Chicago’s Bilingual Teacher Residency: A Partnership to Strengthen the Teacher Pipeline || NCTR E-Blast 11.06.19

What's new at NCTR?

This week NCTR’s Emily Herrick, Erica Hines, Rosemary Baker, Kent Fischer, and Lourdes Lafon are leading 16 partner organizations on a site visit at the Seattle Teacher Residency. The visit to STR is designed to provide new and emerging residency programs with an opportunity to see and learn from an existing, successful residency. In Seattle, the visiting programs will observe and examine the structures used to prepare residents, and they will analyze the process for designing the year-long residency curriculum. STR is in its seventh year and has so far developed 118 teachers for Seattle Public Schools.

Partner update

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities has awarded CSU Bakersfield its Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Award. To win, teacher education and professional development programs must not only demonstrate effectiveness in producing student learning outcomes, but also explain how they have redesigned their programs as a result. Congratulations to our partners in Bakersfield!

Chicago’s 11-day teacher’s strike ended last Thursday, closing out one of the city’s longest strikes in decades. Students returned to classes last Friday, but getting back to normal might take a while. The new agreement includes 209 additional social worker positions, 250 nursing positions, “enforceable class size limits,” and $35 million to reduce class sizes — beginning in schools with the neediest students.

Work with us

NCTR is seeking to fill two important roles. One, the Director of Network, will work closely with NCTR’s Chief Program Officer and the Program Team to lead our Network of partner residencies. The director will help revise and enhance our programming and services, and cultivate, develop and manage strong relationships with our partners.

The other opening is for a Manager of Research and Data to support the collection, analysis, and reporting of data to demonstrate the effectiveness of the teacher residency model and advance the residency movement.

Job descriptions for both positions, as well as details on how to apply, can be found on our website.

Featured News

Chicago’s Bilingual Residency: A Partnership to Strengthen the Teacher Pipeline

A recent paper by New America examines how the Chicago Public Schools, National Louis University and NCTR teamed up to launch the city’s first bilingual teacher residency to recruit and develop educators for elementary schools and early childhood centers. The paper, “Chicago’s Bilingual Teacher Residency: A Partnership to Strengthen the Teacher Pipeline,” features interviews with staff from NCTR, Chicago schools, and National Louis.

The report calls the residency “a promising example of how school districts are leveraging partnerships with teacher education programs to recruit, prepare, and retain bilingual teacher talent from within the district and local community.”

In addition to helping alleviate a shortage of bilingual teachers, the residency also aims to help diversify the district’s teaching force. In Chicago, nearly one in five students speaks a language other than English, and Spanish-speaking teachers are in high demand. Latinx students make up 47 percent of the student population, with Black students at nearly 37 percent. However, half of the district’s teachers are white, with only 21 percent Latinx and 21 percent Black.

We know from helping launch and grow more than 50 residency programs over the last 12 years that the residency model of teacher development is an effective strategy for diversifying the profession. Across the residency programs we supported during the 2018-19 school year, 55 percent of residents were people of color, compared to 25 percent of those in traditional teacher preparation programs.

The paper highlights three key takeaways from the residency’s first two years:

Creative Outreach is Key to Recruitment: In-person events, social media, and recruiting from the ranks of the district’s paraeducators have been key to its early success.
Program Operations are a Heavy Lift: The residency has many components and partnerships that must be integrated in order to create a seamless experience for residents. This requires planning and teamwork.
Partners Should Be Intentional About Ensuring Alignment: Clarifying each partner’s roles and responsibilities, and codifying them in a memorandum of understanding, helps keep everyone aligned and on the same page.

NCTR is proud to have partnered with CPS and NLU to launch this program. Although it is still new and growing, the lessons we are learning through this partnership are informing our work and helping to improve the programming and support that we offer all of our network and residency partners.