Education Commons^™

Co-Designing Teacher Residencies: Sharing Leadership, Finding New Opportunities, Matt Miller, Steph Strachan

Prepared to Teach

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 …

If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the …

Discussing Race, Policing, And Privilege In A High School Classroom, Arianna Banack

Occasional Paper Series

This article describes a unit implemented in a ninth-grade English classroom using the young adult novel, All American Boys (Reynolds & Keily, 2015) to explore issues of police brutality, privilege, and racism. Pedagogical activities are offered alongside a critical reflection of the unit as the author explores difficult moments while teaching. Implications for English educators and currently practicing ELA teachers are provided with suggestions on how to revise the unit to center on exploring the systematic oppression of people of color.

What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali

Occasional Paper Series

In this paper, the authors – a preservice teacher (PST) and a teacher educator – consider how teacher education might better prepare PSTs to use picture books to facilitate difficult conversations in elementary classrooms. They share missed opportunities from their own experiences in a fourth-grade fieldwork classroom and in a graduate-level elementary literacy methods course where they felt unprepared to respond to students’ comments about “controversial” topics. They reimagine how these experiences might have been transformed to be more educative for PSTs, first by considering how they could have responded more thoughtfully in the moment and then by thinking about …

We Are All Learning About Climate Change: Teaching With Picture Books To Engage Teachers And Students, Ysaaca D. Axelrod, Denise Ives, Rachel Weaver

Occasional Paper Series

The topic of climate change and climate justice is politically charged, doesn’t sit neatly within a single subject or content area, and raises concerns of not being ‘age appropriate’ for young children. In this paper we describe how teacher educators in an elementary education program support a student teacher who took up the topic of climate change and climate justice in her 1st grade teaching placement. She designed a unit around a picture book that focuses on the words and work of Greta Thunberg, and used a diverse set of texts to support students’ understanding of the complexity of climate …

Angry Like Me, Catherine-Laura Dunnington, Shoshana Magnet

Occasional Paper Series

In this article we take on a challenging picture book, The Heart and the Bottle written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and how one preschool boy’s response changed us. As part of a three-center initiative to discuss hard feelings and grief with preschool learners, we teamed with six preschool teachers to read and work through this text. We explore how both the preschoolers’ and the teachers’ responses challenged us to look at how the disjoint between pedagogy (literature that says we should teach these types of texts) and practice (how this classroom experience actually unfolds) leaves much room for continued …

How California's Teacher Residencies Are Helping To Solve Teacher Shortages And Strengthen Schools, Karen Demoss, Cathy Yun

Prepared to Teach

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.

Sustainable Strategies For Funding Teacher Residencies: Lessons From California, Karen Demoss, Cathy Yun

Prepared to Teach

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 …

Equitable Compensation For The Child Care Workforce: Within Reach And Worth The Investment, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

This brief outlines concrete ideas and innovative strategies to help advance early educator compensation at the local, state, and federal levels and, in turn, support the development and care of our nation's youngest learners.

Who Will Care For The Early Care And Education Workforce? Covid-19 And The Need To Support Early Childhood Educators’ Emotional Well-Being, Mark Nagasawa, Kate Tarrant

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This brief report describes issues and opportunities related to early childhood educators' emotional well-being that emerged from a survey exploring how the COVID-19 was affecting early educators across New York City and New York State (n=3355). Among our key findings were: (1) that mental health support was the most frequently identified need (n=910); (2) professional mental health was the least reported approach to coping (n=216); and (3) how those teaching and caring remotely were approximately one-and-a- half times more likely to rate their emotional well-being as lower than those whose sites were closed (CI 95% 1.157, 1.896). We argue, given …

Residency Partnership Development Framework, Bank Street College Of Education

Prepared to Teach

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.

Executive Summary: New York Early Care And Education Survey: Understanding The Impact Of Covid-19 On New York's Early Childhood System, Kate Tarrant, Mark Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is an abbreviated version of the first report based upon the New York COVID-19 and Early Care & Education Survey.

All I Want To Say Is That They Don’T Really Care About Us: Creating And Maintaining Healing-Centered Collective Care In Hostile Times, Asif Wilson, Wytress Richardson

Occasional Paper Series

Too often educators (care-givers) are left to navigate toxic work environments without proper support to combat the systemic issues they face daily. Institutions of higher education have neglected to make the health and well-being of care-givers a priority. This failure continues to maintain and perpetuate the oppressive conditions that mirror trauma, pain and stress. The authors of this study extend Ginwright’s (2018) healing centered engagement to conceptualize what they call healing centered collective care—a fugitive framework of care for the care-givers. Data was collected through two case studies and those generative themes are presented using testimonios from the authors.

Don’T Be Fooled, Trauma Is A Systemic Problem: Trauma As A Case Of Weaponized Educational Innovation, Debi Khasnabis, Simona Goldin

Occasional Paper Series

We examine the dangers and affordances of trauma-informed practice, focusing specifically on how this approach can be misused to cause harm. Further, we elaborate how teacher educators can support teachers in developing systemically trauma-informed teaching practice. We analyze and share detailed educational designs showing how counter story can support educators to recognize and contend with racist interpretations of trauma-informed practice. These lenses are frequently used to injure, blame and pathologize, in particular, poor children and families of color.

A Transformative Opportunity For New York State, Bank Street College Of Education

Prepared to Teach

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.

Making Teacher Preparation Policy Work, Bank Street College Of Education

Prepared to Teach

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.

Reflections On Developing A Cross-Institutional Team, Rebecca Cheung, Jennifer Robinson, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Jessica Charles

Graduate School of Education

Today’s educators need to develop the knowledge, skills, and disposition to support all students in deeper learning. Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab) works to strengthen educator preparation in the United States by building the collaborative capacity of preparation programs, school districts, and state policymakers. Through cross-programmatic sharing of innovative practices, including models and artifacts of educator preparation practice, EdPrepLab’s network of preparation programs helps build leadership and high-quality practice through collaboration, research, and documentation.

Reflections On Developing A Cross-Institutional Inquiry Project, Rebecca Cheung, Jennifer Robinson, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Jessica Charles

Graduate School of Education

Jennifer Robinson, Executive Director of the Center for Pedagogy at Montclair State University and Rebecca Cheung, Director of the Principal Leadership Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, are helping to lead a collaborative inquiry group comprised of three different institutions: Montclair State University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). This brief captures protocols and processes they used to support effective collaboration in the design of their inquiry project proposal.

Edpreplab As A Learning Community, Jessica Charles, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper

Graduate School of Education

As part of EdPrepLab’s work to strengthen educator preparation in the United States, network members from across the country partnered to form inquiry groups—each comprised of a cross- or intra-institutional team—focused on collaboratively exploring a topic related to deeper learning and equity. This brief summarizes the proposals of each group and highlights the line(s) of inquiry, scope of work, and intended outcomes of each project.

Becoming A System Of Professional Learning: Conceptualizing Improvement As A Throughline Of Learning, Michelle L. Forman, Tracy Fray-Oliver, Doug Knecht

Bank Street Education Center

This white paper introduces the “Throughline of Learning” (Throughline) model developed by the Bank Street Education Center. The model builds on the concept of the instructional core and demonstrates how focusing on system-wide adult learning needs can help districts successfully reimagine their approach to instructional improvement.

Investing In The Birth-To-Three Workforce: A New Vision To Strengthen The Foundation For All Learning, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

This report asserts that every child—regardless of race, income, or opportunity—should have consistent access to high-quality learning experiences from birth and provides a roadmap toward change at scale, including the development of residency programs and improved compensation for the infant/toddler workforce.