[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:15] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Our guest today is Dr. Diana Turk, Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning and Director of Teacher Education at NYU Steinhardt’s School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Welcome, Diana.
[00:00:27] Diana T: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Jon and Amy. I’m looking forward to being here and to our conversation today. It’s a pleasure.
[00:00:34] Amy H-L: Would you agree with the idea that schools are subversive or should be?
[00:00:38] Diana T: I would agree with the idea that schools should be subversive. Are they? Often not. Unfortunately, the model of education that we have dates back to a time when education purposely was designed to separate those who would lead and manage versus those who would learn to follow instructions and engage in rote work. And so a lot of our model of education is designed to produce students who pay attention, who can comply, who can sit for long periods of time calmly. We often exclude or send out those who need to move their bodies more often and those who ask questions. A lot of American education is designed to produce complacency, not the critical thinking that we say we want.
So yes, it is fundamentally subversive to educate all students, and by that I mean Black and brown students. I mean the students who are in underserved schools. I mean the students who are in schools that have trouble retaining teachers or hiring teachers. All students need to learn how to ask questions, how to challenge what they’re told is fact, how to use evidence to to build arguments, and how to become fundamentally, I would say, active players in civic and justice-oriented processes that they can help shape the world around them rather than have the world shape them.
[00:02:28] Jon M: Could you describe the NYU teacher residency program and what makes it different from other teacher education programs?
[00:02:35] Diana T: Early on, the faculty who came together to design this program, we decided that we wanted to forefront the time our aspiring teachers spent in schools rather than to forefront the time they spent in a university classroom. In a traditional teacher prep program, very often those who are learning to teach go out to nearby schools and then they must rush back to campus to get to class on time. We wanted to turn that upside down right from the start. So we said, you know what, we are going to make our coursework at night and online. And the faculty, there was a bit of an adjustment for those of us who were used to teaching in person. And really, this was before the pandemic. So we, we did not know whether we would be able to build relationships with our students that were the kinds of relationships we needed to build in order to know them, understand them and kind of learn, you know, who they were and what, what they were thinking, what they were doing. But the faculty, we took what I think what at the time was a pretty big leap and said, you know what, we want to forefront the time our residents spend in schools so that they will be in schools full time.
We timed the start of the program. The residency starts in the beginning of July. So they have a couple of months to sort of think about who they are and what is it that they’re coming into this field to do. Why do they want to be teachers? They have time to learn about the communities in which they’re going to teach. They have time to physically do community walks, to learn about all the resources and the personnel and the, you know, who their students are, and then they get to start school and be in school full time throughout the year. So they’re never rushing back to NYU campus. And in fact, for most of our residents, the only time they come to NYU is at graduation at the end of the year. So that’s one way that the program is very different.
A second way is that they’re being paid. So in many cases, we are able to attract early career changers. We do have many enrolled students who are coming right from undergrad. We have a significant number of students who are getting their master’s degree after having been in another field, even for many years. Every year we enroll people who are in their fifties and even sixties who have decided that they want to be teachers and they can do this because they’re going to be paid. They’re going to be able to have health insurance and they’re still getting benefits. And that’s a really important thing that we have to talk about, because in very few fields do we ask somebody to learn how to do the craft of the field and then not pay them, require them to pay and to go into debt and then make the salaries that we pay teachers. So it’s really important that we both have our partner schools pay, towards the tuition. They pay tuition stipends for each of our residents. NYU does a very nice job of financial aid for our residents. We seek as many private grants and funds as possible to support the tuition of our students, but they’re also being paid by their districts and charter networks in exchange for a promise to stay and teach for at least two years. So that’s a really important difference.
All of our schools receive Title I funding, meaning that they are schools where a large percentage of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch, and they are schools that desperately need qualified teachers. So having our residents spend their years learning to teach in the exact environments where they will continue to teach is the best way to help make them part of the community.
They will continue to work with the same students in the following year. In many cases, if they’ve been given an advisory group in their 1st year, they’ll have those students in the year that they’re residents, they’ll have those same students as in their advisory of their first year of teaching, which actually is their second year in the school. So they’re building relationships and in a lot of ways, that’s another difference. Rather than having students go to a school just for, you know, a seven or 14 week, brief internship where they can’t really become part of the school community, in our case, our residents are big parts of the school community.
