Oklahoma has a teacher shortage problem. Perhaps worse, Oklahoma has a certified teacher shortage problem, and one that continues to grow year to year.
As public school teacher vacancies fueled by retirements and early-career attrition have intensified over the past decade, teaching positions have been increasingly filled by uncertified teachers.
The statistics have become quite sobering.
This academic year, for example, 5,500 teachers in Oklahoma public schools are working under emergency certification, where instructors are required to have bachelor’s degrees, but no formal teaching experience or training. That’s nearly 800 more than the previous year, according to data from the Oklahoma State Board of Education.
Enter Heather Sparks, Oklahoma City University’s director of teacher education, and her Teacher Development Academy.
While it’s a tall mountain to climb, Sparks is helping to tackle one of the state’s most pressing issues one cohort at a time.
“We are trying to address this teacher shortage,” said Sparks, a public education teacher for 25 years and Oklahoma’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, “but we’re also wanting to give teachers the skills they need for teaching tomorrow.”
The effort began in 2022, when Sparks launched OCU’s Teacher Development Academy. The academy is a four-week program designed to help emergency-certified teachers gain important skills in how to teach and manage classrooms.
It also prepares learners to take tests needed to gain official teacher certification. Academy completers earn a “Reaching and Teaching All Learners” micro credential and graduate certificate, and can even apply nine credit-hours into OCU’s Master of Education in Instructional Design and Educational Technology degree.
The academy reached a new level in 2024, thanks in part to a grant from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief () Fund, part of the CARES Act created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Sparks first heard of the fund’s existence, she started working with officials from the Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) district to expand the Teachers Development Academy, which had trained 29 teachers in each of its first two years.
The GEER funding kicked in for the fall 2024 semester, and by the time the fifth and final cohort finishes this summer, the program will have trained 230 teachers over the full fiscal year of the funding. All at no expense to the teachers.
OKCPS officials have noticed improvements already. While acknowledging there may be other factors to consider, the anecdotal evidence shows better results on aspects beyond student performance. Teachers have been applying their newly attained skills as soon as they acquire them.
“The way (Teacher Development Academy) classes are structured, i