers to a collection of methods that falls under the broader umbrella of practitioner research (Zeichner & Noffke, 2001) and that coheres around the core principles of reflexivity, inquiry and improvement of practice (Pithouse et al., 2009). From our vantage point as college administrators and teacher educators, we utilize a self-study stance to analyze key elements of the process of developing and acting on region-wide goals for strengthening the teacher pipeline. Both authors are based at the university and have played lead roles in establishing the residency and collective impact efforts between the university, school districts and community: the first author (Mein) through her role as professor and associate dean charged with leading the EPP since 2019 and co-author (Tanabe) through his role as dean of UTEP’s College of Education since 2018.

Within the context of region-wide goals designed to strengthen the teacher pipeline, the university-based EPP collected three key sources of data: (1) teacher candidate exit surveys; (2) employment and job placement data of teacher candidates; and (3) archival documents, including agendas and meeting notes from the CoP; agendas and meeting notes from partnership meetings with school districts; and program documents such as syllabi and program handbooks. These data sources were combined with the authors’ own artifacts, including written journal entries and memos about our experience with the change process.

The exit surveys (n = 165) were administered at the end of the residency over three semesters – in spring 2023, fall 2023 and spring 2024 – to account for teacher candidates who started their year-long residency both in fall and spring semesters. Survey items focused on self-perceptions of preparedness along the four domains of planning, instruction, learning environment and professionalism, in alignment with the state evaluation rubric for teachers. Questions asked how well the residency prepared participants on different aspects of each of these four domains, and responses were on a 1–4 Likert scale ranging from “not well” to “very well.”

Employment and job placement data were collected internally through communication with districts at shared governance meetings, through in-house tracking of candidates by their site coordinator and through communication with district human resources offices. For the purposes of this study, survey and employment data were analyzed descriptively. Archival and reflection data were coded thematically through an “open” and “focused” coding process (Emerson et al., 2011) connected to the frameworks of collective impact and organizational change. Key themes that emerged included “goal-setting,” “shared metrics,” and “shared vision.” These themes will be explored in subsequent sections.

In reading our description of the core features of the region-wide collective impact efforts that we embarked on in the El Paso region, one might get the impression that the work was heavily pre-planned, highly organized and systematic. It was not. We often describe the process as “building the airplane while it is in the air.” Having said that, it is true that the community context within which we led our collective impact work offered a set of unique advantages.

The university EPP is responsible for roughly 70% of the current teacher workforce spread throughout its surrounding region. And those teachers educate the students who eventually make up about 80% of UTEP’s student body. This context can be described as an “educational closed loop,” and properly framing it has fundamentally grounded our collective impact work. Prior to launching the Educator Pipeline CoP, we noted that our unique educational ecosystem was often viewed as a deficit to be used by different community members to “point fingers” or to assign blame for certain education outcomes. Yet, in beginning our collective impact work, we sought to leverage this context as an asset and to use it as a driving force for change. In doing so, we highlighted the fact that in an educational closed loop, blaming each other is illogical and unproductive, because we are all part of the “loop.” When university leaders say that students from our regional school districts are not well-prepared, they must also acknowledge that the university (or at least the university’s College of Education) prepares 70% of the region’s entire teacher workforce. This effort to reframe our unique education ecosystem from a deficit to an asset has allowed us to take full advantage of the core principles and practices of a collective impact approach to improving the teacher pipeline in the region.

Related to our early efforts to properly frame and leverage our strengths, we designed a series of outreach activities to “till the soil” for a large collective impact effort. One type of activity that we used in various forms can be described as a listening session. Put simply, we organized an event to communicate with key stakeholders. Sometimes these events took place at a local venue and felt a little like business forums, complete with a lunch and a program. At other times the events were held at the UTEP campus and included panels of speakers. In general, the messaging at these events was the same: “We [the university] want to learn how we can be better at doing our part to contribute to the hard work you are all doing to improve education in El Paso.”

Another kind of “till the soil” activity we engaged in was affectionally called a “bus tour.” This effort included recruiting faculty and staff from the college of education to board a bus and to go to a school district in our region to learn as much as we could about that district. This activity was co-designed with district leadership and conveyed the same messaging described above. Each bus tour ended with a smaller meeting with district leadership where the College of Education would have the opportunity to thank the district for its hospitality. At this closing meeting, we also sought to communicate that the ultimate goal for the College of Education was to do everything that it can to improve the educational experiences and outcomes for children and families in El Paso. And, in order to do that, we are clear that we must do everything we can to better serve our region’s school districts. These listening and messaging activities are tied directly to the overarching and critical first step in our creating a region-wide collective impact strategy – developing a shared vision.

