A Vision of Residency Programs: Collaboration, Context and Strong Teaching

National Louis University’s National College of Education (NCE) provides a range of pathways to teacher licensure and has a growing portfolio of residency programs in partnership with districts across Illinois. Its vision for residency programs includes three components: 1) context-specific design that responds to the characteristics of local candidates, districts, and communities; 2) core practices that ensure program curriculum and field experiences are aligned with high-leverage teaching practices; and 3) collaborative partnerships with districts that prioritize identifying core practices and systems of communication and feedback to program participants.

Collaborating to Support Student Enrollment

The collaborative partnership between NLU and CPS includes clearly defined roles, and this is particularly true when it comes to admission to the program. This is important because residents have to go through many steps, from filling out an interest form and submitting their college transcripts, to interviewing for a placement, being paired with a mentor, taking tests, applying to the university, and more.

Once candidates make it through the screening and interview process at CPS, they are paired with an enrollment specialist at NLU who assists them with the university application process. CPS recruiters and the enrollment staff at NLU work very closely to ensure they are providing residents with consistent information and directing their questions to the appropriate person. To that end, they hold regular meetings throughout the recruitment process and copy each other on email communication with residents to ensure they are on the same page.

Sandra Salas, enrollment specialist at NLU, helps enroll students into all of NLU’s graduate teacher education programs, but over the past two years has focused more of her time on teacher residents. She assists candidates to ensure they have all of the documentation needed for acceptance into the program (e.g., transcripts, testing requirements) and easing any concerns. Some residents had previously tried to enter a graduate level education program but were unsuccessful due to testing requirements and language barriers. “A lot of them feel like this is their one and only chance, which adds a level of stress and anxiety,” said Salas.¹ And this is why having sufficient designated support personnel is so critical to the success of these programs. Additionally, Salas noted that the majority of support staff are Latinx and speak Spanish, which helps students feel more comfortable and empowered to succeed in the program.

As one resident shared, she was initially nervous about participating in the program and being able to handle it all, but she talked with others who had been through it and “they gave me a lot of reassurance that the school was giving them the support they needed, and that the professors were understanding, and that the experience they got working in the classroom helped them a lot to put whatever they were doing in the university into practice.”²

Grounding Coursework in Context

Janet Lorch, assistant professor and residency coordinator at NLU, teaches the Teaching and Learning in Context summer course, which is one of the first classes that residents take. During one class session, she led a group of 20 teacher residents in an activity centered around how to use an asset-based approach when working with students. Residents engaged in several small-group activities focused on strategies for highlighting the strengths that students bring into the classroom. They talked through how to share their own cultures and ideas for learning about the cultures and needs of students. Lorch talked about how the predominant narrative around students of color and English learner students has largely focused on deficits and why it is important to turn that paradigm on its head.

This exemplifies the focus of NLU’s residency programs on making coursework context-specific so that teachers are armed with the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in the school community in which they will be working. Based on the work of researchers Kavita Kapida Matsko and Karen Hammerness in CPS, this approach provides aspiring teachers opportunities to build their knowledge of how “classroom, school, community, district, and federal contexts” intersect and influence teacher practice and student learning.³ As part of their initial preparation over the summer, each resident plans, researches, and goes on a community walk to learn more about the neighborhoods where their students live and the assets and resources within those communities. As one former resident reflected,

prior to starting the community walk, I was opposed to the idea and believed that it was arbitrary to walk in the community because I knew it was a neighborhood that lives in high-poverty…and because I grew up in Chicago, I only saw this area as being [a place] where people should not travel. However, as we began walking around the neighborhood…I became more willing to participate. After the community walk, I was inspired for the first day of school and ready to immerse [in the] rich culture within the community.⁴

These community walks are also part of an approach to family and community engagement that draws on the work of teacher education researcher Ken Zeichner and looks beyond school events, activities, and parent/teacher conferences to what is going on in a child’s daily life.⁵ Beyond helping residents get a strong sense of what happens outside the school walls, NLU faculty supervisors also spend time observing residents in their classrooms as they work alongside their mentor teachers. Theresa DeCicco serves a dual role in the program as both a course instructor and faculty supervisor for the residents, and as one resident shared with us, “[Theresa] was a huge asset, because not only was she our professor and our [supervisor], but she also previously worked with CPS so she understood some of the dynamics and some of the policies that we were dealing with. I think having that support helped us immensely.”⁶

The presence of faculty in schools has helped to shed light on the disconnect that can happen between what residents are being taught in their courses and the practices they are using in the classroom. Lorch told us that they “discovered challenges last year, that while maybe they were learning the SIOP [EL instructional] model, they weren’t doing any of that in their schools. We can't tell the school to do it differently—we can nudge a little bit, try to do some PD—but we can help the residents come to terms with how they can do the best they can with what they have.”⁷

Both faculty supervisors and CPS staff observed and heard from mentor teachers needing additional support around best practices for how to coach their residents. In response to that need, this year NLU developed a resident field coach position that will be working directly with mentor teachers on how to give constructive feedback to residents, including in the moment.⁸