And then I want to talk about the support model. And I will send you a document that you can share that lays this out. But if we think of the resident in the center of almost a bullseye, they are at the very center. And that first ring around them are those who are on the ground with them in their school community; their mentor teacher, their site lead, which is who is the person in their district or charter network who’s going to oversee and support all of the residents who are there, and their teaching mentor who’s in their field and has at least three years of experience is there to support them and the other residents from NYU who are also in that district or charter network. And then, and this is a really important way that NYU’s residency is different than pretty much any other model that we’ve come across, we have an NYU faculty member on the ground, even in our remote locations. There’s an NYU faculty member in Syracuse, New York. There’s an NYU faculty member in Rochester, New York. There’s an NYU faculty member in Washington, D. C. Wherever we have a site, we have an NYU faculty member on the ground. And that person is going into the school on a very regular basis for the first month or two. It’s weekly. They are coming into the school and they are supporting not just the resident, but also the dyad of the resident and the mentor teacher, as well as the whole school community, they’re getting to know the administration. They’re getting to know other faculty. They’re getting to know the students. And that person then is able to coach and mentor and guide the resident in a really different way than someone who just comes in three times a semester, which is the more standard student teaching supervision model. In most cases, that person is just coming in three times, and it’s mostly evaluative, where our residency directors, those faculty members on the ground, their job is not to evaluate, but instead to coach and mentor.
And so the emphasis is on using our learning to teach framework, which is very embedded in equity, justice and inclusion. To use that framework to coach, guide, and mentor our residents to not only be more effective teachers, but to be more effective equity-centered and justice-centered teachers.
[00:10:12] Amy H-L: How do the content mentors infuse the entire curriculum with justice and equity ideas?
[00:10:20] Diana T: Yeah, that’s essential to who we are and what we do. And I would say that question of the curriculum and the extent to which the curriculum is focused around justice and equity and inclusiveness and a broad understanding of our role as stewards on this planet and not as owners of this planet, that’s the role of the content mentor. And we really do challenge the content mentors to ensure that the curriculum in science or social studies or ELA or math is centered around questions of equity. So when you are thinking about a math problem, it’s essential to ask our residents and then teach them to ask their students math questions that bring in the question of equity, bring in the question of justice. So you can use math to think about pollution. You can use math to think about space. You can use math to think about access to resources. You can use math to think about access and inclusion. You can use, and we do ask our science content mentor, again, to think about the role of the river and how they can use the community to teach science to the students anywhere they are in the country. They can think about the space of the river, the history of the river, the levels of pollution of the river. They can think about the animals and plants in the river, and in ways that focus on making the world a better place. And using the resources that are available to improve the lives of the community, of the students, of their families, and of the non human animals around them.
[00:12:16] Jon M: How is the curriculum responsive to input from the school communities?
[00:12:20] Diana T: So one of the things that happens is because our residency directors spend so much time in the schools, right, they’re going in every week or every other week, and they’re not just going in to observe the residents, but instead are spending time in the schools. They’re really aware of when the students, when the, when the pupils of the school are talking about different topics or experiencing different topics, and they’re really aware of the communities and the kinds of questions that the communities are asking. So one of the topics that has come up time and again is where are the grocery stores? A lot of the time they’re not in the communities where our schools are located. And so the students in those communities and the teachers don’t have access maybe to fresh produce and fresh fruit. You know, these are the kinds of questions the residency directors bring back and the content mentors can say, how can we turn this into a curriculum topic? Or very often in schools, you know, somebody might be part of a lesson, a history lesson, where they’re thinking about, okay, how can we teach this topic in a more equitable way? How can we bring in additional resources so that we’re bringing and modeling to our residents so that they bring and model to their students?
