Our Approach

Our Beliefs

Teachers matter. We have a deep respect for the teaching profession and educators who are dedicated to making a difference.

Teachers are fulfilled when their diverse identities and experiences are affirmed. We strive to build, foster, and sustain an inclusive community where all identities are welcomed, represented, and celebrated.

Teachers are natural problem solvers. We know that teachers are continually innovating and evolving their practice to meet students’ needs.

Teachers are experts. Teachers have unique expertise to develop solutions to the most important challenges facing education today.

Teachers deserve opportunities to lead. The varied skills that teachers bring and develop set them up to make an impact within and beyond their classrooms

Teachers deserve the best. Teachers deserve engaging, high-quality and personalized learning opportunities, just like students.

Teachers need one another. We believe in breaking down barriers that prevent teachers from accessing their best resource: one another.

You are welcome here.

In all Teacher Collaborative spaces and settings, we work to create programming that is accessible to, relevant for, and reflective of participants’ identities and experiences. 

The Teacher Collaborative as an organization works actively to:

• increase the accessibility of our programs, 

• pursue full inclusion and, moreover, a sense of belonging for each participant, 

• celebrate the diversity of our schools and the teachers in them, and 

• support the cause of justice for those who belong to marginalized groups. 

We do this by creating programs with processes, content, and facilitation that all unify to promote equity and disrupt systems of oppression, including:

Universally inclusive practices and processes for our teachers

We aspire to create fully accessible, inclusive programs that, within the constraints of our capabilities, enable all Massachusetts teachers, with a particular focus on those who have historically been marginalized, to engage with their full selves and feel a sense of belonging.

Program content that promotes belonging, equity and justice for students in our schools

Equity & Inclusion is a Core Teacher Competency for our organization and central to our mission. As a result, we aim to ensure that the content of our programming enriches teachers’ own lens for equity and justice and better enables them to create culturally-sustaining spaces for their own students that foster equity and justice. In each program, we connect the program content with our organization’s educational equity mission and, where applicable, to the ideas of belonging, inclusion, and justice. 

Equitable facilitation

One of the Core Beliefs fundamental to our organization is that Teachers are fulfilled when their diverse identities and experiences are affirmed, and our facilitation should support the inclusion, representation, and affirmation of all of our diverse community members. Our approach to program facilitation, therefore, includes two key conditions that push us toward a DBIE approach. These 2 Key Conditions are:

• A Brave Space that balances risk with safety, and stimulating growth with sustaining support

• Cultural Proficiency about the diverse identities, affiliations and experiences that both our teacher population and school populations comprise.

Since our founding in 2017, equity has always been at the center of our programming, in part because this is a concept that teachers have always cared about, fought for, and seen as central to providing the best possible education to all students.