Building an equitable pipeline of educators by assessing equity and customizing innovative professional development

Our collaborative research team, collectively operating as Leaders for Equity in Educator Development (We LEED), is developing and validating a survey that attempts to measure the knowledge, beliefs, and mindsets (KBMs) of school leaders and teachers regarding racial equity. In this paper, we discuss three major dimensions of our current Wallace Funded research study in progress, starting with the ideation and processes informing how we define and quantify our demarcations of low, medium, and high levels of educator KBMs among the participants who completed the Racial-Equity KBM Survey (R-EKBM). Then we introduce our distinct framework for a unique, innovative, and data informed professional development curriculum that corresponds with and is systematically aligned to the KBM levels of racial equity demonstrated by the participant’s survey results. The third aspect we discuss explores the implications of our unique survey and scalable professional development curriculum on improving the educator pipeline while advancing the presence of racial equity in education policy, practice, and pedagogy. We imagine the pervasive use of the R-EKBM survey and corresponding professional development will encourage and amplify a more racially literate and socially just pipeline of school teachers and school leaders that espouse equitable principles in their professional practice.