Teach For America Chicago, Illinois
Institution Comment Comments submitted by: Heather Harding, VP, Research & Public Affairs, Teach For America
We appreciate NCTQ’s review and comments on our preparation program. Given that we are a highly selective alternative route into the profession, it is important to offer some contextualizing comments regarding the nature of our program. As a national teaching corps we see our program as beginning with recruitment and moving through selection, training, support and development, and alumni leadership development. Any focus on preparation does not fully highlight all that we do in developing educational leaders in the classroom and beyond. Given this, it is important that we highlight our approach to teacher training and development. The objective of Teach For America’s training and ongoing support program is to ensure that our teachers—or corps members, as we refer to them—enter the classroom equipped with the foundational knowledge, skills, and mindsets to become highly effective teachers. Over the years, we have studied our most effective teachers to identify what they do to succeed in their classrooms. Specifically, we see that they set big goals, invest in students and their influencers, plan purposefully, execute effectively, continually increase effectiveness, and work relentlessly. These principles and the 28 specific teacher actions that underlie them form our Teaching As Leadership framework and rubric. Since all new teachers—especially those working in low-income communities—face intense and numerous challenges in their schools and classrooms, we invest significant time and resources in providing support for corps members throughout their two–year commitment. The support takes the form of observations and coaching; regional learning sessions; graduate school coursework; and an online community and resources. Our online portal is a place where corps members and alumni have access to information, tools, and resources designed to enhance their effectiveness as teachers, and where corps members can exchange ideas and questions with one another. It includes concrete pedagogical resources, video examples, and models, while also offering several modules for self-directed online learning. At Teach For America, we continuously evaluate and refine our program based on several factors, including the impact that our corps members have on students; feedback from our corps members (whom we survey multiple times during the institute and throughout their two-year commitment); observations and feedback from our program staff members; input from outside experts and practitioners; and ongoing internal studies. We are currently working on building more opportunities for corps members to increase their pedagogical content knowledge with experts in the field. One example of that work is a pilot series in secondary math we co-designed with Magdalene Lampert, of the University of Michigan. The series focuses on refining teacher conceptual knowledge, identifying promising instructional strategies, and planning and executing effective lessons.
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