Nearly every day, Tulsa Public Schools’ Melissa Ihde works with Katy Green, executive director of Educator Effectiveness and Professional Learning, supporting novice and aspiring teachers. Outside of their normal work day, Green and Ihde, director of Teacher Development and Pathways, both participate in Learning Forward Academy, a multiyear active learning experience designed for profound educator enrichment.
Going through Academy as a team, they said, has benefited the district strategic priority they brought into Academy to evaluate—high-quality mentoring that impacts novice teacher retention and professional growth, and ultimately, improves student outcomes.
Academy launches a new class every June. Class participants work in teams alongside coaches and professional learning experts, putting what they learn into action toward improving their schools and organizations. Each participant develops and works on a problem of practice.
Ihde and Green joined Academy in 2023. Seeking to align to their district’s focus on the science of reading, they brought literacy into their Academy problem of practice. “We have focused specifically on literacy and culture of assessment,” Ihde said. “What we have been studying is if we build the capacity of mentors, and build their skills and knowledge in that area, will we see that also translate to teachers?”
Green said Academy affords time and evidence-backed tools for digging into complex problems and structuring effective methods to drive sustainable improvements in K-12 through high-quality professional learning. “What’s so great about the experience,” she said, “is having that protected time, having that structure, having that opportunity to have somebody help you think through what are the right questions we should be asking ourselves? And then just having that support system along the way.
“We are literally seeing something through from start to finish,” Green said. “What Melissa and I intended to start out seeking to understand is generally what we have ended up understanding better in 2026.”
MENTORING MATTERS IN TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Oklahoma’s largest district, Tulsa Public Schools supports novice teachers primarily through an Instructional Mentoring program and Tulsa Teacher Corps, the district’s in-house teacher certification pathway designed for non-certified aspiring teachers. The programs respond to a challenge confronting many districts; a high number of students in Tulsa are being taught by a novice teacher in at least one subject area, and most novice educators are alternatively or emergency certified, coming into the profession under-prepared for the job.
For the 2024-2025 school year, program goals included building mentor and novice teacher capacity in literacy instruction; increasing the use of formative assessment and student data to guide planning; ensuring coaching conversations center on student demonstration of learning, and; improving reading proficiency for students in mentor-supported classrooms.
In Academy, Ihde said because Tulsa Teacher Corps and Instructional Mentoring programming have been grounded in continuous improvement strategies, “that model of thinking was familiar to us. Being part of Academy, which is rooted in the same ideas but with a lot of additional frameworks to deepen your understanding, has allowed us to become more consciously competent.”
In Academy, Green and Ihde could more deeply examine 2025 data on outcomes from Instructional Mentoring and Tulsa Teacher Corps, which showed improvements in teacher retention, and dig into student-level impact.
“We wanted to use Academy as an opportunity to better understand how much mentoring was impacting student outcomes,” Green said. “And while the data didn’t reveal a drastic difference, there are some promising bright spots.”
“What we saw over the course of the couple of years looking at Map data at different points is in some cases we would see where teachers participating in our Tulsa Teacher Corps who are receiving the most intense level of wraparound supports that we provide, were starting to close that gap. Their students were growing at a rate that was, if you keep following the (trend) line, was set to meet and in some cases exceed their counterparts.”
“That wasn’t quite as compelling as what we saw in our retention data, where we saw in some years close to 20% higher retention rate of teachers receiving our supports than those who weren’t. In a district our size, that equated to close to 50 more teachers that we were able to keep in one year, assuming otherwise we would’ve lost them.”
“We were most interested in learning what truly is the impact of this work, not only what we can see very clearly, but also what we can then theorize if to keep a teacher longer, they’re going to build their skills.”
TEAMWORK ACCELERATES IMPROVEMENT
According to Shannon Bogle, Learning Forward’s senior director of Networks and Academy, “After going through Academy myself, and then watching people like Katy and Melissa go through as a team, I can attest to the value of having another person learning alongside of you and bringing that back to your district to then engage other stakeholders.”
In the Academy, each educator is placed on a learning team. These teams are intentionally curated to ensure a diverse mix of experiences, district sizes, roles, and learning perspectives. The purpose of the learning team is to provide participants with a consistent group of colleagues to collaborate with throughout the experience.
These teams often become powerful professional networks, with many members maintaining collegial relationships long after the Academy concludes, connecting educators from across the country. When district teams attend the Academy together, they are intentionally placed on different learning teams to broaden perspectives and bring additional insights back to their shared work.
The Academy structure creates multiple opportunities for collaboration—across the full class, within learning teams, and with district teams. In this case, Katy and Melissa were placed on different teams, which allowed them to gather feedback and ideas from a wider range of colleagues and bring even more perspectives to their work.
LEARN MORE: APPLYING TO ACADEMY AS A TEAM
If you’re considering applying to Learning Forward’s Academy, which kicks off in July 2026, Bogle suggests considering joining as a team. “The impact multiplies when colleagues learn together. When district teammates participate side by side, they reflect on new ideas, apply tools to their shared work, and support one another as they bring learning back to their systems. At the same time, each participant connects with educators from across the country, gaining fresh perspectives and new ideas. The result is stronger collaboration, clearer alignment, and a much greater chance that the learning leads to real changes in professional practice and student learning.”
To read more about Tulsa Public Schools’ continuous improvement in novice teacher mentoring and aspiring teacher accreditation, click here to access their Academy impact story from Academy Class of 2025.