And we are using the residency directors who are on the ground, the content mentors, who are meeting weekly in their content groups and talking about the kinds of questions that come up, what are the science questions that come up in the Bronx and how are those different than the kinds of questions that come up in Rochester? What are the history-based questions that are coming up in Syracuse and how are those different than the questions that come up in Palm Beach? These are the kinds of topics that we talk about. You know, the, the residents are talking about them. The faculty are talking about them. Small groups of content mentors are talking about them. And at the leadership level of NYU, our residency leadership, we’re talking about these. And as I said, we are constantly revising and iterating everything we do, so the content mentor curriculum for science will look totally different one year than it did the preceding year because it may be that the science residents are thinking about climate change more and more. Their students are needing to talk about climate change and so that’s the job of the science content mentor to bring more and more work in around climate change. Yeah. That’s the math residents’ challenge to say, how can I bring climate change into math? And certainly in social studies and supporting students with disabilities, social studies and ELA, we are constantly reacting and supporting around the kinds of questions that naturally come up through politics, through current events, through just what’s going on in our world. Part of being a program that’s built around iteration is being able and willing and eager to change what we do to address the needs of the learners in the classrooms that our residents support, because ultimately it’s all about the kids and helping them grow into equity- and justice-focused human beings who are good stewards of the world.
[00:15:48] Jon M: When you first became involved in teacher ed at NYU, the prospective teachers in the program were primarily white and from middle or upper middle class backgrounds. Why was it important to you to change that?
[00:15:58] Diana T: Well, first of all, every child deserves to see somebody who looks like them leading their classroom. So we can just say that flat out. Historically, white middle class women in particular have gone into teaching. It has been a profession that, that has invited women to be teachers since the time of the Republic. So we had Republican motherhood was all about white middle class women learning to be educated so they could educate their sons, right? So we’ve always had white middle class teachers. What we need are teachers who understand who the students are, understand where they’re coming from, are comfortable with the assets that the students bring to the classroom rather than thinking how they will– are comfortable using the assets the students bring, rather than coming into education to improve students to change their outlooks.
The whole “to sir with love” model, where the white middle class teacher comes in and turns everything around overnight. We know that that’s not how education works and that’s not what students need. There’s ample research showing that for a student of color, having even one teacher of color along the way changes their educational outcomes, changes when they get placed into higher level courses, whether they go to college, whether they graduate from college, so we desperately need a teaching force that looks and understands the backgrounds of the students they’ll be serving.
[00:17:46] Amy H-L: How do you recruit that force?
[00:17:48] Diana T: That’s the, was it the 64 million question? That right there is the question asked at every teacher education conference. And there are a lot of different perspectives on that. You know, Teach for America thought that one way to do that was to take highly educated, highly motivated students and ask them to spend two years in a classroom. At NYU, we believe that there is a lot to be said for taking highly educated and highly motivated college graduates and helping them become teachers, but we don’t want them to leave after two years. The research shows that you become a stronger teacher the longer you teach, and the more you have access to professional development, the more you learn and grow. So we don’t want people learning to teach backs of students and then leaving right when they’re qualified to teach.
One of the best ways to recruit a more diverse teaching force is to follow a teacher residency model, which provides those who are learning to teach with paid opportunities to learn to teach rather than simply paying tuition. For the time that they’re learning to teach, they will actually earn a salary, earn a stipend, have health insurance, and otherwise be supported by mentor teachers, by university faculty, by a whole host of people so that they can grow in, you know, we, we like to think that in a year, they’re strong enough to become at least close to effective.
Ideally, we only put an effective teacher in every classroom. And at the end of a year, research shows that those who are prepared in a really rigorous, thoughtful teacher residency model can be ready for their own classrooms, on day one, to be effective teachers.
[00:19:50] Jon M: So how do you do the outreach to the students who you want to have enter the teacher residency program? I mean, what kind of, just physically, how do you, how do you go out and find people and convince them, or urge them to, to join the program?
[00:20:07] Diana T: Universities have struggled to attract a diverse teaching force, particularly universities like NYU, which are private and have high tuition. We have struggled in the past. We give financial aid. We certainly look favorably on diverse applications. We use a holistic reading of applications, but just being able to connect with a more diverse, aspiring teacher force has been a challenge for many universities. At NYU, we have been very lucky, I will say. I know this can be a controversial topic, but we have a partner. It is a for profit partner, but they do an amazing job at some of the things that universities struggle with, like doing a very thorough nationwide, really broad recruiting effort to bring in applicants who want to become excellent teachers and who in many cases come from the communities where they ultimately want to teach. Our partner is able, in a way that we faculty at NYU would not be able to do, to send recruiters to historically Black colleges and universities. They can attend job fairs across the country. They can go to City Year gatherings. They do an excellent job of really canvassing places where there is a diversity in who is coming to learn about teaching. They do an excellent job of helping them see that at NYU, they would have a lot of financial support, a lot of faculty support ,and a very supported experience to learn to teach. They’re not being thrown into the classroom on day one as a teacher of record, but rather they are supported throughout the year of the residency.
