Servant Leader Apprentice

Role: Servant Leader Apprentice (Academic Year In-Person Programming)

Reports to: Program Manager, Pipeline Programming

Location: The Greater Philadelphia Area

OUR MISSION

The Center for Black Educator Development exists to ensure there will be equity in the recruiting, training, hiring, and retention of quality educators that reflect the cultural background and share common socio-political interests of the students they serve.

OUR VISION

All Black students will have consistent access to high quality, same race teachers throughout their PreK-12 experience. Teachers who do not share the same cultural backgrounds as their students will demonstrate high levels of expertise in culturally responsive practices and anti-discriminatory mindsets and habits. Professional learning, pipeline, policies, and pedagogy will be aligned to ensure greater educator diversity, cultural responsiveness, and improved student outcomes.

The Center for Black Educator Development (The Center) was launched in June of 2019 by veteran educator and former U.S. Department of Education Principal Ambassador Sharif El-Mekki. The Center has four main inroads to impact social justice through education:

1. Pathways to teaching: recruit talented Black men and women to advance justice by pursuing a career in education.
2. Professional learning: help all educators—and especially Black educators—to excel by offering insights, practices, experiences, opportunities, and targeted training with a focus of practice and feedback.
3. Culturally-informed pedagogy: develop and promote culturally affirming, responsive, and sustaining curriculum and materials that are sourced in diverse perspectives on student learning, teacher practices, and school leadership and culture.
4. Policy changes: advocate for local, state, and federal interventions necessary for greater educational equity, teacher diversity, and transformational pedagogy.

OUR VALUES

1.     Educational Justice: We honor the price that was paid for us to have our current experiences by fighting with those we serve. The work continues until all who educate Black children are accomplished in their work and yield dramatic outcomes with students, when all Black children reach true liberation through education and are pushed to the highest levels of excellence.

2.     Outcomes Matter: The value of our efforts lives in the result.  We know that if a child is educated well, it impacts their grandchildren and generations to come. We count it done when we have achieved a lasting impact that is both quantified and qualified.  We work with urgency, outcomes matter and define our impact.

3.     Servant Leadership: We operate within our locus of control and responsibility and own our own development.  We consider the audience when adopting an approach and take responsibility for the outcome.

4.    Embody Excellence: We draw from current and historical pedagogical practices to promote Black Excellence. We represent an industry standard in educational equity and embody the quest toward liberation.

5.     Serve Righteously:  We enter spaces with humility and recognize that the people we serve are the experts of their own experiences.  We seek justice with communities. We engage in principled decision-making. We acknowledge when we have erred, work to correct our mistakes, and graciously engage with others.

6.    Racial Identity: We value the importance of staff and students having a positive view of their racial identities.  We reflect on our histories, both individual and communal, as a way to honor our struggle and traditions so that we can build upon the legacy that currently exists.

7.   Sustaining the Soul: We believe in the power of working toward balance: in serving others, in taking care of ourselves, and in taking care of our families.  It is in working toward this balance that we find the sustenance to persevere even through the most challenging times.

Program Description

In Philadelphia, The Center’s flagship city, the student body is over 50% Black but only 24% of the teachers are Black and just 4% are Black men. The Center works to affirm low-income Black students by increasing the number of Black educators working with Black students. During the school year, The Center curates an after school tutoring program for elementary school Scholars, designed to positively impact literacy development for young people of African descent during their foundational years. Servant Leader Apprentices are college-aged educators who provide tutoring and direct instruction, facilitating small group literacy activities for elementary scholars. Junior Servant Leaders (JSLs) are high school students who will support Servant Leader Apprentices (SLAs) by serving as teaching assistants during instruction, designing their own lessons, leading literacy activities, and developing their own educational practice.

The Center’s vision is that participants in the apprenticeship program will be equipped to apply culturally affirming, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy to support the intellectual, emotional, and social development of their students.  Servant Leader Apprentices (SLAs) and Junior Servant Leaders (JSLs) will attend weekly professional development sessions, receiving feedback and coaching in an effort to nurture an ecosystem of support and accountability.  The Center commits to equipping future educators with pedagogical understandings and tools that extend beyond the traditionally euro-centric models currently prevalent in the field of education. By doing so, the Center hopes that these high school and college-aged students will emerge from their apprenticeship committed to entering the field of education upon graduation.

Role Description

Servant Leader Apprentices (SLAs) will provide literacy instruction and tutoring for elementary-aged scholars. You are committed to Black excellence in education and will work to develop a high quality, academic-centered after school experience for young learners. You are a self-starter who learns from your own areas of strength and growth. You  feel a sense of responsibility over student outcomes, are receptive to feedback, and willing to be in charge of classroom management. You are also willing to support Junior Servant Leaders in implementing relevant instructional strategies. You will model professionalism for JSLs and help them manage their learning about literacy development and teaching, while supporting continuous improvement.

Role Qualifications

We seek educators from diverse backgrounds, with a particular interest in those whose experiences match those of the children we serve in the Greater Philadelphia area. As a Servant Leader Apprentice, you will:

Be the Instructional Leader in a classroom

• Provide in-person 1:1 tutoring for elementary students
• Teach literacy curriculum in small groups
• Collaborate with CBED staff to design lesson plans
• Implement best practices for classroom management
• Follow the Center’s curriculum, analyzing data to understand student outcomes
• Draft lesson plans aligned to curriculum

Commit to programmatic goals

• Build strong relationships with elementary students
• Attend professional development workshops and 1:1 sessions with CBED staff
• Collaborate with other Servant Leader Apprentices to create a cohesive, nurturing environment

Assume responsibility for administrative elements

• Take attendance and drive toward attendance outcomes
• Collaborate with CBED staff and partner school liaisons to analyze student progress
• Communicate outcomes regularly

Prior Experience & Competencies

What will help you to be successful:

• You are interested in being a teacher and/or working with younger children in some capacity.
• You have an interest in mentoring high school students and elementary-aged children, setting rigorous and high learning expectations.
• You have a deep commitment to The Center’s mission, vision, and core values.
• You are interested in pursuing a career in education, specifically teaching and learning.

Skills

• Ability to set rigorous and high expectations for elementary Scholars.

• Ability to diagnose and coach instruction

• • engaging in courageous conversations about teaching and learning
• • delivering feedback in a positive and constructive manner.

• Capable of working in areas of gray at a fast paced, start-up organization

• Engaging in constant reflection on your work—not just what you do but how you do it as well

• Results-oriented– a flexible thinker willing to do “whatever it takes” and show resilience

Education

Being a college-aged student is required.

Work Demands

• Weekday availability from 2:45 PM to 6:00PM (minimum of three days/week)
• Ability to physically perform the duties and to work in the environmental conditions required such as maneuvering in classrooms
• Submitting and analyzing student data. Assessing student performance and working towards desired outcomes
• Must be able to maneuver between classes and respond to needs of young children

Why work for The Center

We have a passion for teaching Black students so that we impact educational equity.

We will partner with you to position educational inequity as a social justice issue.

We are unapologetically passionate about what we are doing.

We know that we are doing matters

We laugh, have fun and work against systemic inequity.  We believe in all of that.

We offer some of the best professional development and coaching in the industry including workshops on:

• Literacy development and instruction
• Project based curricula
• Engagement strategies
• Data driven instruction
• Classroom management
• Courageous conversations
• Lesson planning
• Objective writing
• Professionalism and mentoring
• Historicizing reasons why education is not working for Black and Brown children

The Center is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, parental status, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

#WeNeedBlackTeachers