Prepared To Teach works across the country to solve a key problem in education: making sure everyone who wants to be a teacher can afford to attend a quality preparation program.
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Sample Formal Resident Agreement
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This sample Resident Commitment Agreement is a skeleton for partnerships to use and edit in ways that best fit their needs. This formal contract model not only embeds expectations for the residency but also sets out terms for residents' receipt of financial supports during the residency, such as agreements to take positions in a district once they have completed the program.
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Sample Residency Partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This residency partnership sample MOU can be edited and adapted in ways that best fit local partnerships' needs and goals. The MOU includes collaborative goals and shared responsibilities, followed by specific program and district responsibilities.
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Sample State Application Language for Residencies in ARPA
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This document contains sample language for state plans. Please feel free to adapt this document for use in your efforts to encourage your state education agency to include residency funding in its application for the last third of ARP dollars, which is due June 7th. For more information, contact PreparedToTeach@bankstreet.edu
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Supporting Candidates' Financial Needs
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This document takes the affordability lessons found in our report, The Affordability Imperative: Creating Equitable Access to Quality Teacher Preparation, and offers preparation program leaders a set of guiding questions to help them find more ways to reduce the financial burdens of their aspiring teachers.
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Teacher Residency Website Guidance
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This document provides guidance on how to design an effective teacher residency webpage that can support partnerships in garnering support, interest, awareness, and enrollment. Guidance is rooted in four key principles: Highlighting partnership values, telling stories, centering navigability, and focusing on keywords.
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Using ESSER Funds to Support Teacher Residencies
Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This document details the opportunity that Local Education Agencies (LEAs) have to leverage Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief Funds (ESSER) to develop teacher residency programs at their school sites. It is not only allowable, but also advisable under Federal guidance that these funds can support teacher candidates working for a full year, co-teaching within classrooms with accomplished mentor teachers, helping lead to a more diverse teacher workforce, reducing teacher turnover, and improving instructional outcomes.
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Going Further Together: Building Ownership and Engagement to Support High-Quality Teacher Preparation
Maria Salciccioli, Melissa White, Karen DeMoss, and Hannah Dennis
Building shared ownership and engagement over teacher preparation can help ensure that efforts to sustainably fund high-quality programs will endure beyond initial start-up funding. By drawing on effective, lasting collaboration among stakeholders who have not traditionally worked together—both within organizations and across organizational lines, programs can successfully identify sustainable funding sources for the long term. This report shares strategies for building ownership and engagement and highlights programs across the country that have successfully sustained and grown the kind of commitments that ensure program development and longevity.
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Beyond Tuition, Costs of Teacher Preparation: Descriptive Analytics from the Aspiring Teachers' Financial Burden Survey
Francheska Santos, Divya Mansukhani, Susann Skjoldhorne, and Neal Finkelstein
This report shares analyses from the national survey of aspiring teachers carried out by Prepared To Teach during the 2019-2020 school year. Beyond Tuition, Costs of Teacher Preparation dives into the income sources, expenses, debt, and work realities of aspiring teachers across the country and identifies where candidates are in need of additional support.
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Roles for Candidates in the Classroom
Charlotte Wells
This animated PowerPoint presentation shows different models for integrating aspiring teachers into the classroom to help with instruction while furthering their own learning. With more than a dozen examples, it's a helpful starting point for partnerships seeking to shift towards a more cohesive P-20 education system.
The presentation includes voiceovers and timed animations. You can choose to present without these if you'd prefer. Settings are in the slideshow tab of PowerPoint.
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Five Domains for Transforming Teacher Preparation
Charlotte Wells, Karen DeMoss, Divya Mansukhani, and Zach Paull
This report describes the process of establishing the current Prepared To Teach theory of change, which supports national communities of practice in five domains identified by the Network's learning agenda in the 2019-2020 school year: mindset shifts, educator roles, labor market alignment, school improvement, and deeper learning. Read how these five domains are explored through existing residency partnership programs, how individual programs both solidified and strengthened existing partnerships, and important insights into how to expand and share the benefits partnerships can reap through their work together. Finally, explore how the domains center the need for systemic changes built upon the cornerstones of justice and equity in order to construct an educational system that helps every student thrive.
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A Transformative Opportunity for New York State
Bank Street College of Education
Funded, yearlong teacher residencies save money and improve schools. To fund every new teacher in New York at a rate of $20,000, the total cost would be $440,000. Within 5-7 years, teacher turnover would reduce by two-thirds. Resource reallocation plus cost savings from retention would pay for most or all of the state's future needed teacher pool.
