Grow Your Own Educators by Inspiring Your Students Into the Field of Education

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

Thanks, Erin. Thanks everybody for being here. I’m seeing the chat over here and I see so many different states, so I’m super excited to see everybody. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Missouri, Connecticut. I have a map up on the screen right now of our Educators Rising presence. So as you look for your state, we’ll dive into that. I just wanted to start off by giving a little bit of information about me, Dr. Lisa Rollins, national Director of Outreach and partnerships for PDK International Educators Rising as our premier program. So I oversee all 50 states, but we have a presence in all 50 states. And if you look at this map, you can see the ones that are highlighted in dark blue are official state affiliates, and the ones in the lighter blue mean that we have presence there, but not yet an official state affiliate. So if you see your state not highlighted, I can help with that as well.

But a little bit about me, I started off as a family and consumer sciences teacher in the 19th largest district in the nation, prince George’s County, Maryland, where I ran the ECE program there with a preschool inside my high school for about nine years. And then I moved into Ed professions and started a four year pathway called the Teacher Academy of Maryland, where I wrote the curriculum for that and it is still booming and wonderful. After that, I transitioned into the Arizona Department of Education where I worked as a program specialist that oversees all of the ECE and ed professions courses in the state along with Perkins Grant administration. And on the side, I was the state director of ED Rising Arizona for about five years. And that led me to think, well, I can help all of these teachers in my state to inspire future educators.

I want to do this nationally. So I got the opportunity to move to the national office about three and a half years ago, and I’ll always be a teacher. I can’t stop teaching. I also am adjunct faculty in the Master’s program of curriculum instruction in Arizona at Grand Canyon University. And then I also teach the Intro to ED courses at Mesa Community College here in Arizona. So thank you so much for taking the time out to come here and be at this webinar. I hope you can learn a little bit about Educators Rising and what we can do to help your teacher shortage issues as well. Again, here’s the map so you can see where we currently have a presence, and some of you may have heard of Educators Rising. Some of you may have heard of FTA or FEA. We’re all the same. Those are all of our trademarks.

So PDK has been around since 1906 and in 2015 we rebranded FEA Future Educators Association to Educators Rising. So this is our 10th year anniversary and we’re super excited to have a bunch of events that relate around that at our national conference and throughout all of 2025 to celebrate that. We’re really excited about our movement. We know that there’s an educator shortage and we aim to help solve that. So just in our last 10 years, we’ve reached over 145,000 students since just becoming ED Rising and from those students, we have a four year study in Ohio where student educators, rising students took a survey and did a study, and we see that there’s an increase in interest when they’re in the courses in high school. We also have middle school chapters as well. So you can start from middle school, go into high school and then into your profession.

But 80% of students indicated an interest in professions and 50% said that they plan to pursue teaching through a college or university after high school. So I want to start off with our challenges. They’re pretty obvious. We know that there’s an educator shortage and we know that there is a lack of teachers reflecting the population in which they serve. So that’s what our program aims to do. We work with institutes of higher ed, we work with high schools and middle schools, mostly CTE programs. If you have an education and training pathway in your CTE, in your school, in your district, in your state, it’s something that you can add a course typically as a two year CTE completer course, but you can have it up to, like I said, in Maryland when we have the pathway there four years. So they’re getting four years of experience and instruction while still in high school, but typically a two year program.

So we aim to solve those two challenges for our districts. And what’s really important here is I think as we look at research and we see the trends, we know that 60% of teachers teach within 20 miles of where they went to high school. And so let’s think about the true definition of grow your own. We want the students who are currently in their community to come back and serve their community, which then solves the two problems. One that we have an educator shortage, we’re filling that up, and then two, reflecting the population in which they serve. So if they come from that community, they want to stay in that community. And I’ll just tell you, I’m originally from Michigan, the mitten from right here. We use our hand to show where we’re from in Michigan. So if there’s any Michiganders out there, you’ll know.

I’m from West Michigan. I graduated and there wasn’t a job for me, so I couldn’t get hired. I mean, I applied everywhere. I had never an intention of leaving Michigan until I saw this ad in the newspaper in Michigan for a school in Maryland. And I was like, oh my gosh, and they’re offering 49 5. That’s the most money I’m ever going to make in my life. And I jumped on it because I wanted to teach so badly, but I had to leave my community to do so. So really think about utilizing the students that are in your schools right now and tapping into them so that they can stay in their community and serve. There’s tons of kids out there who may not know what they want to do, and career exploration is such a huge part of Educators Rising. So I want to go through the five Cs.

