Everyone says practice matters; but the Match Teacher Residency provides a shining example of a rigorous, practice-permeated approach to training designed to ensure that new teachers will hit the ground running. It may serve as the uber example of Non-Traditional Teacher Prep.
As part of a year-long residency, in conjunction with practice designing and implementing rigorous classroom instruction, residents must master fundamental classroom management “moves” involving scanning and making their expectations clear. Residents learn how to receive and respond to feedback before moving on to real classroom instruction.
Here are some great materials, provided courtesy of Scott McCue, COO of Match Teacher Residency:
Advance reading for candidates from Match’s handbook on classroom management.
A video of a candidate whose first attempts at scanning requires explicit and targeted guidance from a coach.
A video of the same candidate at the end of training, when her scanning is adequate to pass the relevant portion of the high-stakes assessment used to screen for preparedness for classroom instruction.
We’d like to feature more examples of rigorous teacher prep in this “From the Field” column and we welcome submissions from teacher prep programs. Look for more discussion of what we propose makes teacher prep assignments rigorous in our next report in the “Training our future teachers” series.
