From Innovation
to Infrastructure
Building a Sustainable Educator Workforce Ecosystem
Three days, one system
The Learning Tour begins Tuesday, February 2, with an invitation-only Leaders Dinner the evening before. Over two days, participants will see the system in action, learn how it was built, and explore what it takes to strengthen, scale, and sustain it.
The Texas Story
By InvitationThis evening is by invitation only. Invited guests will receive details directly from US PREP.
See It, Build It
Seeing the system in action and how it was built
Breakout Round 1: Build It
Shared Decisions, Shared Accountability: EPP–District Governance
What does a productive EPP–district partnership actually do? Walk through the meeting structures, shared data, decision rights, and routines partners use to select schools and mentors, solve implementation problems, and improve the residency together.
Great Mentors by Design: Selection, Training & Support
Follow the full mentor experience: selection, preparation, clear expectations, coaching, feedback, training, and continued development.
Connecting Coursework to Practice: HQIM & the Science of Teaching Reading
Explore how faculty can redesign coursework around the instructional work residents do each week. Examples show how high-quality instructional materials, practice-based teaching methods, and clinical experiences can reinforce one another throughout a full school year.
The Site Coordinator: Connecting Coursework, Coaching & Clinical Practice
What changes when university support is embedded in partner schools? Examine the Site Coordinator role, including coaching residents, supporting mentors, working with principals, and connecting classroom practice to coursework. Hear what the role requires to work well and what the evidence suggests about its value.
Building Strong Secondary Residency Pathways
Secondary preparation presents distinct challenges, from content requirements and certification to recruitment, scheduling, and clinical practice. Explore how Texas State is redesigning secondary pathways to make preparation more coherent and accessible while maintaining strong content preparation and meaningful school-based experiences.
Grow Your Own: A Pathway from High School to the Classroom
Trace a candidate’s journey from recruitment through community college, university coursework, residency, certification, and employment. Partners identify where working adults lose time, credits, or income, and how districts, community colleges, and EPPs can design a more navigable pathway together.
Pipeline to Leadership: Reimagining Staffing, Scheduling & Teacher Leadership
How can schools organize people and time so students receive the support they need? This session introduces P2L’s approach to redesigning staffing, schedules, and teacher leader roles together. See how districts connect teacher preparation with opportunities for experienced teachers to lead, building a sustainable pipeline that strengthens classrooms from day one.
Building High-Quality Residency: Core Practices & Conditions That Make It Stick
What distinguishes a high-quality residency from a yearlong placement? Drawing on research and implementation experience, LPI and US PREP examine how coursework, clinical practice, mentor support, candidate compensation, and shared EPP–district responsibility work together to prepare teachers. Participants consider which features are essential to quality, how implementation can vary across contexts, and what partnerships need to put in place from the start.
Sustain It
Strengthening, scaling, and sustaining the system
Breakout Round 2: Strengthen It
Leading the Leaders: Building the Support System for Site Coordinators
Explore the leadership structures needed to build and sustain a strong Site Coordinator team, from onboarding and training new Site Coordinators to facilitating ongoing learning, calibration, collaboration, and problem-solving. Examine the role of the Site Coordinator coach or leader in setting expectations, strengthening coaching practice, monitoring implementation, creating a professional learning community, and ensuring every Site Coordinator has the tools, feedback, and support needed to succeed.
Multiple On-Ramps: Grow Your Own & Paraprofessional Residencies
How can preparation programs create accessible pathways for paraprofessionals and other aspiring teachers without lowering the bar for quality? Examine recruitment, advising, financial supports, community college-to-university alignment, degree completion, yearlong clinical preparation, and district hiring, and how partners work together to remove barriers from entry through employment.
A New Path to Certification: Texas’ Enhanced Residency Certificate
Texas is changing both how teacher readiness is demonstrated and how high-quality preparation is funded. Explore the Enhanced Residency Certificate, performance-based demonstrations of readiness, the role of yearlong clinical practice, and how HB 2 PREP Allotments create new incentives for districts and preparation programs to build sustainable residency, Grow Your Own, and mentor pathways.
