CTEPP Equity Leaders Fellowship 2025

As the multi-year Center for Transformational Educator Preparation Programs (CTEPP) grant drew to a close, the CTEPP leadership team1 wrestled with some challenging and essential questions:

  • How can cross-campus collaboration continue to make our work stronger?
  • How do we stay committed to our equity-focused initiatives in this political climate?
  • How do we implement ideas to disrupt systems of inequity in a sustainable way? 

Using what funding remained, they decided to further leverage learning from the cross-campus network Transformation Lab by offering a set of individual CSU leaders the opportunity to engage in cross-campus collaboration to address equity problems they are facing in their roles. 

In January, the Equity Leaders Fellowship was launched. Twelve leaders  were selected from a competitive process and met virtually once per month throughout the Spring semester. Sessions were designed and hosted by the Educator Quality Center and facilitated by Ginger Simon, EdQ’s Data and Improvement Coach, and Allegra Brown, CTEPP Improvement Coach from Cal State Dominguez Hills. Using an improvement science framework, readings, coaching and peer consultancy, Fellows explored these essential questions together:

  • What is the equity problem I want to address and why?
  • Who am I? How do my identities influence my approach or perspective on the problem?
  • What do I understand about the problem and what do I need to better understand before I attempt a solution?
  • Now that I understand more about the problem, where can I make a difference? What am I going to try to do? Who do I need to join me? 

Examples of local campus equity problems explored by Fellows include:

  • Lack of clinical placement opportunities for candidates to serve in schools that are demographically diverse.
  • BIPOC, female identifying students disproportionately earning non-passing grades in a required course.
  • Disproportionately low application rates for male, BIPOC teacher candidates in ITEP programs.
  • Faculty committee charged with promoting justice-oriented programs struggling to agree on and identify a focused direction for collective work. 

As the program concluded, each Fellow prepared a short presentation of their explorations and plans for a consultancy session with a member of the CTEPP Leadership team. 

The EdQ and the CTEPP Leadership team plans to continue to offer opportunities for similar equity-centered system-wide collaboration and learning in 2025-2026. Stay tuned!

1 CTEPP Leadership Team: Dr. Shireen Pavri, Dr. Bre Evans-Santiago, Dr. Paul Tuss, Dr. Ginger Adams Simon, Dr. Pia Wong, and Dr. Robert Willams

 

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