UNT and Texas Wesleyan aim to help first-year teachers thrive. Here’s how.
Two North Texas universities are revamping their teacher training programs with an eye toward ensuring newly-certified educators are better prepared for the job on the first day of school.
Texas Wesleyan University and the University of North Texas are shifting their teacher preparation programs from part-year student teaching programs to year-long teaching residencies. Researchers say novice teachers who go through the more extended classroom experiences are better equipped to work with students and less likely to quit after only a few years on the job.
The change is funded by a combined $3 million grant from the Fort Worth Education Partnership. A portion of the grant also goes to the Fort Worth Independent School District, where officials plan to use grant money to pay for teacher resident positions as a part of a larger staffing effort designed to help less experienced teachers grow.
Residencies give new teachers a full year in the classroom
Natalie Jacobs, the Fort Worth Education Partnership’s director of talent, said the idea behind the grant is to expand access to high-quality teacher training in the Fort Worth area. Since the pandemic, school districts have struggled to attract new teachers and retain the ones they have. By expanding the number of teacher residencies available in the area, Jacobs said the nonprofit hopes to ensure that more people who are interested in a career in education are adequately prepared for the job when they finish college.
The key difference between a traditional student teaching experience and a teacher residency model comes down to the amount of time future teachers spend in the classroom. Under the traditional model, student teachers spend half a year working alongside a classroom teacher, which generally adds up to about three to four months of co-teaching experience. In some cases, students split up their student teaching experiences, doing a few weeks in the fall semester and a few more in the spring.
Under a teacher residency program, student teachers spend their entire senior years in a classroom, generally co-teaching alongside a more experienced teacher a few days a week while they continue taking university classes. Teaching residents are in the classroom from the first day of the school year to the last.
Carlos Martinez, dean of Texas Wesleyan’s School of Education, said that difference is a big one. The fact that student teachers get twice as much time in the classroom is important, he said, but the fact that it comes in the form of an entire school year is key. Instead of dropping into schools for a few weeks at a time, teaching students get a chance to see how the whole year plays out, from setting classroom expectations during the first days of school through state testing and to the last day before summer break.
That extended experience gives students not only a look at the day-to-day work teachers do with their classes, but also the bigger picture, he said. They get a better understanding of what teachers are supposed to accomplish over the course of the entire school year. That’s an important thing for teaching students to understand, because once they start their first jobs, they’ll have to do that work themselves, he said.
“The kind of rookie that you produce after 28 weeks is very different than the kind of rookie that you produce after 14 weeks,” he said.
Another key difference between the two models is that, unlike half-year student teaching experiences, those teacher residency positions generally come with a stipend. Martinez said that difference is also a major factor for Texas Wesleyan’s teacher residents, since many of those students have families to support. Many students have to quit paid jobs when they start student teaching, he said, so the stipend that comes with teacher residencies makes the program less of a financial burden.
New teachers better equipped, more likely to stay after residency
Researchers say students who go through teacher residency programs tend to be better prepared when they start their first teaching jobs and less likely to leave the profession within the first few years. In a report released in July, researchers from the Learning Policy Institute, a national education think tank, looked at outcomes from programs in 12 states and found that both rookie teachers and the principals who hired them said those who completed full-year residencies in college were more effective during their first years than those who didn’t.
Researchers also found that well-designed residency programs can help reduce teacher turnover, which has been a big challenge for school districts in the years following the pandemic. Novice teachers who completed a full-year residency tend to feel better prepared when they start their first jobs, which makes them less likely to get overwhelmed and decide a career in education isn’t for them.
Amanda Vickery, associate dean for educator preparation at UNT’s College of Education, said a big part of that preparedness comes from the fact that students get a chance to make all of their early-career mistakes in a controlled environment, where a co-teacher is on hand to help them understand what happened and how to fix it.
Vickery said the longer classroom experience also gives teacher residents more of a chance to see the parts of the job that college classes didn’t prepare them for. Sometimes, the lesson is just that teachers can’t be prepared for everything, so they need to be able to handle surprises when they happen, she said. Vickery, who taught middle school social studies before coming to UNT, recalled a time during her first year as a classroom teacher when she discovered that some of her students were ducking behind a pull-down map to pierce each other’s ears using staples, scissors or whatever else was handy.
“There’s so much about being a teacher that you just can’t prepare for,” she said.
FWISD taps residents to support strategic staffing
Part of the grant will also go to support Fort Worth ISD’s rollout of a strategic staffing model called Opportunity Culture. The model, which is already in place in districts across the country, is based around the idea of having a few highly effective teachers act as team leaders for small groups of other teachers in their buildings, offering coaching and advice while continuing to teach their own classes. Those master teachers work with their own students for part of the day. Then, co-teachers take over while master teachers work with other classes in their team, helping less experienced teachers hone their skills or working with students in pull-out groups.
The district is piloting the model this year at Hazel Harvey Peace and Westcreek elementary schools and O.D. Wyatt High School. Fort Worth ISD leaders plan to expand the program to three more campuses next year, and eventually implement it district-wide.
Woodrow Bailey, the district’s chief of talent management, said the grant will support that rollout in two ways: It provides money for the district to pay for the co-teachers who take over master teachers’ classes for part of the day, and it creates a pipeline for teacher residents, many of whom will spend their residencies working in those co-teacher positions.
From the district’s perspective, the teacher residency model has clear advantages over the traditional student teaching model, Bailey said. Besides offering teacher residents who can step in for master teachers for part of the day, it also creates a pipeline for first-year teachers who are better prepared for the job, he said. That means those new educators are in a better position to help students move forward academically, he said.
“They’re going to be better prepared to meet the needs of any student that they come in contact with,” Bailey said.
