Rachael Maves: Hello everyone, you are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Tiffany Dellard. Tiffany has worked in education for over 20 years in K through 12, higher ed and state government settings. She currently serves as the executive director for the Office of Educator Preparation and Licensure at Middle Tennessee State University, where she supports future educators as they progress through preparation programs towards state licensure.

Tiffany, thank you for joining me today.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: Thank you for having me.

Rachael Maves: So this is going to be a really timely conversation because everyone continues to talk about teacher shortage and every that sweeping the nation and getting positions filled. But before we jump into all of that, I really do want to hear from you. Why did you choose a career in education?

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: So for me, I honestly don't know when there was a set moment. I remember growing up as a child, my father was an educator. He retired after over 30 years in the field. And so I grew up in the household of an educator. I grew up with another parent in the household who found education to be very important and stressed it.

fortunate enough to have a very memorable early experience with education in elementary school. And I still remember each one of my elementary school teachers by name. That's the impression that they left on me all of these years later. And I always remembered it to be a very comfortable space. I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed reading and all of those things.

And even with all of that, I never necessarily set out to go into education. Like many, I made it through undergrad and had a degree in psychology and kind of thought that I was going in one direction and ended up deciding that maybe I wasn't cut out for the world of medicine. So what am I actually going to do now?

just happened to get a job at actually my neighborhood elementary school that my brother had just stopped attending as a parent liaison and fell into that work, enjoyed it immensely, actively sought out graduate school to figure out how I could continue to work with families in schools based on the experiences that I had there and went to graduate school focused every

Rachael Maves: Mm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: paper, every research project, every internship opportunity around working in schools with families. And that really just built the passion in me that said, okay, this is my career path. Various aspects of education while in grad school, got to work with pre-service teachers, doing workshops around family engagement and developed a passion there for supporting teachers. And that then led to my first

not first, but postgraduate school, my first full-time job working in a school district as a family engagement coordinator and loving that work. And so my time in education continues to build my passion for the work in education, whether that's supporting educators and families in schools or whether it's the work that I have now in terms of helping to support

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: the next crop of educators, knowing how important they are and knowing how important their preparation experience is in setting them up for their career. I think, again, every day just continues the passion for education, even if we can't pinpoint for sure when I decided that this was absolutely it. I just kind of fell into it and said, it is. Absolutely.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: It was a progressive journey into the field. So you said that it was really the family engagement part that drew your attention. tell me about that. mean, because typically the stories that I hear on the podcast is usually that trajectory of teacher in the classroom, but you're the first one that I've heard that like started in that space and was like, families, I really want to focus on families.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: Absolutely. You know, I've never been a classroom teacher, but I have experience working in schools from pre-K all the way up to high school based around supporting educators and families. And I always thought of my family engagement work as building the bridge to the partnership that is needed to ultimately support students, right? Families.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: do important work in the life of their children. Schools do important work in the life of children. But I saw in my first role as a parent liaison how sometimes those things get misaligned and not because we don't have the same goals, right? But maybe sometimes we have differing priorities and we certainly can have differing views on how things should be accomplished.

families doing so in the way that's appropriate for them and their family and where they are at that time. And then schools, obviously with the preparation and the professional experiences of educators having a clear idea of how things should be. And so my work and family engagement allowed me to kind of stand in the middle and pull together.

two of the most significant and important entities in a child or a student's life in terms of home and school and really unearthing the possibility of what can happen when we work together. I got to, as a parent liaison, remember I got to be trained by reading specialists and a school counselor on how we were teaching reading at the time.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: to first graders so that I could then turn around and help do with the Title I funds that the school had. They put together kits that we could send home with families and we actually provided training to families to support their students with literacy at home. And there were parents who were empowered by that and there were teachers who were encouraged by that because they couldn't do all of the work of teaching reading.

Rachael Maves: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: at school, but families don't always have the tools at home or the knowledge, right? We may know how to read, but that doesn't mean we know how to teach reading. We also don't know how to do that sometimes in ways that don't conflict with how the school is teaching them. So having the opportunity to...

Rachael Maves: That's great. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: That's right. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: learn that from teachers and the work that they do in teaching students reading and then sharing that with parents who, you know, some of whom shared with me, they wanted to help their student, but they didn't know how. And we gave real tools to do that. And they felt supported in doing that. I think that was one of the moments that like, oh, this, kind of work is a part of education and it is an important part of education. It's something that I could really do.

Rachael Maves: Yes, yes.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you go from that role? Because that's such a critical role, Tiffany. I wish that there were funds available that every district could have a role like that to act as that bridge and really understand the diverse needs of families and communities to be able to connect that academic piece.

And not just academic, would say all of it, social, emotional, all of those pieces. So how did you go from there then into the Office of Educator Preparation and Licensure at Middle Tennessee?