I call them the five Cs because there’s five of them and they all start with C, so it’s easy to remember, but we start with chapters. Then we have the curriculum for your teachers to actually teach the course. We are A-C-T-S-O, A career and student technical organization that has competitions and conferences, if you’ve heard of FBLA or HOSA or deca, same idea, same types of competitions and conferences. And then our 50th community. So right now we have over 25,000 registered members and over 1400 chapters. Our conference last year was our highest attended conference ever, and I think our students are just so much more prepared than students who go into teaching and have never had a high school program that explores this. We had a webinar a couple of weeks ago with some college kids and they’re like, we could teach this college course. We’re so much further prepared than our college counterparts.

So just think about how much further along. It’s not just filling a seat, right? We want to make sure that they’re highly qualified teachers and instructors in our positions. So think about how having a chapter, having a course at the high school level will put your students one step closer. So we’ll start off with the chapters. It takes one teacher and one student to start a chapter. National dues are $15. Some states have state dues to help support their state conferences as well, but just with that $15 students get access to all of our podcasts, all of our cap and magazine articles, our national board videos, teaching channel videos, all of their competition rubrics, everything right there in their portal. That $15 also has them eligible for attending their state and their national conferences to compete and to run for leadership offices. So you could be a local chapter officer, you can be a state officer, a national officer, but even a student ambassador for Educators Rising.

And the one thing that I think is not talked about enough as scholarships, we gave away over 70 scholarships last year. PDK offered over 70 scholarships to students. And as someone who just finished paying their student loans off, I highly encourage all students to take advantage of any scholarship they can, so there’s never any money left out on the table. We also have an honors society that they can join as well. So that is just a $15 national due and state dues may apply in some states as well. The next thing that I want to talk about are competitive events and our conference. I really, really, really encourage you. If you’ve never come to a conference, check it out. If money is an option, let me know. I can work on getting a registration waived for you. Coming to see 3,800 people come together on their summer break is just inspiring.

And the teachers, the kids, even parents come to our conference in the summer. We have over 25 competitive events we have at JV level and varsity level so that the kids compete against students in their age group, even if your kids don’t want to compete just by being a teacher leader, which is absolutely free. By the way, I forgot to mention, teacher leaders can register for free and in their portal, they have access to all the rubrics and all the events, and they can use those as project based assessments within their course. So even if a student doesn’t want to compete at the state or the national level, they can still get actual practice in the class by doing that. So we have events like lesson planning and delivery where they have to deliver, write the lesson plan, deliver the lesson plan, record themselves, and then meet with a judge to talk about what they could do, what they could do to improve what went wrong, what went really well, and have a reflective session with them.

We have a job interview. We have one of my favorites is called the Edris moment. I would also suggest to bring some Kleenex because it’s so emotional when these kids are telling about that one moment where they just realize education is for them. And so it’s really, really inspiring. So some of our competitions are open to spectators, like the educators Rising moment, and then some of them are closed to spectators. So you can also see in the breakout sessions. And we also have social events. So last year the kids did a karaoke and lip sync battle and just to see their excitement and just be surrounded around other like-minded kids because we oftentimes hear, well, don’t go into education or you don’t want to be a teacher. All of the negative things at our conference, there’s no negativity about anything in education, and it’s just pure joy and love and caring, and the kids are just so excited.

So if you want to come check that out, if you’ve never been, again, please reach out to me and I can help with that. The next thing I think is important is I want to mention with our program, they do an internship and a lot of our schools have dual enrollment offerings as well, so they’ve already gotten some college credits, but we want to keep that collaborative community going. We want to make sure that they’re still embedded because sometimes when you go to college, you might not see an education course right away. So think about that continuation. And we do help support. We have Educators Rising Collegiate with NEA Aspiring Educator chapters that can help stay connected, and that’s shown a 60% increase in interest when they continue to stay connected while in college and into the profession. So we do aim to do that as well.

