Sacramento County Office of Education: Increasing the number of teachers with similar ethnicities/experiences as their students
An influential county office of education overseeing an extremely diverse county student population (Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian, etc) and known as a hub of progressive thinking.
Project profile: We want to redesign a student’s learning experience so that ALL students can be honored and supported in their journey. Simply put, teachers today largely do not reflect the ethnicities and/or experiences of the students they teach. Through our plan, we will increase the number of high school students of color interested in teaching as a career, support teacher candidates of color in our School of Education credential program, and train current educators in how to fundamentally redesign the school experience through the principles of human-centered design. The key strategies include:
Recruit students of color into teacher pathways and provide paid high school mentors to help them explore the teaching profession
Create a Genentech Fellows program to provide math/science teacher credential candidates of color with $5,000 scholarships and mentoring
Train educators in human-centered design to empower them to reinvent the learning experience around student needs.
“Through our project, we will be able to address our problem of practice in an innovative and game-changing way. Through our Design Sprint and the excellent coaching from the d.school, I know that our project will result in meaningful change in our classrooms and in the lives of educators and students alike. We are eager to get to work on this project!”
— Frank Pisi, Director, History-Social Science, Sacramento County Office of Education
Design is an iterative process where we share work in progress. Over the course of two months, the Sacramento County Office of Education practiced design thinking and created a prototype. See below for a video of this early prototype.
To learn more about this project contact Frank Pisi at fpisi@scoe.net