THE PROBLEM

• Research affirms that effective teaching is key to student learning -— yet teacher candidates too often are unprepared for the complexity, expectations and requirements of the teaching profession, with attrition as high as 50 percent in the first five years of teaching.  
• The resulting shortfall of effective teachers disproportionally hurts students in economically disadvantaged areas and is acute in hard-to-fill disciplines.
• Promising teacher residency models that tightly align academic preparation with classroom experience and mentoring historically have not been scalable or financially sustainable.

THE STRATEGY:  A unique coalition of New York state stakeholders has designed a pilot teacher residency program — the Classroom Academy — to advance effective teaching, student learning, and a pioneering approach to financial sustainability that can be a model for other districts, regions and states. The pilot is comprised of school districts, career and tech centers, their education unions and a public institution of higher education, all connected through a network of shared educational services. The initial pilot of the Classroom Academy is dedicated to the principles of accomplished teaching established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). It tightly aligns high-quality college academic preparation with paid two-year classroom residencies overseen by Attending Teachers. The Classroom Academy is unique in its comprehensive mix of stakeholders, National Board principles, strong assessment and evaluation component, and groundbreaking incorporation of a “shared services” model of financing. Now in its second year, the Academy seeks funding to develop a guide that does a 360 degree capture of this initiative, for the purpose of scaling and replicating the program across various contexts, in order to provide high quality educators to all students.

CLASSROOM ACADEMY OBJECTIVES

• Strengthen student learning and  teacher preparation through a sustainable teacher residency model that can be scaled across districts, regions or states;
• Improve recruitment of teacher candidates for hard-to-fill certification areas;
• Provide clinically-rich experiences for the application of graduate level learning, in extended, full-time paid placements;
• Retain high-quality educators across the career continuum and improve their instructional practices through high-quality professional learning grounded in the National Board body of knowledge;
• Rigorously and continuously evaluate the Academy’s impact on student learning and teacher preparation, and disseminate the initiative’s progress, learnings, and strategies to other schools, districts, and states.
• Engage additional districts in this fiscally sustainable teacher preparation residency model, which builds partnership, collective efficacy, and shared responsibility in a true P-20 partnership.

How does the BOCES Contract for Shared Services (CoSER) work?