I think one of the big things that makes a difference is that our partner, Noodle, does a really wonderful job of supporting applicants through the admissions process. And we have eight deadlines in the course of the year. So in a lot of graduate education, somebody has to know, for example, in October, November, that they are going to be applying to graduate school for the following year, because they have to meet a deadline and it’s one deadline. And if they miss that deadline, then they’re not going. But what Noodle has helped us see is that our applicants, and especially those who are not coming straight from undergrad, follow a different trajectory. Many of our applicants don’t decide until April or May that they want to become teachers. And so we have a huge applicant pool in April every year.
A lot of those are career changers or people who are currently working as aides in a school or as paras. They are supported by our admissions team to work through their application. We have them not only do a written application, but they also do an asynchronous interview. So we get to see them and hear them talk for themselves about why they want to be teachers and where they stand on questions of equity in the classroom.
And we have several opportunities. As I said, we have eight different admissions deadlines and this team of admission supporters who will help understand what is stopping an applicant along the way. So if an applicant has started an application for the teacher residency, but hasn’t finished it, somebody’s going to reach out and say, why is it that you stopped? And they might say, Oh, I’m having trouble getting my transcript. Well, now we understand why they stopped and somebody might be able to help them get their transcript rather than just saying, this person doesn’t really want to become a teacher. We know, in particular, for those who are first generation students, and the vast majority of our students are first generation graduate students, that they can get stopped. Say you went to college 20 years ago and you don’t remember any of your faculty. You might have trouble getting an academic reference. But if you can talk to an admissions counselor and somebody, can say, you missed that deadline, but there’s another deadline a month from now. And in that time, let’s think about who else you could ask to write on your behalf. Now, we’re able to get a much more diverse applicant pool, which enables us to pull together a more diverse pool of folks who are going into the next round of admissions, where they do their interviews, and now we’re able to admit and then ultimately enroll a much more diverse pool of aspiring teachers.
We do survey all of our newly enrolled students and by and large, the two or three reasons that they say they come to the NYU teacher residency is number one, because of NYU’s reputation as a highly effective justice- and equity-oriented teacher ed program. Number two, because of the support they know they’re going to get. And number three, and this is a huge one, they are going to be paid along the way.
So it’s the residency model where we are able to work with our partner schools. And they are both district schools and charter schools. We work with them so that our residents are filling roles, student-facing roles that they would otherwise be paying people to fill, but our residents are doing those roles while they’re learning to teach. And that means that they can collect a salary and receive health insurance and other benefits during that time of preparation.
[00:26:35] Amy H-L: What’s the demographic composition of the teacher residency program?
[00:26:39] Diana T: We just are starting our ninth year. And since our inception, we’ve been at least 65 percent aspiring teachers of color and for our New York City partners, we’re even higher than that. So we went from about 14 % to just shy of 70%. And that it’s not just, I mean, it’s extremely important that our residency is racially and ethnically diverse, but it’s also diverse in terms of class. So we are able because of the paid internships and because of the benefits that our residents receive, we’re able to attract those who come from lower socioeconomic brackets and are looking to teaching not as a two year stint before law school, but they’re looking to teaching as a career. And those are the people who are especially focused on becoming excellent teachers and helping really shape the lives of their students. Because in many cases, they were the students in those school districts and in the geographic areas where they’re learning to teach.
[00:27:49] Amy H-L: How many years did it take to achieve this demographic and geographic mix?
[00:27:54] Diana T: The first year we, our pilot year, we enrolled 12 students and 10 of them identified as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color. So right from the start, we realized that we were able to tap into a different population than just through the traditional NYU application and recruitment process.
