Teach For America

Teach For America–Bay Area is a regional site of the national nonprofit organization that trains recent college graduates and professionals to teach for at least two years in low-income communities. This grant would help TFA–Bay Area continue its Foundation-supported work to design curricular tools, evaluate deeper learning rubrics, plan for teaching deeper learning within the context of the Common Core, and pursue opportunities for scale. This work will show how school networks can use new state assessments to improve the teaching of deeper learning.

Teach For America–Bay Area proposes to define and codify a deeper learning instructional approach in order to enhance professional development, improve hiring strategies, and ultimately achieve better student outcomes. After identifying a set of indicators for deeper learning competencies, the organization will assess its corps members’ performance in the Bay Area. The rationale is that those teachers who best demonstrate these competencies in their own lives are most likely to teach them to their students.

Teach For America–Bay Area is a regional site of the national nonprofit organization that trains recent college graduates and professionals to teach for at least two years in low-income communities. This grant will help TFA–Bay Area to develop a new pre-service training model, cultivate early adopters of deeper learning, and build an alumni school leaders network. These efforts seek to foster the conditions for these strategies to spread through its larger educator network. This work advances the Education Program’s strategic goal of testing theories of diffusion of deeper learning practices.