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Making Teacher Preparation Policy Work
Bank Street College of Education
Making Teacher Preparation Policy Work is the fifth public report from Prepared To Teach. This policy-focused report shares lessons from New York's clinically-rich preparation pilot including principles for policy to support funded teacher residencies in New York and beyond.
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Residency Partnership Development Framework
Bank Street College of Education
The Residency Partnership Development Framework identifies five distinct yet interconnected domains that are integral to achieving scalable shifts in the teacher preparation ecosystem that will allow all aspiring teachers to access high-quality, funded teacher residencies.
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How California's Teacher Residencies Are Helping to Solve Teacher Shortages and Strengthen Schools
Karen DeMoss and Cathy Yun
With significant state investment teacher residencies are spreading throughout California. These vignettes highlight two California teacher residencies and how they are helping to address shortages and support both students and teachers. These examples also spotlight creative funding strategies that can help California’s investments in teacher residencies become sustainable over time.
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Sustainable Strategies for Funding Teacher Residencies: Lessons From California
Karen DeMoss and Cathy Yun
With significant state investment, teacher residencies are spreading throughout California To sustain these efforts after the initial state investment programs are using creative funding strategies. To learn about how teacher residencies across the state are funding their work, the Learning Policy Institute and Prepared To Teach at Bank Street College of Education partnered to examine the current state of practice around residency sustainability. The report highlights California teacher residencies with known financial sustainability efforts in which partners are leveraging local resources to support residents and mentor teachers. These concrete examples of creative residency funding strategies are meant to help California’s new investments in teacher residencies become sustainable over time. They also offer valuable lessons for residencies in any community context.
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Co-Designing Teacher Residencies: Sharing Leadership, Finding New Opportunities
Matt Miller and Steph Strachan
This report focuses on how a group of university teacher educators at Western Washington University’s Elementary Education program and district administrators at Ferndale School District reconsidered their approach to teacher preparation. Instead of viewing preparation as primarily the University’s responsibility, the partnership placed the needs of P-12 students and the district at the forefront of considerations, while also honoring a parallel goal enhancing the preparation experience.
The report describes the successful outcomes of the work, including revisions to the residency like work opportunities, a revised placement process, a district “on-boarding” process, and responsive professional development throughout the residency. Finally, you can find the “ingredients” that enabled the district and teacher preparation program to identify needs and priorities while uncovering opportunities to work differently together.
Throughout, the words of participants help tell the story of the partnership and highlight aspects of the work. These words come from structured interviews with school district personnel, university faculty, university administrators, cooperating teachers, and residents.
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Prepared To Teach National Network
Bank Street College
A two page summary of the Prepared To Teach National Network of teacher residencies.
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New York State Root Causes
Bank Street College of Education
When teachers quit, education fails. Teacher residencies can reduce turnover, diversify the teaching profession, and support student learning. New York State has an opportunity to transform teacher preparation.
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Professional Preparation
Bank Street College of Education
Part of being a professional is completing quality preparation. But teachers don't necessarily receive rigorous, extended practice as other professions do—and notably, they don't get paid for their work when they do.
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Simplifying Improvement
Bank Street College of Education
Initiatives, projects, and structural changes in service of school reform can become overwhelming and complicated. Teacher residencies are a streamlined way of untangling priorities for improvement and creating a unified strategy.
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The 3 R's of Sustainably Funded Residencies
Bank Street College of Education
Deep partnerships between universities and districts are essential to the success of locally-grown teacher residencies, in part because of the funding opportunities these relationships unlock. Across the country, partnerships have identified funding strategies that can sustain and scale residencies, including dedicated financial support for aspiring teachers completing their clinical practice placements. Districts rethink staffing to free up dollars and programs find ways to reduce costs. When residencies design and recruit in ways that meet P-12 needs, districts also frequently dedicate additional dollars to the partnership. Together, these approaches offer “3 R’s” for sustainable residency funding.
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The Prepared To Teach Paradigm Shift
Bank Street College of Education
Prepared To Teach exists to help districts, states, and teacher preparation programs find ways to develop sustainable streams of public funding to support high-quality teacher preparation.
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Transforming the Teacher Development Trajectory
Bank Street College of Education
Teacher preparation programs that work for everyone—preparation providers, districts, and aspiring teachers—rely on strong partnerships. Residency programs bring districts and providers together to support sustained clinical practice for candidates and create aligned goals throughout the program, linking teacher preparation to success in the classroom.
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Money Matters
Bank Street College of Education and Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College
This short document summarizes the research supporting a unified P-20 system and how teacher residencies can bring us closer to achieving that goal.
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About Prepared To Teach
Bank Street College of Education
Learn more about Prepared To Teach and our work around sustainable funding for teacher preparation.