A new report from TNTP provides an inside look at their effort to rebuild their own pre-service teacher training from the ground up, with one goal in mind: Give new teachers the skills they need to be successful from the moment they set foot in their classrooms.
TNTP had to tackle the same problems that are holding back other preparation programs across the country-such as a lack of clarity about the skills new teachers need to be effective, and an emphasis on theory instead of practice. Their solution is a new five-week pre-service training program called Fast Start.
Fast Start differs from conventional teacher training models in three major ways:
- Focus: Fast Start focuses on four critical skills most closely linked to first-year success: delivering lessons clearly, maintaining high academic standards, maintaining high behavioral standards and maximizing instructional time.
- Practice: Like athletes or musicians, teachers need to learn by doing-but most programs spend too much time on theories about teaching. In Fast Start, teachers spend 26 hours in intensive, hands-on practice activities.
- Feedback: Every Fast Start participant benefits from 32 hours of one-on-one and group coaching to help them constantly fine-tune their use of essential instructional techniques.
TNTP is still in the early stages of this work, but they have already seen some promising results: After two years in 14 training sites across the country, they have found that teachers who performed better during Fast Start training earned higher ratings from their principals and did better on their district’s performance evaluation system. And they have learned much along the way about how to make pre-service training even more useful for new teachers.
For more information, please visit: http://tntp.org/key-issues/view/fast-start