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: So in between there, I went to graduate school and I lived in the family engagement world through an organization that was working in schools doing family engagement work. But I also was in higher education and I was paying for a graduate degree. I applied for an assistantship and got a role in administrative assistantship with a trio.

grant funded office that focused on first generation college students, students with a low income background receiving Pell Grants and things like that. And then students who received academic or physical disability services. And so then I discovered another passion. I

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: working with individuals in higher education, similar to working with families in

has challenges because we don't know the hidden rules. We don't know how the system works. We don't know how to navigate the system. And we can be perceived as not being invested and not being committed when really we just don't know what we don't know. And it's easy to get discouraged in those situations. And so in the world of TRIO,

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: We primarily had a student support services grant, but in the world of TRIO, I worked with a number of especially first generation college students and came to realize how important it is to have this access, but also to have the support that you need to be successful, right? And so working with students in that program,

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: I really built a passion for higher education. And then also while in graduate school, I got the opportunity, like I said, to begin doing workshops with pre-service teachers. And so I was speaking with pre-service teachers prior to their going into their internship or clinical experience and talking to them about family engagement and breaking down some of the myths and assumptions and.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: really presenting ideas to them that though they may have tangentially talked about them in some of their first work, they often hadn't had a concentrated conversation and I often, and they often expressed being sad about it being one conversation, realizing the power of having tools and resources and strategies for doing that work. And so I think that

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: bridge that combination of working with college students directly, working with pre-service teachers specifically, helped build a bridge for me that led to this work now where I am supporting higher education students in pre-service teaching. My largest contact with them is actually in that last semester where they're doing teaching there in the field. I helped.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: support along with a team of a number of people, experienced educators, faculty members, just a large group of people, but I get to help coordinate kind of that final experience for them. And overall, our office helps support them through to licensure. so, you know, achieving what oftentimes, especially for our traditional students, is a kind of

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: dream from as long as they can remember dreaming of career kind of reaching the point of actually becoming a licensed educator. So in that sense, I think even though parts of my trajectory seem random, it actually has come together and created in me a combination of skills and experience and perspective that I think perfectly situates me for the

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: and allows me to be a great support for people in this field of education.

Rachael Maves: Well, it's clear wherever you go, Tiffany, that you are a bridge builder. I mean, that keeps coming up in your story and as you're sharing about your journey, that critical piece of how do you stand in that gap and connect the sides and make meaning of it and demystify processes and things that are hidden, which I think is just critical. So I'd love to hear then in the role that you have, where we find ourselves in our current context, what keeps you up at night?

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: So I think for me, specifically because I work with educators who go through a traditional pathway, so oftentimes these are traditional undergraduate students, sometimes they're post-bac returning students, but.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: most often traditional undergraduate students who go through a four-year institution and then proceed to licensure. Our office also supports educators who enter through an alternative pathway. So maybe it's a second career, they kind of jump right into the work and then the faculty are supporting them with the content while they work through it. One of the things that has

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: really become important to me is this idea of retention and knowing that I'm not in districts, right? So I can't directly support retention, but what does it look like to support retention through preparation in the sense that we are.

Rachael Maves: Thank

Rachael Maves: yes, we need a t-shirt Tiffany that says that support retention through preparation. Absolutely.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: So this idea that on our end, on the university end, regardless of the pathway, what are the ways that we are sowing into educators, both in their professional knowledge and skill, right, but also in their self-efficacy, their confidence, their overall viewpoints of the work that they do. How can we sow into them?

this level of confidence and assuredness in their preparation and ability to tackle whatever the day brings them in the classroom so that their choices are not short term in terms of career, right? How do we help everyone regardless of the pathway, make it past that five year mark, right? Make it past the three year mark.

Rachael Maves: Yes. Yes.

Rachael Maves: Yes. I was gonna say the three-year mark and we can get them past the three-year mark.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: They could pass the three-year mark, yes, but I've heard so many educators say that their confidence and their real belief that they knew what they were doing came around that five-year mark. So I want to see folks make it to that five-year point. And I think that there are a number of factors that play into that. But in terms of my work, I am constantly trying to reflect on

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: the things that we do and the ways that we can better support educators to feel prepared for a career in education and not just a moment. And so I think that for me is probably one of the bigger pieces.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, well, I mean, on that note, as you think about addressing that issue, what are one or two ways that you envision that moving forward or that you're doing right now to help ensure that teachers are hitting that three to five year marker, leaving the preparation program feeling really secure in the work that they're about to engage in?

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: So one of the ways with our traditional students, we've started to build in more professional development. One of the things that I would hear is kind of this disconnect between what educators in the field are seeing in our candidates when they come out and what our faculty are saying that they have prepared them for through their coursework, right?