I could also talk here about the GRE. So it was a decision on the part of the faculty early on that, there has never been research that ties performance on the GRE to efficacy as a teacher. That, that doesn’t exist. And in the early years of founding the teacher residency, New York state required our applicants to take the GRE and required applicants to have at least a 3.0 grade point average. Now, we know from research that the GRE can prove to be a barrier in particular to lower income and to applicants of color who tend to score lower on the GRE, but also just having to pay for the GRE can be an impediment to even applying to a school like NYU. So right from the start, although we were not able to say that we didn’t need the GRE because we do have New York State accreditation, so we had to go with New York State’s rules. What we said was that we would view the GRE as part of a more comprehensive, well-rounded application. And we signaled very clearly to applicants that we recognize that there was no correlation between performance on the GRE and eventual efficacy as a teacher. So we signal to them that we were not concerned about their performance on the GRE. We also have been very clear. The research shows that students of color and particularly first generation college students tend to come out of higher education with lower GPAs, particularly if they are not in an applied field, but in an academic, you know, what we call the pure academic fields like math or biology as opposed to one of the applied fields of engineering or something like that.
We’re facing the fact that several of our applicants of color had GPAs below 3. 0. And according to New York state, that was a problem. Now, one of the things we did was to begin to [inaudible] so all colleges and universities were allowed to create waivers for certain students. So right from the start in the teacher residency, using this holistic approach to evaluating applications, we did not hold a GPA as a central facet, but instead look to other capacities and other testaments to an applicant’s ability to become an excellent teacher.
And once we had data, we were able to see that those who came in in what we might have labeled “at risk,” and I’m putting quotes around that word simply because they had below a 3. 0 grade point average coming out of undergrad that had no correlation to their grade point averages with us or to their scores on our learning to teach framework. So they’re demonstrated efficacy as growing teachers. So we were able to take the data and send that to New York state as part of our argument. And we were not the only institution doing this. Other teacher prep programs in New York made the same argument and we finally succeeded in having New York state agree to drop the GRE as a requirement and drop the 3. 0 grade point average, which is, is really important. We just know that that punishes students who come into college, not knowing what they want to study. Maybe someone coming in thinking that they want a pre med degree, but along the way they realize they actually don’t want pre med. They want to be a science teacher, but they might have really low grades in those early years. Even for students who are kind of learning and getting acclimated to college, it punishes those who don’t do well in their first semester. And there’s no research that says that that’s what they need in order to become effective teachers.
[00:32:42] Jon M: If you do a nationwide outreach for potential students, but you don’t have schools, obviously, everywhere where potential students might be. So would they move to one of the district schools that’s involved?
[00:32:57] Diana T: Yes, and that, that was a decision we made early on. So this was one sort of point of contention with our, with our, our for profit partners. They pushed us from the start to take anybody anywhere and said that they would help us find schools and mentors anywhere across the country. We didn’t do that because we believe so strongly that the residency director, this NYU faculty member on the ground, who coaches not just the resident, but the whole community, is such an important role. They play such an important role in coaching, guiding, and mentoring. So we chose early on not to send our residents to people in Boise and three people in Missoula. Instead we said, you know what? We’re only going to send our residents to partners. And the NYU faculty have selected where we have spent time looking at their model of supporting students disabilities. We’ve looked at their model for supporting students with specified language learning needs. We’ve talked to them extensively about their, their stances around equity and justice. So the NYU faculty have chosen to partner as much as we possibly can, only with districts and networks who share our philosophy.
Now, in all cases, I would say our schools, our partners, are in progress. If they had it solved how to be both highly effective school educationwise and wholly focused around equity and justice for all learners, they probably would not need to hire teachers on a regular basis, right? And so in most cases, schools want to do better. They want to be stronger academically. They want to be more justice-oriented. They want to be more inclusive. They want to do better by their students with disabilities and their English learners. And so that’s where the NYU faculty are able to support the schools, while at the same time supporting the residents to grow and be more equitable.
[00:35:22] Jon M: You mentioned the mentor teachers are these teachers from the district.
[00:35:26] Diana T: Yes, they are teachers from the district, and in all cases, we ask the districts to bring us potential mentors and then the NYU faculty, and in particular the residency director who is assigned to that school district or charter network, works with the site lead of the district or network to help make sure the teaching mentors not only are excellent teachers, but they’re excellent teachers of adults. Not everybody who’s an excellent teacher is able to be an excellent mentor and an excellent mentor teacher. Not everybody is comfortable co teaching with a resident.
