Fostering the Capacity of Teacher Leadership in a K-5 RPP

School districts typically purchase prepackaged curriculum created by curriculum writers. Often, this method approach doesn't allow for student needs of a certain demographic area populations to be met. Springfield Public Schools, a large urban school district in Massachusetts composed of over 25,000 students and 4,500 teachers, chose to prioritize the needs of their district's community. Over the past 5 years, district leaders, school level administrators, researchers, evaluators, and educators have been involved in a large-scale Research Practice Partnership (RPP) funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Over 50 teachers in the district wrote and revised computer science lessons to be integrated into preexisting content areas. Unique to this project, many teacher leaders were developed starting with five teacher coordinators who quickly became the guiding force of the project. These coordinators were able to develop skills necessary to coordinate a large-scale Research Practice Partnership (RPP) and made it their purpose to utilize other up and coming educators within the district to maximize exposure of the project, utilize their acquired knowledge and experiences, and create sustainability. We have built the capacity for educators involved in the project to become facilitators in a variety of areas throughout the district. From the onset of the project teachers, working as design team members and early adopters of the curriculum, gained various skill sets and knowledge from explicit professional development (PD) in focused areas. Some of these areas included working and gaining knowledge with platforms and devices, team building and collaboration techniques, lesson development strategies, understanding of computer science standards, and an equitable mindset connected to building and creating lessons for students and strengthening opportunities for the students in our school community. This process evolved and grew our current facilitators. Educators involved have become mentor teachers, facilitators of professional development (PD), gained exposure in national and regional conferences, and even been hired as academic supervisors in the district. The RPP plans to continue to foster the development and growth of teacher leaders to guarantee the success of the project long after the RPP is complete as well as support the vast needs of a large diverse school district.