The Teacher Advisory Board is a group that works with Youth Speaks staff, board and Spokes to develop curricula, educational tools & strategies that Youth Speaks will take into classrooms; helps create the vision of how Youth Speaks programs can be most effectively integrated into schools & classrooms; and creates professional development tools for other teachers and members of the wider educational community who are passionate about using spoken word and creative writing in classrooms. TAB members should be committed to actively participating in regular meetings and email/phone correspondence.

Teacher’s Advisory Board Mission: Youth Speaks Teacher Advisory Board (TAB) is an ambassador program for educators and teachers who have a passion for young people and arts education as it relates to literacy, public education & policy, spoken word, poetry and performance. TAB promotes the organization's mission within school districts and administrations, developing and hosting educational conferences and sponsoring fundraisers and events. Through the Arts-in-Education department's objectives and agenda, TAB formulates an action plan for the upcoming year's events and activities. TAB is a great resource for curriculum formulation, professional development and training services and a forum for educators to work within a framework to create and sustain change. Comprised of some of the strongest educators from the bay area and our school-based residency programs, TAB works as an advisory program for Youth Speaks around education, critical literacy and youth development.

What We Do: Teachers involved with TAB work diligently at finding the intersect between best practices, educational theory and youth advocacy. We believe that the best way for our work to be effective is for this relationship between Youth Speaks and educators to be strong, intentional and based in a commitment to young people and issues related to their achievement and lack thereof. We recognize the brilliance of each and every young person today and commit to overcoming and overturning the historical failure of the school system in the US, specifically for youth of color. TAB works to create strategies to combat the embarrassing graduation and drop out rates in California's school system by creating critical inquiry forums where educators can come together to discuss ways to compel the downward slope of the educational system, while working to improve the literacy skills of youth on individual as well as group bases. As well, TAB works hard at understanding policy dealing with youth and how it relates to the Prison Industrial System pipeline and the failure of our public schools. TAB members work hard developing Professional Development resources, a bi-yearly Arts-in-Education journal, Research on the effectiveness of Youth Speaks' programming, Curriculum focused on alternative education and critical literacy, and events and activities that promote Youth Speaks' Arts-in-Education agenda and objectives.

How We Do It: Through outlining our action work plan, we are better able to prepare and accomplish our goals and objectives by creating committees that will spearhead each designated area of concern. Each committee will be headed by a member of TAB. As a committee chair, TAB members will outline a plan or strategy for the successful completion of task at hand. The following are the main committees TAB will be working on this year:

Professional Development – You will be working closely with Youth Speaks' AIE Managing Director to design and implement several professional developments throughout the school year. You will also be working towards developing the Summer Institute for Teachers.

Curriculum Development – You will be working on writing curriculum to be used in professional development trainings as well as being posted on the website and included in the Youth Speaks Educational Journal. The larger vision of this committee is to work towards creating a curriculum and methods book for publication.

Media and Outreach – You will be working to get the word out about the incredible work that TAB is doing through the avenues of the Youth Speaks Educational Journal and the website, as well as grass roots organizing.