We ask our teachers to consider the residents co-teachers from the start although our residents grow in what they do, and we call that a gradual release model. So as the year goes on, they are gradually take on more and more responsibility in the classroom. We do ask them that we ask the mentors to introduce the residents on the first day as their co-teacher, so that the students, the learners see our residents as teachers in the classroom, even as they’re learning and growing into this role of being a teacher.
[00:36:44] Amy H-L: Diana, do these residents carry a full course load while they are in the classroom?
[00:36:50] Diana T: That’s a great question. And so as we decided that we wanted to forefront the learning in the classroom, the NYU faculty also decided to use a very unusual approach to the education of our teachers. We chose to use a module-based approach and to make the modules consecutive.
So our residents in the secondary program, those who are becoming teachers in middle and high school, they take 10 modules, each of about five weeks long, and they are consecutive, the content building successively with each module. In the inclusive childhood program, which is the program that prepares teachers for grades 1 through 6, they take 12 modules because it’s a dual certification program for childhood and special education. And the faculty work very, very closely to make sure that we carry through threads, we call them through threads, through every module. So the education of students with disabilities. There’s not just one module that addresses that. In fact, it goes through every single module. Rather than a traditional teacher prep program that might have a student taking , if they’re say in social studies, they might be taking a US history class, a methods class, a special education class, and a language and literacy class. Instead, in NYU’s approach, they’re going to have elements of all of those in one in one module. And we designed our modules to answer the questions that new teachers tend to ask. So the very first question is who am I and why am I here to teach? And the second module is who are my learners and where will we learn and teach? And the third module is how do I create an environment of respect and rapport in my classroom? And the fourth module is what do I teach? And the fifth is how do I teach? So these are these very basic questions that we then bring in through threads of teaching students with disabilities. We bring in equity and justice. We bring in universal design for learning. We bring in language and literacy. We bring in thinking about educational technology and it’s in every module, but always getting progressively more sophisticated. So, rather than taking four classes at once that students have to put together in their heads, they’re taking one module at once. And learning it in the kind of way that they’ll actually use it, right. It doesn’t make sense to have U.S. history be separate from social studies methods if we’re going to actually ask those who are teaching U. S. history to use the methods of teaching in their U. S. history class and to bring elements of language and literacy into that U. S. history class. A lot of the times in more traditional teacher prep, we ask the aspiring teachers to put it all together in their heads. In this case, the faculty are doing a lot of that work and we are constantly meeting to make sure that those who are teaching module three understand what was taught in module two so that we can build upon it going forward and then module 3 instructors spend a lot of time preparing the module four instructors to take on the threads and arguments and make them deeper in the next module.
[00:40:46] Amy H-L: Diana, are most of these classes, or these modules, asynchronous? Because I assume you have students in different time zones.
[00:40:54] Diana T: They’re all synchronous. When I said that the NYU faculty were really uncomfortable initially with the idea of online learning, it was because a lot of us only had seen the model of asynchronous learning and we really worried about that. So the residents every week, their module meets for a synchronous session and then each of our residents has a session with their content group. And that content group is led by an NYU faculty member called a content mentor, and they are taking whatever the module is about, say it’s about, you know, how do I teach in their content group? They’re thinking even more deeply about how the planning of teaching and the craft of teaching applies just to their content areas. So we have content sections in English and social studies and math and science.
Now all of our residents, and we had branches in California, we’ve had a branch in Arizona, we time the modules to meet in the evening. So our modules start as early as 6 p. m. or as late as 7:30. Cause there are different sections. We limit each section to 20 residents or fewer. And when they meet synchronously, everybody comes together. And we try to time it in ways that make the most sense to the residents. So we will sometimes have residents who come having just put their kids to bed. Or we’ll have a resident who is still in their classroom because for them, it’s just the end of the day. And so they’re joining the synchronous session from their classroom. In all cases, though, what we found, and we were so skeptical at first, whether we would be able to build community, what we’ve found is that, you know, when I teach in person, I’m assigned a classroom, right? I teach in room 347 in the Silver building. I don’t belong in that classroom and you don’t belong in that classroom. But when we join our synchronous sessions, either at home or from school, often we bring elements of our personal lives to the classroom. So you can see that I love plants and that becomes a big conversation for my students or somebody’s cat walks across the screen or somebody might say, I have to mute my screen right now because I’m nursing my baby, we really bring our humanness to our synchronous sessions and in many ways the cohorts become tighter knit and the relationships that we build are so close among the faculty and especially among the residents themselves.
