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There's Power in Teaching.
MEET THE TEAM
There's Power in Teaching.
Louisiana has experienced tremendous success and high-quality scale in a short amount of time, due largely to the grass-roots approach to Grow Your Own. Using a state-wide network of teachers and depending on strong, state-wide university partnerships, Louisiana's model has been shared with many other states with an eye towards instilling leadership in teachers, sustainable practices, and elevating the teaching profession as a whole. Our organization is largely volunteer run... and this just shows the power in teaching.
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KIMBERLY ECKERT
State Coordinator
Kimberly began researching the teacher shortage, negative perceptions of teaching, lack of teacher diversity, and their impact on Louisiana in 2017. After being selected as the 2018 Louisiana Teacher of the Year, Kimberly began using her network and available resources to establish state-wide Edrising Pilots to develop a state-wide, scalable and sustainable plan. For this early work, she was granted the inaugural Louisiana Public Interest Fellowship to implement and share the state-wide Educators Rising Program for targeted recruitment of a diverse and culturally responsive teacher pipeline.
While still teaching, she helped school districts establish the framework for their programs. While at the Louisiana Department of Education, she established work and leadership around rising educators, grow your own programs, and the pre-educator pathway. Since, she has served Educators Rising National as a Curriculum Implementation Specialist and thought-partner in several states developing their grow-your-own plans.
She recently co-authored a book titled, “Flip the System: US-How Teachers Can Transform Education and Save Democracy”, contributing Louisiana's story of rapid growth and success in establishing earlier teacher pipelines.