Reimagining the role of teachers to better serve all students, particularly those historically marginalized, is crucial to the success of our school systems. Strategic school staffing disrupts the outdated one-teacher, one-classroom model, alleviating many challenges faced by students and teachers. Local education agencies (LEAs) across the country are exploring ways to train and organize educators to provide engaging, affirming, and meaningful experiences for students.
One key component of strategic school staffing is designing structures that cultivate teacher pipelines, with residency models offering excellent opportunities not existent with other models. LEAs in partnership with educator preparation programs (EPPs), can build sustainable models by using paid non-teaching roles like tutors or paraprofessionals and developing clear pathways into teaching. Across the country, LEAs and EPPs are collaborating to recruit, develop, and retain effective educators through paid residency models that provide a year-long teaching experience alongside an expert mentor, integrating coursework with clinical practice. These programs help recruit and retain teachers of color, which is essential for representing the diverse student population and boosting academic performance, and they also mitigate barriers for aspiring teachers, such as financial strain and lack of on-the-job training, by providing a paid residency year and additional support in navigating licensure.
Education First, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has developed a toolkit for building sustainable residency models targeted toward LEAs and EPPs partnering together. This toolkit is a companion resource to the Partnering on Prep toolkit Education First published in 2022. Included in the new toolkit is a roundup of publicly available tools and resources LEA and EPP partners may use to support the design and implementation of sustainable residencies.
