Education Commons^™

Technical Report: Listening To Teachers Study, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is the summary report for the second year of the Listening to Teachers Study which asks how early childhood educators in New York City (NYC) have been faring through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The study’s purpose has been to seek deeper understandings of what NYC’s early care and education (ECE) workforce has experienced during the Pandemic to inform decision-making about the city's future ECE systems by raising issues for reflection and action-oriented discussion.

The study has followed a multistage, exploratory-mixed methods design, incorporating: 1) ongoing consultation with ECE stakeholders to incorporate questions of interest to them – and their …

Who's There For The Directors?, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This third report from the Listening to Teachers study’s second year focuses on a subsample of early childhood program leaders (n=113) in NYC. Among the key findings in this report:

• Support from supervisors lowered the odds of survey participants reporting potential burnout.
• However, the odds of program leaders reporting potential burnout were 1.7 times higher than for other respondents.
• The odds of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) respondents being in leadership roles were significantly less than their white colleagues.

While this study's self-selected sample makes these findings ungeneralizable, they do raise the critically important question, What is …

Forgotten Frontline Workers, One Year Later, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is the second in a series of reports discussing findings from a June 2021 survey sent to New York Aspire Registry members who work in NYC (n=663). It also follows up on Forgotten Frontline Workers, a report issued last year which focused on family child care (FCC) professionals’ experiences earlier in the pandemic. The results discussed in this report come from a self-selected sample (n=97), and cannot be used to draw conclusions about all FCC professionals in NYC; however, their value comes from recognizing each of these participants’ humanity and the important policy-relevant issues …

Fighting For Justice In Education: How Schools Can Lead The Change Towards A More Equitable World, Tara Kirton

Occasional Paper Series

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different” (Roy, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous implications for every aspect of life. School, work, celebrations and everyday social interactions have all felt the repercussions of the pandemic. While the shutdown called for an immediate pivot from our everyday ways of being, it has also provided opportunities for stillness and deep reflection. This moment of pause has provided an opportunity to think, speak and act differently. As a parent my hope is that educators will lead the change.

Remote Portals: Enacting Black Feminisms And Humanization To Disrupt Isolation In Teacher Education, Mildred Boveda, Keisha M. Allen

Occasional Paper Series

As two Black women teacher educators who contend with the neoliberal expectations of the westernized academy and the material realities of preparing teachers for P-12 contexts, we face the pressures of performing productivity while attempting to ameliorate injustices for multiply-marginalized students (e.g., Black students with disabilities facing economic hardships). Working within predominantly white spaces, we were already socially and intellectually isolated prior to the 2020 pandemic. In this collaborative essay, we articulate how COVID-19 exasperated existing educational and social inequities, yet served as a portal to collective sense-making of our heightened intersectional consciousness, sense of duty to community, and enactments …

Esser Logic Model For Teacher Residencies, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This document provides support for Local Education Agencies (LEAs) who might wish to use their Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) Funds to develop teacher residency programs. Residencies are explicitly allowable under federal guidance, as they can address both immediate COVID-19 learning opportunity gaps and help districts "build back better" by diversifying the teaching force, reducing turnover, and improving outcomes. The logic model above is part of the new resource that LEAs can use to complete their required ESSER plans.

Teacher Residency Website Guidance, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

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.

Preparation Program And District Partnership Agreement Considerations, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This document outlines key considerations to keep in mind when building a residency partnership. Articulating agreements can help clarify the responsibilities of each party—programs and schools or districts—as well as foster a shared understandings of the mutual goals and responsibilities the partnership wishes to embrace. Agreements can remain informal or can form the basis for a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

Sample Formal Resident Agreement, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

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.

Sample State Application Language For Residencies In Arpa, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

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 7^th. For more information, contact PreparedToTeach@bankstreet.edu

District Arp Erra Funds, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This document contains ideas for districts to leverage ARPA funds.

Guidance: Resident Expectations And Agreements, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This document outlines expectations that residency programs might want to make explicit for those who will be enrolling in the residency. Many of these considerations also would be included in formal agreements between individual residents and preparation partnerships, for example when residents must agree to serve as teachers in a district in exchange for receiving funding during the program.

Arp Webinar Slide Deck, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

Slide deck for Prepared To Teach webinar on May 17th, 2021.

Sample Residency Partnership Memorandum Of Understanding (Mou), Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

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.

Supporting Candidates' Financial Needs, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

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.

Exploring District Investments In Residencies, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This one-page document illustrates ways school districts can adjust existing funding streams to support teacher candidates during their residency year. Examples of include substitute teaching days for residents, professional development opportunities, and co-teaching alongside mentor teachers.

Forming And Sustaining An Advisory Group, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This slide deck outlines the basics of forming an effective advisory group to develop a strong residency partnership. By developing trust and collaborating on shared, mutually beneficial work, advisory groups can support both short-term and long-term partnership goals. The presentation includes supplementary notes on many slides.