Rachael Maves: Mm.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: And I've come to realize that a number of the things that our district partners aren't seeing is not because our students haven't been presented with the tools, the resource, the knowledge for those things. It's often because somewhere, you know, we hear it all the time, right? Somewhere that that theory and practice element is getting disconnected. And while they received the tools and the practice through their coursework,

something gets lost when they then see that in a real world full-time educator experience. So one of the things that we've started doing because we have them in their student teaching semester is bringing in professional development about some of the things that again not because our faculty haven't done a great job

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: in exposing them and sharing these resources, but because there is a new opportunity to help them put things into practice when they are in that student teaching component. we have sessions now, and these are broad sessions, right? Because we know that our area-specific or content-specific preparation provides different levels. But what does it look like for

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: a music teacher to have a refresher on how IEPs work. What does it look like for a general K-5 teacher to get information about supporting multilingual learners in their classroom without having an ESL endorsement or without having to wait while we know that there are

Rachael Maves: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: or folks in the district in the building that that is their focus and that's what they do. Oftentimes they're not going to be able to be in your classroom with you full time and your student will be there with you full time. So how are you prepared to approach that work? What does it look like for us to refocus in on real time strategies of supporting the social emotional needs of our students? And how are we prepared to actually seek out

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: counselors and social workers in our buildings to actively engage with them to support our students as opposed to just coming across them when there is some issue or challenge that they are helping us address. And so we've been doing that for a few semesters now. I get feedback from candidates about, what are some of the things that you think, wow, I probably need to know a little bit more about this now that I've

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Rachael Maves: Yeah. Yes. Go deeper. Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: Absolutely, and it happens mid semester. So they've now been in the classroom full time for about half a semester with their mentor teacher. And I think that really allows them to kind of pull it all together and get out. With our district partners, I frame it. You know, we have specialists that come in. We've been connected with some great folks from various districts who are focused in these areas.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: My request to them is, you know, please develop a session of that talks about the things that you wish every teacher knew in their class.

Rachael Maves: Yes, yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: regardless of content area, regardless of grade span, because oftentimes we're talking about, when you're talking about special educators, when you're talking about folks who support multilingual learners, you're talking about school counselors. These are folks who work across grade spans, across content areas, right? And so asking them to spend some time with us and share your real world knowledge and experience and also the things that you think

every educator should know and really come with some great sessions and candidates have walked away feeling like, I gained some things and I hadn't thought about that, but now I'm prepared to do this in my classroom when I begin next semester or next school year, whatever the case may be.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that. I mean, to me, it sounds like you're setting up for your your soon to be teachers the same model that we set up for kids. Like go in, you're trying it. And now where's the place that you need that extra scoop or that additional support or you want to dive a little bit deeper so that you're continuing to build those skills and have the awareness of the spots where it's just not clicking yet because it does it takes time.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: Absolutely, and I think that's something that I always stress to our teacher candidates, even at the beginning of student teaching. think there are a number of pathways to education. All of them are great. If you are committed to being the adult in the classroom supporting students, more power to you.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: what I want, but I think the beauty of a traditional student teaching experience is this idea that you are in a classroom with an experienced teacher, right? There are not too many times that you're going to be full time in a classroom full of students with the opportunity to try within reason, right? Then your preparation using your knowledge, but

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Yep.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: in there and really just try and trust that there is someone right there who is not going to let you or those students in that classroom fail. And so you get to go in there, do it and trust that you can learn from the experience and be supported from that experience and then just become stronger. You go into your classroom, the door closes and you are the one in there.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, that's right.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: We've already had some experiences to work through and maybe things don't have to be quite as scary as they would have been before that experience.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, so this is our last question, Tiffany, as we wrap up our time together, but what question in education are we not asking that we really should be?

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: You know, I thought about this one a little bit, and I think that there are a number of ways that you could go. But my question about everything that we do in education is a question of who is this supposed to work for and is it actually working?

Rachael Maves: Hmm. Hmm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: I think that we make a lot of changes for a lot of reasons. And maybe sometimes they are based on the students in the classroom, but I think there are a lot of choices made for a lot of other reasons. And if we spent a little bit more time using the students as the litmus, what would it look like for that?

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Rachael Maves: Yes. Yes.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: And I recognize why we don't do that because sometimes it's uncomfortable. Sometimes it requires a teacher to not be the ultimate authority in a space or sometimes it requires a school or a district to be unconventional. And so maybe it's just a little bit of a too ideal world.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: of a situation, question to have to, you you have to have an ideal world to actually be able to answer that question. And maybe that's why we don't do it. But I would love for us to spend more time looking at our overall systems specifically and ask the question of who is this actually supposed to work for and is it actually working for them?

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that. That is quite the note for us to end the episode on. It's been such a great time connecting with you, Tiffany, and hearing more about your journey and how you're thinking about education. Thank you.

Dr. Tiffany Dellard: Thank you.

Rachael Maves: A friendly reminder everyone that PARSEC Education's updated early bird sale for PARSEC partners is live until September 30th, coming up here pretty soon. Partner tickets are only $1.99 for the 2026 Measure What We Value Summit, happening February 4th in Fresno, California. Don't miss this limited time offer and the opportunity to learn from A.J. Crapehill, author of Great on Their Behalf, as he shares how to align system-wide goals with the needs of your students. Secure your tickets now at parsecsummit.com.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.