“High Touch” Recruitment of Black and Latinx Teacher Candidates (Poster 7)

• In Event: A University System Transforming Teacher Preparation Through Initiatives to Recruit, Support, and Retain BIPOC Teachers

Abstract

Our team aimed to increase its proportion of Black and Latinx applicants to our teacher-preparation programs to more closely match the K-12 population that our program completers serve. Our target was for our teacher-preparation programs to mirror our undergraduate population—our main recruiting source—which meant increasing from 3% Black and 37% Latinx applicants (our 2016-19 average) to 5% and 55%, respectively, by Fall 2023.
Our strategies to increase enrollment aligned with literature showing the efficacy of “high touch” outreach activities and “grow your own” initiatives for recruiting BIPOC into teaching (e.g., Carver-Thomas, 2017; Podolsky et al., 2016; Villegas & Davis, 2007). According to the principles of Improvement Science, we sought low-effort, high-impact strategies that could be tested, measured, iterated, revised, and scaled (Rohanna, 2017). First, recognizing that university-application processes could be inaccessible to students from historically excluded communities (Garza, 2019), we made phone calls to subsets of potential applicants, to offer assistance with the application, answer questions about the program, and be a friendly point of contact. Second, we hypothesized that starting the recruitment process at the high school level could promote our long-term goals. Thus, we invited students, teachers, and counselors from teacher-career programs in local high schools to our campus, for a day of introduction to the university and to our teacher-preparation programs. Virtually all these high-school students were Latinx.
Over the past seven semesters, our Recruitment Specialist and a Department Chair have made about 300 phone calls to potential applicants. Using “Plan-Do-Study-Act” (PDSA) cycles (Rohanna, 2017), each semester we adjusted the timing and method of “capturing” potential applicants to call, based on the learnings from the prior semester. Our data included 1) number of potential applicants called, 2) date and time of the call, 3) the nature of the exchange (e.g., phone conversation, voicemail with follow up email, email exchange), 4) notes about the questions or concerns of the potential applicants, and 5) which potential applicants completed their application. These data showed that groups who received phone calls were likelier to complete an application than groups who did not, and suggested more efficient ways to identify potential applicants and times to call them.
We know less about the efficacy of the campus visits—a more recent strategy. Four campus visits were conducted in a single semester, essentially constituting only one PDSA cycle. Survey data showed that the visits increased the high-school students’ desire to attend our program and become teachers, and increased students’, teachers’, and administrators’ knowledge about our teacher-preparation program.
While we cannot draw a straight line between these activities and our recruitment successes, we are progressing towards our aim, having increased the proportion of Latinx applicants to 50% in Fall 2022. We have more to learn about recruiting Black teacher candidates, but our findings offer low-effort strategies for other teacher-preparation programs that seek to increase their BIPOC enrollments.

Authors

• Julie Gainsburg, California State University - Northridge

• Ian Carroll, California State University Northridge

• Tina Torres, California State University - Northridge

• Amy Hanreddy, California State University - Northridge

• Alexandria Hollett, California State University - Northridge