[00:43:50] Jon M: What is the graduation rate from the program?
[00:43:53] Diana T: Yeah, so it’s, it’s extremely high. One of the critiques of online learning is that they tend to have a higher rate of dropout and they don’t have good completion rates. That’s not at all the case with us. Our completion rate has been above 92% every year and in most years it was higher than 96%. One of the things that we know about teacher residencies and this is data that’s been compiled by the National Center for Teacher Residencies (CTR) is that in a residency, because it’s full time and it’s in the schools that are targeted to be where the teachers will ultimately teach, if somebody doesn’t want to teach, they know it pretty quickly. If you’re just doing student teaching for three or four hours a day, you might say to yourself, you know what? I’m just going to get through this program. I’ll be fine. And then I’ll just go do something else when I’m done. If you’re spending a full day in a school, say a middle school in Harlem, and you don’t think that you want to ultimately work with middle schoolers in a Title One school, you’re going to know it pretty quickly. And if you’re looking at a whole year of spending a full day in school with 12-year-olds, you might say, you know what, I don’t want to do this. So we tend to have people say very quickly, this is not the right program for me. So those who are in it, we’re really coaching them and working with them to be successful.
[00:45:23] Jon M: When we were talking before, you mentioned that you’ve modified the Danielson framework. For listeners who may not be familiar with Danielson, could you describe it and then talk about why and how you’ve modified it?
[00:45:35] Diana T: Sure, yeah. Charlotte Danielson’s framework for teaching is, I would say, the most commonly used framework throughout the United States and even the world. It’s a framework that is used not only for those who are learning to teach but also by experienced teachers. And in our first few years, we used it. There were at the time, I think, 22 components. I’m not sure how many components there are now for teachers, but we used 11 early on. And we found that as a program, we were talking so much about equity and justice and inclusion and deep, rigorous academic thinking. And yet we found it was possible for teachers to score pretty high on Danielson and not be showing equitable practices and not to be inclusive. They could score highly on some of the components where they were engaging students eagerly in the classroom, but it wasn’t rigorous academic talk. And so we spent a year as a faculty divided up, looking at a whole host, maybe a dozen other frameworks. And we came upon a framework that comes out of the University of Denver, that’s called FEET, the Framework for Effective and Equitable Teaching. In this framework, the focus on equity and justice and inclusion is embedded right in the components. So rather than looking at the way somebody manages classroom procedures, the FEET framework looks for the managing of equitable classroom procedures.
So, we ended up selecting, I think we used seven FEET components and four Danielson components in the NYU, we call it, the Learning to Teach Framework. And, you know, we like having reference to Danielson. It’s important for a lot of our partners to see overlap in the framework. They’re using in the framework we’re using, but we take a lot of time to explain to our partners why we’ve chosen the FEET components and in most cases, they agree and are eager to use our more equity and justice and inclusive components so that when we are coaching a resident and looking at how they are scoring on, you know, it’s a 4.0 scale just like Danielson. When we’re looking at whether somebody is in the basic level or whether they’re developing their practice or becoming effective as we look at the rubrics, the focus on equity and justice and inclusive practices and rigorous academic talk for all learners. All that focus on all learners is embedded right there in the FEET components and that’s been been really important to us because we all know that those things that are most important to us are those that we tend to assess. If a school says that they believe in citizenship front and center, and then they are only assessing math and literacy, then you’re smart to question whether they actually believe that citizenship is front and center. But if citizenship is part of how we’re evaluating students and whether our teachers are growing their students to be equitable in the classroom. If that’s how we’re evaluating and coaching our emerging teachers, that shows that we’re putting our money where our mouths are.
[00:49:21] Amy H-L: The program won a very prestigious award this year, the 2024 best practice in multicultural education and diversity award from the AACTE, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Have other colleges expressed interest in learning from the program?