In this section, we highlight the ways in which our region-wide transformation efforts to strengthen the teacher pipeline aligned with Kania and Kramer’s (2011) collective impact framework. We describe four key features of our work together: (1) developing a shared vision; (2) operationalizing the vision through responsive programming; (3) identifying outcomes and shared metrics; and (4) establishing cross-sector mechanisms for data sharing and continuous communication.

The development of a region-wide vision for strengthening the teacher pipeline has been an iterative process that started with the formation of a regional Teacher Preparation Working Group in 2019, which later became the El Paso Educator Pipeline CoP. With leadership from local philanthropy and facilitation support from a statewide technical assistance provider, a working group first convened in January 2019 with the goal of identifying barriers, existing practices and possible action areas related to teacher preparation. Participants included leadership from two large school districts, the university, the regional educational service center and two local philanthropic organizations. Five key areas of need were identified by the group, including teacher pipeline, teacher preparation, new teacher support, principal support and inquiry and/or research. Of those, two key priority areas were selected by the group: teacher pipeline and new teacher support. The group, which expanded to include four additional school districts (of an overall nine in the region), began to meet bimonthly to gather data and develop a shared direction for the teacher pipeline and new teacher support.

One key thread in these meetings was the need to address the perceived disconnect between the university and schools by fostering stronger cross-institutional communication and alignment in the preparation of teachers. Leadership in the College of Education (including the authors of this article) responded to this call to action by initiating a full-scale transformation process within our university teacher preparation program. This process involved input from faculty, staff and students, as well as school districts and other community partners involved in the Teacher Preparation Working Group. All cohered around the shared vision of preparing the highest-quality, day-one-ready teachers who meet the needs of and provide rigorous learning experiences to all students – with the ultimate goal of positively impacting PK-12 student success across the region.

With this larger outcome – positively impacting PK-12 student success across the region – as a guiding light, and with support from technical assistance partner US PREP, UTEP leadership and faculty designed and piloted a paid, year-long teacher residency for undergraduate teacher candidates, many of whom typically worked one or more jobs while completing their semester-long clinical experience. The core structural elements of the residency included candidates spending a full academic year in a classroom co-teaching with a carefully selected and trained mentor teacher, with coaching support and performance assessments from a university site coordinator who was based in the field. From the outset, UTEP residents were paid a stipend, first by local philanthropic partners and soon after with state support and district-identified funds.

The residency initial pilot in 2019–2020 included 19 teacher candidates in two large school districts in the region; by 2023–2024, the residency was scaled to include all undergraduate education majors and post-baccalaureate candidates, with more than 150 residents/year placed in seven partner school districts across the region. With philanthropic support, the university also initiated a pilot teacher mentorship program in 2020 in partnership with three rural or quasi-rural districts. By 2023–2024, this program had expanded to six school districts and included support from both philanthropic and a TQP grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

One key cornerstone of the residency is shared governance, where the university and school district partners meet on a quarterly basis to review data and make joint decisions about teacher preparation programming. Participants in shared governance include university program leadership and site coordinators, district academic leadership (including chief academic officers and assistant and/or associate superintendents), district human resources leadership and campus leadership, as well as mentor teachers and residents, on occasion. Co-designed agendas and data sharing are at the heart of shared governance. Key sources of data shared and deliberated across all university-district governance meetings include teacher candidate performance on the university teaching rubric, which is aligned to the state evaluation rubric; program perception data from mentor teachers and candidates; and employment data, including the number of residents hired and retained in partner school districts.

In this way, the university and district partners are able to track the development of teacher candidates on a quarterly basis, identify areas of need and address those areas in close partnership with districts and campuses. One early example of this feedback loop in action was the identification of a gap in lesson planning, where residents were not spending enough time with their mentor teachers co-planning in order to be successful in co-teaching. Upon reviewing the data and identifying the issue, pilot district partners set aside compensated time for mentor teachers and residents to co-plan together, while the university included more explicit co-planning expectations and set aside time in our trainings with mentor teachers and residents. Both sets of actions led to a positive change in resident lesson planning and co-teaching with mentor teachers. This is just one of many examples of how partnership-based data review and reflection led to incremental improvement in programming – and this continuous improvement process represents a core feature of shared governance.

The key data sources shared in university-district governance – resident performance, program perceptions and resident hiring for employment – serve as the foundational metrics for assessing university-district progress toward the larger goal of impacting the teacher pipeline and ultimately PK-12 student success across the region. At the regional level, governance teams have come together as an inter-district governance body as part of the Region-Wide Residency and Teacher Pipeline Summit since June 2023, when we first articulated a broader shared vision and identified metrics related to the teacher pipeline. The working vision – developed through a collaborative brainstorming process that again included district/campus leadership, university leadership and faculty and philanthropic representation – can be summarized as:

In the service of this vision, the group articulated sample goals and metrics, which are outlined in Table 1.