The next thing, the next C is more for the teachers, but also for the students our curriculum. So unlike any other CTSO, we do provide curriculum for your program, which would be your education professions, your early childhood courses. So what we’ve noticed, and even as an educator, and I told you I had to create the curriculum that all my teachers would use, and then every teacher would create lesson plans off of that. Well, that’s just one more thing for the teacher. And oftentimes our ed professions teachers are teaching an AP history class or an English class. They may only have one section, and just because they’re an excellent teacher and they’ll go in and they’ll do a great job, we still have to provide them with the resources they need to teach the course, right? We shouldn’t be putting the extra work of lesson planning and curriculum creation on a teacher for one section of a course.

And so it was my passion in life to take that off of a teacher’s plate because the last thing we want is to lose another teacher because they’re overworked. So we do have the resources that you can use to help support your teacher in that. So we have a curriculum map that outlines different units and sections. It’s flexible. It comes in one, three and five day format. So if you need to do a deep dive, grab the five day lesson plan. If you need to do just something very small, you’ve already covered that. You can grab the one day lesson plan as well. Things like backwards planning and classroom management, things that I wish I would’ve had more on honestly in college, and we all have, our standards are all aligned to Ines and National Board standards as well. So that’s there for you, and you’ll see that the five day lesson plan comes with project-based learning and a summative assessment as well.

In addition to that, our clinical experiences that I mentioned, we give you guidance on that, and I also do a presentation on each of these steps, preparing, observing, assisting and interning and how that looks when a teacher really does it in real life because there’s things you need to think about. I’ll tell you, my biggest failure as a teacher doing internships was my first year I thought I had prepared them for confidentiality and mandatory reporting, and then the first day they go out into their field placement at the elementary schools, I get an email from a parent asking why their child was in a picture on Facebook. Well, I forgot to tell the kids you can’t take pictures of kids and post them online. So learning moment for me, but I kind of go through some of those things with teachers so that they don’t have the same failures that I had.

But in this process, what I think is really important is the career exploration. So I kids that would say, well, I just was put in this course, I want to be a teacher, or I don’t want to be a teacher, I want to be a nurse. And I was like, well, why don’t you want to be a school nurse? Or I want to be a psychologist. Well, we need school psychologists. We need all of these other areas, but kids have not been exposed to them or made the connection to them. There’s so many professions and different careers under the field of education, under the umbrella of education. So I’m just putting that out there to you that if you have a student who’s like, I don’t want to be a teacher, we’re not asking everyone to be a teacher, although that’s where the shortage is mostly felt at.

We have shortages in every area. So I had a student who wanted to drive a bus. I said, yes, buddy. Of course, let’s drive a bus. Let’s do that. If that’s your career goal, I just think during this internship period, you do some six week rotations, you follow a fifth grade teacher because you think you like fifth, you follow first. Let’s have our kids figure this out while they’re still in high school, before they get to college and spend time, money, and resources. Let them be exposed to different careers and education. I even met with the college of student who said they’re doing marketing for a district. I was like, that’s one I hadn’t even thought of. You need a marketer, you need a social media person. So just something to throw out there in your internships if you’re going to use the program is to give ’em a little bit of career exploration in that.

We also have assessments to take that grading off of the teacher. So if you’re interested in the curriculum, we’re running a pro right now that the assessments will come free with the curriculum and the new interactive guidebook, which I get the most feedback about all the time, how great it is and how the students love it. So that’s available for you too. In addition, part of our program are micro credentials. You can add those on. I’m not going to lie. They’re not easy and they do take about five to 15 hours each to earn, but we do have those if you want to take your program up to the next level, I will say I would wait on those until you have some students who are really, really ready to become a teacher. And then last but not least, to round out our resources for teachers and students is the parapro.

We’ve partnered with ETS to offer the parapro to students at $20 less list price so that you get a discount as an Educator’s Rising member. You can add that to your curriculum purchase as well. You can just reach out to me. The great thing about this partnership is that you can test your kids at your school site. So we’ve worked on a partnership with them where we’ll have your school become a testing site. Your teacher can then order 20, 30, 40 session keys, however many they need so that every student coming out of graduation also has their parapro and should they decide to go directly into employment as a para, they would be able to do so based on district requirements obviously. But thinking about a full package, thinking about, we’re starting the chapter, they’re competing, we’re using the curriculum that are aligned with competitions. We’re dual enrollment, so they get college credits.

