How Two Organizations Worked Together to Create a Blueprint for Impactful Leadership and Coaching Practices

Teachers Supporting Teachers (TST) and Teach For America (TFA) have partnered together to pilot a coaching fellowship to innovate, test, codify, and share promising practices to strengthen holistic educator pathways and to ultimately improve teacher retention. Distributed leadership systems and structures can have a significant impact on teacher retention, and strong coaching is an integral component of this, creating a need to provide professional growth opportunities to foster strong coaching skills in educators. 

Across Illinois, we are faced with a persistent teacher shortage and to address this, we need to both continue to recruit outstanding, diverse talent to become new teachers while also creating conditions that allow excellent educators to sustain in the field. Over their years-long partnership, TST and TFA have worked together to provide professional development programs for educators at different stages of the leadership pipeline to address these needs. 

We believe the outcomes of this pilot, captured in the this report, Enhancing Educational Ecosystems: Insights from TST’s Coaching Development Fellowship, offer a blueprint for other educational institutions to enhance their own efforts to maximize the impact of distributed leadership and coaching. TST and TFA underscore the potential for significant positive impacts on teachers, students, and communities.