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 …

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.

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

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is the first in a series of reports based upon a survey conducted with 3355 early childhood educators across New York City and New York State, which sought to understand how they were faring during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020). Among the key findings were: (1) at that time the emotional stress of the pandemic was affecting respondents more than health and financial stressors; (2) Educators’ need for mental health supports exceed other areas of support requested; (3) approximately 70% were engaged in remote instruction in New York City and half were providing remote instruction …

I Want To Know Why, Virginia Casper, Rebecca J. Newman

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, an early childhood coach and her mentor coach tell one story of their year of joint reflective work together. They follow the topic of outdoor play in birth-to-three and early childhood family-based care programs as it surfaced at the beginning of the year. This inquiry expanded into the coach’s burgeoning understanding of the meaning of experience for very young children, which became a parallel process in the coach’s work with practitioners. Together, the coach and mentor coach describe the ways in which they created a more authentic and meaningful way to think about outdoor time and environments …

New York City Pre-K Leadership Study, Veronica Benavides, Faith Lamb-Parker, Sheila Smith

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Presents key findings from a study of New York City pre-K leaders that evaluated how leaders support teachers and what factors help or hinder leaders’ efforts to positively impact learning for all children.

Teacher Leaders: Transforming Schools From The Inside

Occasional Paper Series

Teacher leadership is "hard." Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid enough. This volume is a modest attempt to restore the issue of teacher leadership to the prominence it deserves and requires. Although there is considerable overlap among the essays, they have been organized loosely into three categories: "mentoring," to address the essential question of teacher helping teacher; "transforming school …

Performance Assessment Of Aspiring School Leaders Grounded In An Epistemology Of Practice: A Case Study, Jessica E. Charles, Rebecca Cheung, Kristin Rosekrans

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

There is increasing interest in the field of leadership preparation about the opportunities that robust performance assessments may provide to capture and evaluate the complexity of school administrators’ work. Heretofore, the conversation about administrator performance assessment in leadership preparation has mainly centered on the development and impact of large statewide assessments that grow out of a Cartesian epistemology of individual knowledge possession, in which individuals must demonstrate mastery of a set of static knowledge and skills. We analyzed the characteristics of a performance assessment system that deliberately accounts for the organizational complexity of practice and knowledge generation in its design. …

District-Wide Instructional Initiative Framework, Jessica Charles, Tracy Fray Oliver, Doug Knecht, Emily Sharrock

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Describes the Bank Street Education Center's District-wide Instructional Initiative Framework, a tool that guides the Center's partnership work with school districts who are engaged in a process of instructional improvement. The Framework was developed out of research on district improvement, organizational development, school leadership, and professional learning, as well as the Center's own experience implementing large-scale district reform in the largest school district in the nation: New York City.

Schooling For And With Democracy, Douglas R. Knecht

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Given the current challenges facing our democracy in the United States, the role of public schools in forming habits of democratic practice in our citizenry is as important today as ever. To explore this urgent topic, the author interviewed 13 leaders of 10 New York City public schools committed to educating for and with democracy. Six patterns of beliefs and practices emerged from the conversations, including commitments to intentionally developing informed, empathic, inclusive, inquiry-minded, confident, vocal, and involved citizens through parallel democratic structures for both adults and students. A seventh pattern was also identified; however, it took the shape of …

The Role Of The Principal In School Reform, Michael Fullan

Occasional Paper Series

Fullan examines the principal's role in school improvement and reform. He describes where principals are and what they do and don't do in relation to change. He then talks about the complexity of leadership and offers guidelines for how principals might lead change more effectively.

Introduction: A Principaled Approach, Patricia A. Wasley, Judith Rizzo

Occasional Paper Series

This introduction highlights the collaboration between Bank Street College and the New York City Board of Education who developed an approach to preparing principals that has proved highly effective. Wasley and Rizzo briefly describe the program's history and its evolution, and concludes by analyzing why it has worked so well and what they would do to further strengthen the approach.

Historical Perspectives On Large Schools In America, Robert L. Hampel

Occasional Paper Series

Hampel evaluates the large school versus small school debate from a historical perspective. Until the 1970's, the small school was seen as the problem, not the answer. This essay will look at five beliefs, each firmly held for a long time by most educators.

“It’S Non-Existent”: Haunting In Trans Youth Narratives About Naming, Julia Sinclair-Palm

Occasional Paper Series

Often, choosing a name is one of the first ways trans people begin to assume a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Stories about the process of choosing a name reveal how trans youth negotiate their relationship with their old name and their emerging sense of identity. Working with Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (2008), I explore the ghostly ways birth names remain in the lives of trans youth. Gordon’s concept of ghosts presents an opportunity to think about how trans youth experience their birth name and the complex ways trans youth negotiate their identity at school.