[00:49:40] Diana T: Yes, we have had a lot of conversations and have had a lot of outreach from other schools, and our take is that there are so many schools, I mean, there’s so many schools that don’t have highly qualified equity-centered teachers that we can’t prepare all of them. And so we are, have been really happy to talk to other colleges and universities to even those who might be considered our competitors, I put quotes around that in recruiting students, we want all teachers to be well prepared and to be well prepared to be culturally sustaining and justice and equity and inclusion oriented. So we have very widely shared our materials. AACTE asked us to put together some lunch es and we did those. We have shared a lot of our materials. We share our framework. You know, we’ve shared pretty much everything widely at conferences. We are not proprietary about what we do and we also are constantly iterating what we do.
And we, as a faculty, pay close attention to the research. We are constantly conducting our own research and constantly gathering data and iterating to be ever more justice oriented and focused on how to prepare the highest quality, most dedicated teachers. So, yeah, we have been asked to share and we willingly share with anybody who is interested in what we’re doing.
[00:51:25] Amy H-L: And where in the country do you have schools?
[00:51:28] Diana T: Right now we are on the East coast. We were in San Francisco and we found that our residents really struggled to make ends meet in such an expensive city. And so we decided that if we were not really contributing to the pipeline of those who could stay and contribute to the San Francisco Unified School District, SFUSD, that it really didn’t make sense to be there.
So we were there. We were in Corona, Norco, California, and likewise, we just ended up pulling out of California because it was just too expensive for our residents. So we are all over New York City. And I think we have at least 50 charter network and district partners. We’re partnering with the New York City public schools this year for the first time, which is really exciting, but we’re also in Syracuse, a city school district in Albany, Rochester, and Washington, DC.
We have been in Palm Beach, Florida. People might think of Palm Beach as a wealthy school district, but it’s actually not. It largely brings students in from sugar plantation areas. It is a school district that has been hard to staff and we’ve done really good work there and the district has been really happy with those who have become teachers there. But now Florida is not able, the Palm Beach schools are not able to contribute any finances to a program that calls itself anti-racist. And we do, and we are justice and equity oriented, and Palm Beach is no longer allowed to partner with us due to Florida’s rules. So we sadly have pulled out of Florida as of this year.
I know, I know. It was actually, it was interesting because when the Don’t Say Gay Law was passed, we as a faculty struggled. Did we want to be there? And ultimately we decided, yes, we did want to be there because the Florida teachers need us. They need an equity centered teacher education more than ever. And so we stayed and even through the outlawing of DEI, we’ve been working with our Florida teachers on how to be equity and justice and inclusive centered while not using words that would get them into trouble. And so it’s been a lot, and we’ve been very committed to staying there. But this year, unfortunately, Palm Beach had to end the partnership.
[00:54:06] Jon M: Are there any topics that we haven’t discussed that you’d like to mention?
[00:54:09] Diana T: I’m trying to think of what I, what else I would want to say.
[00:54:14] Jon M: You mentioned integrating special education in all the modules. Is there anything that you’d particularly like to add?
[00:54:19] Diana T: So right from the start, as we designed our modules, the faculty knew that we wanted to prepare all teachers to teach all learners, and that means learners with and without classified or diagnosed disabilities. It’s really important that any teacher be able to teach all of the learners in their classrooms. And so, right from the start, we designed all of our modules to have the through thread of teaching students with disabilities and teaching language learners. So, we practice, teach, and model universal design for learning. We make sure that our residents, many of whom have documented and undocumented disabilities, we make sure that we make all of our material available in multiple ways. So they might listen to a podcast and read and also watch a video. We might have them annotate and talk, do a turn-and-talk. They are provided lots of opportunities to show their learning in multiple ways. Universal design is multiple modes of learning methods, means and opportunities to demonstrate their growing learning. The whole UDL, Universal Design for Learning approach is central to everything we do. So we worked hard to make sure that our website is accessible, that we work with our applicants to provide as accessible an experience as possible. We have welcomed many residents with disabilities, whether they disclose or not, and as faculty, we work very hard to accommodate and support any learning differences, and it is a practice of the program to make sure that the support of diverse learners is central to the DNA of everything we’re doing so that. We prepare teachers who are not only able to teach every learner, but are eager and comfortable in teaching every learner.
[00:56:39] Jon M: Thank you, Dr. Diana Turk of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Thank you so much.
[00:56:46] Amy H-L: And thank you listeners. Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, for more episodes, articles, and our new video series, What Would YOU Do? If you found this podcast worthwhile, and we hope you did, please share it with a friend or five. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops and classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, and Thread. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.