School districts and teacher preparation programs both play critical roles in setting educators up for success in the classroom. However, too often they work in isolation. By creating a partnership around shared goals, they can build a stronger, more diverse workforce–and provide a better and more equitable education experience to students.
But how should they go about building those partnerships? Partnering on Prep: A Toolkit for Building Strong District-Teacher Preparation Program Partnerships, created by Education First with the support of the Joyce Foundation, can help. It identifies strong partnerships, synthesizes lessons learned and implementation strategies, and includes a series of tools and artifacts directly from the field.
The toolkit builds on the 2016 report Ensuring High-Quality Teacher Talent, which made the case for strong, bold district-teacher preparation partnerships and provided ten recommendations for building them.
This toolkit digs deeply into each of the 10 recommendations from the original report, highlighting the work of new partnerships, articulating specific steps partners can take, and providing tools and artifacts developed by partners to support their work. The toolkit is designed primarily for districts and teacher preparation programs who want to launch new partnerships or partner more effectively with one another, but it can also be used by states, funders, technical assistance providers and others looking to strengthen teacher preparation pipelines.
A sneak peek of tools you’ll find:
- Teach Richland Residency Handbook: (Richland Parish Schools, TNTP) This handbook outlines mentor and resident responsibilities and provides guidance to mentors on how to coach adults, have difficult conversations and collect data.
- University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Clinical Practicum Syllabus: (UTRGV) This clinical practicum syllabus establishes the learning outcomes, course objectives, policies and evaluation requirement for resident teachers at UTRGV.
- US PREP’s Governance Meeting Protocol: (US PREP) This governance meeting protocol describes the purpose of governance meetings, who should attend, how frequently members should meet and topics they should cover.
For more, see the report:
and the toolkit: https://education-first.com/partnering-on-prep/?mc_cid=b48db148a6&mc_eid=36af9c46e9
