City Teaching Alliance
Empowering educators with an innovative self-service portal.The Mission
City Teaching Alliance prepares culturally responsive educators to improve educational outcomes for urban students. Founded in 2009, the organization offers a Master of Arts in Teaching program in partnership with American University focused on anti-racist pedagogy. Operating in several major cities, City Teaching Alliance aims to disrupt racial and socioeconomic inequities in education by equipping teachers with the skills to address urban school challenges and accelerate student achievement.
The Problem
City Teaching Alliance needed help with an outdated and unreliable online portal to communicate with their teachers. The existing platform was not used consistently by teachers, leading to outdated information and a lack of trust from both teachers and staff. This resulted in teachers reverting to less efficient methods of communication like email, phone, and text. City Teaching Alliance was looking to streamline both the teacher and staff experience, providing clarity to teachers about their requirements and deadlines, while also giving staff better visibility into teacher’s progress.
As Megan Rottmannn, Vice President of Teacher Experience at City Teaching Alliance explained, "2020 was a very tough time for the world, and an especially tough time for our teachers and our nonprofit staff. There was a high degree of chaos in that season of life. After a season of turnover, our systems very quickly fell into disrepair."
The Solution
Idealist Consulting partnered with City Teaching Alliance to build a new, mobile-friendly centralized portal called "Compass." The key features of the Compass portal included:
- Task tracking and customized task lists for teachers
- A resource repository and support request system
- Integrated program requirements like hiring, certification, and AmeriCorps enrollment
- Grant request functionality
- Automation and data migration to streamline internal processes
As Rottmann noted, one of the core requirements was to build "one calendar to rule them all" where teachers could see all their tasks and program events in one place. While this proved technically challenging, the teams worked together to find alternate solutions that provided teachers with a clear and consolidated view of their responsibilities.
Rottmann described the needs of City Teaching Alliance, “We have historically communicated these requirements to them via email newsletters - which doesn’t allow for a personalized list. There's just a lot of confusion, a lot of assumption that they've already done what they need to do. We needed to show teachers a list of what they needed to do and have them check things off.”
The Result
The launch of the new Compass portal was met with excitement and enthusiasm across City Teaching Alliance. As Rottmann observed, "People are reaching out independently and asking, 'How do I get this on Compass?' And that is the kind of staff behavior change that we need in order for the platform to succeed."
The new portal has provided significant efficiency gains for both teachers and staff:
"Now that all of that data is funneled through and into Salesforce, our team can more clearly see where the biggest financial needs are, how many dollars we are spending for different demographic groups, and really ensure that we are equitably applying the grant process.”
Additionally, integrated processes for things like AmeriCorps enrollment have greatly reduced the burden on staff. As Rottmann explained, "This very critical element of our financial package for teachers that required a ton of staff outreach is now living alongside all of their tasks, and staff are also seeing improved progress towards completion by teachers."
As part of Idealist Consulting’s unique service delivery model, The Idealist Way, the consultant team used our proprietary tool Story Navigator to provide extensive training and documentation right in the new system to empower City Teaching Alliance's staff to independently maintain and update the new portal going forward.
The Compass portal has helped the City Teaching Alliance team streamline processes, improve visibility, and enhance both the teacher and staff experience. With a powerful and consolidated system, City Teaching Alliance can better serve its mission to support urban schools and empower teachers and students.
Having a log [within Story Navigator] showing why we made decisions and who was involved in deciding to hold, close, or resolve any given issue will be a really worthwhile resource in the coming months to refer back to. To be able to see not only what was built, but why.