Now we have them parapros, so coming out of a CTE program, college and Career Ready, they can go into their career or they can go into college as well. So if you’re interested in the parapro, super easy. You just have to tell me how many you need. And session keys never expire. So let’s say you said I wanted 30 and only 25 kids actually sat for the test. You would have those five keys to use at another time. The other good thing about this is that a practice test does come with this. So I did this for my kids and I thought, well, this is going to be way harder than I can take on. But it wasn’t. I literally got the codes set on my kids at a computer, they put their codes in, I left the room, had another teacher proctor it for me, and I think I want to say in all my years, maybe two or three did not pass. So it’s a pretty good credential, and if your state recognizes industry credentials of the parapro, this would work for your CTE requirement for industry credentials as well. With that being said, I will wrap up the talking portion of the show and take any questions in the chat or the q and a for if anyone has any.

Erin Grubbs:

Thanks, Lisa. Yeah, just a reminder to use the q and a panel for any questions. We’ll keep an eye on the chat there as well, but in the meantime, would love to better understand, I guess, what you think are some of the big barriers that actually prevent schools and districts from adopting some of these programs that you’re talking about. It sounds like there’s a really good opportunity here. So where do you kind of run into that?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

I think barriers is number one, finding a teacher or finding, getting the program up and running because it’s just one section, but it’s the whole school schedule. It’s finding funding, it’s getting a CT program approved. Sometimes it takes a year or so to get it approved and then get it into the schedule. Oftentimes we do hear a teacher left and then the program leaves, which I think is just the saddest thing because a program shouldn’t be dependent on a person, but that happens sometimes. So I would say those are our top barriers.

Erin Grubbs:

Got it. That helps. If you can maybe talk about some of the successful strategies that you’ve seen with districts who have implemented these programs. Can you give us some examples of those?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

Yeah. We have so many strong programs. We have so many strong states. I, Connecticut is blowing up. They’re almost statewide. Kentucky is huge. Indiana, Ohio, Texas is our largest population. They’re doing it right because they’re making it co-curricular. The states that are doing it and are succeeding are making it from their department of ed. Having a course, having a CTE, having Perkins funding allocated to it and really making it intentional and putting the funding behind it and putting a leader behind it. So a state director who runs all of the state competitions and the things that the registrations and really embeds it. I think the strongest states have a really robust entire program. They’re not just starting a chapter and they’re not just using the curriculum, but they’re doing it all. They’re doing the dual enrollment, they’re doing the industry credential. They’re really diving right in and doing it all, and that’s where we see the most success, and it’s really those inspiring teachers. If you look at your staff and you go, who’s the teacher that everybody wants to be like and everybody loves, you’re going to get that recruitment and that retention going with the students, and then students talk. So they’re going to talk about the cool things they’re doing, and we got to do a children’s literature book and we got to go to the elementary schools. They’re going to talk and other kids are going to want to join.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah, no, I love that. That’s great. And it kind of ties in, I think to this next question that we got from Lori. She’s asking, has Educator Rising worked with any educator prep programs for candidates who already have their bachelor’s degree or coming into the profession as a second career?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

No, that would be the adult strand. So we work with middle school chapters, high school chapters, and we do work with epps, but we don’t have any adult besides our PD K membership, which they can become PD DK members and get eligible for conferences and things of that.

Erin Grubbs:

That helps. I think you talked about this a little bit, but how do you think the program specifically helps address the diversity gap in the teacher workforce right now?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

Yeah, and that’s a good question. I think for me it is we’re looking at, like I said before, the reflection of the community if you already live in that community. So that’s where the Grow your own is so special is because it solves itself. In essence, when you’re from a community and you stay in that community, you already know what the members are like. You already know where the local stores are, you already know people, and you’ve already built that collaborative community. So it really does solve itself if you look from within.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah, no, I love that. I don’t see any other questions have come in. I’ve got, I think a couple more. If you can make one change to how schools are currently approaching teacher recruitment, what would it be and how do you think your program helps there?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

I would be more intentional in the HR side of things, and a lot of times when I’m going through and I’m doing presentations and I’m meeting with schools, I ask them, what are you doing intentionally besides offering the course, besides the internships? And I’ll just give some examples from states that I’ve heard. I was in Connecticut presenting and a school district said, we put on our application, were you a member of Educators Rising? If they check, yes, they get an automatic interview, so not an automatic hire, but they automatically, Connecticut recognizes that our ED rising kids are so much further ahead. They’re going to give them an automatic interview. Another district in, I want to say it was Indiana will give, if they were an Educator’s Rising and they get hired, there’s a deal like You give me three years, we give you scholarship bonus.

