Sharing Good Practice
A Conversation With Wendy Kopp
CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All
to enter the profession. Teach For
All partners provide one alternative
approach to enlisting some of the
nations’ most promising future leaders
and preparing and supporting them
to teach the highest-need students,
who are often teaching in the hardestto-staff schools. Beyond addressing
teacher shortages, by cultivating their
teachers’ on-going leadership, our
partners are also addressing what
we think of as a leadership shortage,
providing a vital pipeline of educational
leaders and advocates who will work
throughout their lives at every level of
the educational system, at every level
of policy and across sectors to ensure
that all children have the opportunity
to fulfil their true potential.
W
hen Wendy Kopp started
Teach For America in 1989,
her aim was to ensure that
the most marginalised
children could also be the recipients of
quality education in order to maximise
their potential.
Her unequivocal commitment to
Teach For America resulted in the
organisation growing exponentially in
numbers over the years. Today, more
than 10,000 Teach For America corps
members are in the midst of two-year
teaching commitments in 50 urban
and rural regions.
In 2007, Wendy founded Teach
For All, a global network of social
entrepreneurs from around the world,
who were determined to adapt a
similar model as Teach For America
in their own countries. The Teach
For All network is comprised of
partner organizations in more than 35
countries around the world, including
its founding partners Teach For
America and the U.K.’s Teach First.
Wendy’s accomplishments include
numerous
honorary
degrees
and awards for her outstanding
contributions to public service. She
has also been celebrated as one of
14 | Sep - Oct 2015 |
|
Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential
People.
She is the author of the books A
Chance to Make History: What Works
and What Doesn’t in Providing an
Excellent Education for All (2011) and
One Day, All Children: The Unlikely
Triumph of Teach For America and
What I Learned Along the Way (2000).
She is an innovator, an author, a wife
and doting mother.
This quick conversation with Wendy
gives you a glimpse of the work that
she does with Teach For All.
What can the region’s
governments do to stem the
shortage of qualified teachers
in the Middle East?
We’ve seen that governments are wellserved to develop a comprehensive
approach to recruiting, selecting, and
developing teachers. If traditional
pathways
into
teaching
aren’t
providing enough qualified teachers,
then we need to establish alternate
pathways
to
recruit
additional
qualified pools and then develop
ways of training and supporting F