Meeting Critical Workforce Needs: Bilingual & Special Education Pathways
How can preparation systems expand access to high-need certification areas while maintaining rigorous preparation? Examine approaches to recruiting and supporting bilingual and special education candidates, designing coherent coursework and clinical experiences, addressing financial and completion barriers, and partnering with districts around workforce needs.
Preparing Teachers for AI-Enabled Classrooms
Move beyond AI as a productivity tool to explore where it can meaningfully strengthen educator preparation and school systems. Examine emerging applications for candidate learning, coaching and feedback, instructional planning, data use, mentor and teacher development, and district workflows, along with the guardrails needed to ensure AI supports, rather than replaces, strong professional judgment and human relationships.
Three Years to Degree, Certification & Residency
Explore Texas Tech’s TechTeach Across Texas model and how a three-year bachelor’s degree can incorporate teacher certification and a residency. Examine the program design, partnerships, sequencing, affordability strategies, and institutional changes that make a faster, still rigorous pathway into teaching possible.
From Data Collection to Continuous Improvement
Strong partnerships need more than dashboards. Explore how EPPs collect data that follow candidates through preparation, clinical practice, hiring, and early-career outcomes, and, most importantly, create routines for using that information to improve programs, strengthen partnerships, and make decisions.
Connecting the Talent Strategy: PREP, TIA & Pipeline to Leadership
How can districts connect entry into teaching with continued development, teacher leadership, and compensation? District leaders examine how PREP-supported pathways, strategic staffing, TIA, and Pipeline to Leadership can fit within a coherent talent strategy. Explore how districts align mentor and teacher leader roles, coaching, schedules, compensation decisions, and professional learning around instructional priorities, including high-quality instructional materials. Presenters distinguish what each initiative supports, where requirements differ, and which local decisions help the pieces work together.
Breakout Round 3: Scale & Sustain It
Getting Candidates Across the Finish Line: Promising Practices in Certification
Certification exams can become a significant barrier between preparation and the classroom. Explore how EPPs are using earlier diagnostics, targeted academic supports, faculty engagement, data cycles, and candidate-specific interventions to improve certification outcomes while maintaining high expectations for readiness.
From Innovation to Infrastructure: Sustaining Pipeline to Leadership
What happens after the initial redesign? District leaders implementing Pipeline to Leadership share how they are moving redesigned staffing and scheduling from a pilot to a sustainable district strategy, including teacher leader roles, compensation, braided funding, preparation partnerships, expansion across campuses, and the lessons they are learning along the way.
Is Residency Worth the Investment? What the Evidence Tells Us
Move beyond anecdotes to examine the growing evidence base on teacher residencies. Researchers unpack what we are learning about teacher effectiveness, student outcomes, teacher retention, and merit pay, and how residency-prepared teachers compare with other pathways into the profession.
Building the Conditions for Public Investment
How does strong local practice become a priority for public policy and recurring investment? Explore how practitioners, researchers, community organizations, regional intermediaries, philanthropy, and advocacy partners build a shared case for stronger teacher preparation. Using Texas examples, examine how partners developed relationships, translated evidence into clear messages, elevated educator and candidate voices, and sustained attention across policy cycles. Participants identify which relationships and capacities their own state or region needs to strengthen.
Leading Residency at Scale: Protecting Quality as Programs Grow
What changes when residency expands across programs, campuses, and district partnerships? Deans and EPP leaders discuss how they organize staffing and budgets, establish manageable Site Coordinator workloads, support faculty alignment, calibrate assessments, and monitor variation across sites. Through candid examples of growth, setbacks, and leadership transitions, examine how leaders recognize when quality is slipping, decide whether to expand, and institutionalize the structures that sustain strong preparation.
Making Paid Residencies Sustainable Through Strategic Staffing
See how districts and EPPs can redesign roles, schedules, and existing resources to support paid residency. Presenters work through the financial and operational choices behind a model that can continue after temporary funding ends.
Building Strong Residency Partnerships in Rural Communities
How can rural districts and EPPs make high-quality, paid residency accessible when candidates, mentors, and university partners may be spread across large distances? Examine approaches to recruiting local talent, supporting working adults, coordinating clinical placements and coaching, sharing capacity across districts, and financing small cohorts. Partners discuss what must remain consistent for quality and what needs to adapt to rural conditions.
San Antonio, TX 78207 VIEW HOTEL DETAILS →