The Region-Wide Residency and Teacher Pipeline Summit now meets on an annual basis and serves as a mechanism for convening and tracking progress toward shared goals alongside the Educator Pipeline CoP, which meets quarterly and includes a broader agenda. Tracking progress on a yearly basis through a summit structure helps expand cross-institutional, cross-sector communication and contributes to an additional feedback loop at a broader scale beyond that established by the university-district governance structure. In addition, annual meetings to track progress contribute to mutual accountability, where partners are working side-by-side rather than in silos to meet a common region-wide goal. Communication and feedback occur at multiple levels outside of university-district governance, including at the campus and classroom levels through the presence of university site coordinators on campuses. These multi-level communication structures contribute to multiple feedback loops that address key indicators and process metrics – including mentor teacher selection and support as well as resident support – in the service of the broader metrics set at the regional level.

Within the nested data sharing and support structures of university-district shared governance, the Region-Wide Residency and Teacher Pipeline Summit and the Educator Pipeline CoP, UTEP has worked closely with school district and community partners as well as other entities (such as the state education agency) to collect, analyze and disseminate data related to teacher preparation and induction – initially for the purposes of program improvement and subsequently for the purposes of assessing program impact. With respect to candidate preparedness following the residency, on exit surveys, graduates reported high levels of perceived preparedness for their own classrooms across these four domains, with 96.4% reporting feeling “well” or “very well” prepared in planning, 93.2% in instruction, 96.4% in learning environment and 92.1% in professional responsibilities. Employment data points to a high rate of job placement of residents in full-time teaching positions post-residency: overall, 84% of resident graduates in 2022–2023 and 86% of resident graduates in 2023–2024 – more than 80% of whom were Hispanic – were hired post-residency in their placement districts. Human resources representatives from two school district partners – both of whom are rural districts – reported that their number of vacancies decreased significantly following the implementation of the teacher residency in their districts. These emerging outcomes related to teacher preparedness, job placement and vacancy reduction track with the region-wide goals set at the summit, while additional data collection is still in progress.

This article describes the emergence and core features of a region-wide collective impact process aimed at strengthening the teacher pipeline and enhancing teacher quality, with the ultimate goal of improving educational outcomes for children across the El Paso region. Key features of the approach outlined here include a shared vision for strengthening the teacher pipeline; shared goals and metrics for tracking progress related to teacher recruitment, preparation, hiring and retention at both the region-wide level and at the level of university-district partnerships; and common agendas both at the region-wide level and in shared governance meetings between the university-based preparation program and school district partners. These features align with the core practices of collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011).

While these practices have remained consistent, it is important to note that the change process has been sometimes messy and ambiguous for all involved. The act of individually and collectively crossing the boundaries that typically define different arenas of work – the university, school districts and campuses and the philanthropic sector – involves identifying a common language and norms of interaction that cut across our different institutions and institutional identities. These boundary-spanning region-wide educational change efforts, centered on collectively established goals, shared agendas and shared metrics, reflect the collective impact framework outlined by Kania and Kramer (2011), which has been implemented in a range of regional contexts (see Ide, 2020). Such an approach has implications for coalitions seeking to enact cross-sector change toward a shared set of outcomes – in this case, related to strengthening the teacher pipeline.

At the core of this new interactional and action-oriented space is the commitment to the larger vision and to one another as partners. This commitment involves a mutual willingness to learn – from one another and from the data we share – as well as the practice of authentic communication, especially communication to manage conflicts and disagreement, which are a normal and expected part of any partnership. Because a central feature of the change process is confronting the unknown, the concept of commitment introduces a form of predictability – not necessarily related to the outcomes of change, but rather to the process of mutual learning, genuine communication and sustained partnership.

These underlying principles and practices – authentic communication, a mutual willingness to learn from one another and from the data, boundary-spanning norms of interaction and a tolerance for messiness and ambiguity – have contributed to creating the conditions for continued engagement in and commitment to the work and our ultimate outcome: improving educational outcomes for PK-12 students across the El Paso region by systemically improving the teacher pipeline and strengthening teacher quality through coordinated, cross-sector, multi-level communication and collective action.

This study includes data sources that were part of a larger study, “Examining the Impact of UTEP’s Teacher Residency on Teacher Candidates and Mentor Teachers across the El Paso Region” (Project ID: 2019177–1), which was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of Texas at El Paso. The submission received an Exempt determination following a Limited Review.