So there’s something like that. One district that I was very impressed with said that they start their brand new teachers, if they were an Educators Rising member and they come back and teach, they start them on a step two instead of a one, which I know kids aren’t going to see the importance in that, but my adults out in the room are going to know that that step two is going to get you to your step 20 a lot higher. So a lot faster. I mean, so just thinking in the HR aspect is okay, now the CT teachers and the CT directors have done all of the work to get them to the collegiate level. They’ve got them college credits, they’ve got them the parapro. It’s up to you to hire these kids and work really, really closely with the district level with those CTE directors to say, who are those kids? We need to track them into the field and get them to come back, and what carrot can we dangle to get them to come back? For example, when I got the offer from Prince George’s County, it was a $3,000 moving stipend. I couldn’t have done it without, I couldn’t have driven from Michigan with all of my things, and I needed that. So if you are going to attract somebody, give them a little carrot, a little incentive to come back.

Erin Grubbs:

And I think we see that in so many other industries. So pulling some of what’s working well there to the education industry definitely makes sense on the HR side. Cool. All right. Well, I think we’ll do one more question if we don’t get any more that come in. So how do you see these grow your own programs evolving over the next five to 10 years? What does that future look like for you?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

I think we’re seeing a big uptick in interest in CTE. I think it fell off for a little bit and people weren’t really knowing it or recognizing it and trade schools and vocational and just the verbiage over years has changed. And so maybe not as recognizable, but I think we’re going to see increased participation. I think we’re going to see a lot more kids that want to just help and care and give and nurture, and those are all words that are associated with educators. So I think guiding the conversation into what careers help other people, and it’s just that intrinsic motivation of like, I want to give, I want to love, I want to help. And I think we see a lot of that in our current future students as well. So I think it’s going to be a lot more intentional of it’s not about the money, it’s about feeling good and helping others.

Erin Grubbs:

Nice.

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

There is one question in the chat. Did you see that one?

Erin Grubbs:

I didn’t see the chat. I saw one come through in the q and a. So lemme do this one and then I’ll grab the chat. She said she missed the beginning of the webinar, so just wanted to better understand how does this program in line with states who already have some specific high school teaching programs, would this be supplemental or a replacement to a program that they might have in place?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

Supplemental? If you already have a program in place, we can just help with the resources. We can help with getting your students registered members so that they can compete same as any other C-T-S-O-F-B-L-A hosa, same type of format would just be co-curricular with the program that you already have.

Erin Grubbs:

Okay. Alright. And then we’ll do this last one in chat. So how would you suggest talking to your administration about adopting a program like this?

Dr. Lisa Rollins:

Well, I’m the teacher who doesn’t take no for an answer. So I might not be the best to give this advice because if I’m told no, I find another way. I think that’s what all educators kind of do. I would approach it into the need, especially even when we do live presentations. Everybody stand up. If you had at least one school opening this year or five, we get up to 20 to 50 school openings still. I mean, the data shows if your district has a need to fill teacher shortages and has a need, it should be obvious to any administration. We got to do something to grow our own and get these vacancies filled. If it’s not obvious by data. And all of the data that I showed here and all of the statistics that I showed here, I’d speak from the heart. I think inspiring teachers have a way with administrators to, I know teachers who whatever they ask their admins for, they get because they’re so dedicated and because they’re so passionate.

And if you can look at the return on investment, I think my last slide, it was $25,000 to onboard a new teacher continually over and over the hr, the paperwork, the training. We don’t want to keep being poor because we have a high turnover. Our students are going to be so much more well prepared. They’re going to know what they’re getting into. It’s not like they’re going into student teaching their fourth year and have never been around kids. They already know when Susie has a meltdown, how to handle it. It’s not a shock to them. So I think speaking from the heart, showing the data, and then really knowing that it’s going to be a return on investment for your entire district is how you approach it with administrators.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah, no, I like all of that, especially districts love the ROI. So being able to tie that back is so great. Well, great. Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for this great presentation. You provided so much information and lots of key takeaways. We’ll make sure that all of this information is shared in the follow-up email so that if you are interested in more information on Educators Rising, you have that and want to thank all of our attendees for joining and making this such a great conversation. We hope to see you on a future GoReact webinar and have a great rest of your week.