Profile: Chicago’s Bilingual Teacher Residency Program

This profile has been adapted from: Amaya Garcia and Roxanne Garza, Chicago’s Bilingual Teacher Residency: A Partnership to Strengthen the Teacher Pipeline (Washington DC: New America, 2019)

At the start of the 2019 school year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS)—the largest district in Illinois and the third largest in the nation—was still struggling to fill over 3 percent of its teaching positions. Of the 669 vacant spots, nearly 10 percent (64) were for bilingual positions,¹ a pressing need given that nearly one in five CPS students is an English learner (EL). Notably, Illinois has a bilingual mandate that specifies that any school enrolling more than 20 EL students who speak the same language must offer a bilingual education program, which places extra pressure on local schools to hire and retain bilingual educators.²

At the same time that CPS is trying to find innovative ways to attract new teachers and address a linguistic mismatch between students and teachers, the district is working to address a racial mismatch between students and teachers. The Latinx student population is the largest racial/ethnic minority group in CPS, making up almost half of the student population (47 percent), while Latinx teachers make up only 21 percent of the teaching workforce.

The district recognizes it is competing for talent with other districts in the state, and that talent is increasingly scarce. The Illinois State Board of Education found over a 50 percent drop in teacher candidate enrollment and completion in the state between 2010 to 2016.³ So CPS has been looking for innovative solutions.

In the summer of 2018, with support from the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR), it launched one of those solutions: a new bilingual teacher residency program. In partnership with National Louis University (NLU), the program is designed to both help address current shortages in bilingual elementary and bilingual early childhood teachers and increase the diversity of its teacher workforce.⁴ Felicia Butts, director of teacher residencies at CPS told us that, in addition to developing bilingual teachers who meet the academic needs of English learners, the program is focused on recruiting teachers who share the experiences and backgrounds of students.⁵

One way the CPS residency does this is by recruiting from within and tapping paraeducators⁶ who hold bachelor’s degrees in a non-education field and show promise and interest in becoming licensed teachers. Similar to national trends,⁷ the paraeducator workforce in CPS more closely matches the demographics of the student population than the teacher workforce. While the residency program is not solely focused on recruiting Latinx candidates, nearly 100 percent of the bilingual teacher residents are Latinx.Chicago’s bilingual teacher residency program is one promising example of how school districts are leveraging partnerships with teacher education programs to recruit, prepare, and retain bilingual teacher talent from within the local community.

A Residency Program that Fits the Needs of the District

What is a teacher residency?

The first urban teacher residency program was started in Chicago in 2001, and established the foundational elements present in the majority of urban teacher residencies today.¹³ Graduate-level residencies, like Chicago’s bilingual residency, provide individuals who have completed bachelor’s degrees in non-education fields with a pathway into teaching that provides more hands-on experience and mentorship than most traditional teacher preparation pathways. Candidates typically work in a classroom alongside a more experienced teacher for an entire school year before they take on responsibility for leading their own classroom, in the way that medical residents work alongside experienced medical practitioners before receiving their license. This on-the-job approach to teacher preparation is paired with coursework that will result in a graduate degree in education and a teaching license.¹⁴ Residencies can also be designed to offer financial, academic, and other support to encourage program persistence, completion, and retention.¹⁵

Program Features

Chicago Public Schools’ bilingual residency program was launched as a small pilot in 2018, with a cohort of 11 residents working towards their elementary education license and bilingual endorsement. In 2019, the program was expanded to include new tracks for bilingual early childhood education and early childhood special education. Currently, all of the bilingual residents are being prepared to work in Spanish-English bilingual programs, as that is the greatest area of need in CPS.

Residents work for one year alongside mentor teachers while simultaneously taking courses at NLU to earn their master’s of arts in teaching in either early childhood education (birth to grade 2) or elementary education (grades 1–6). Residents also earn their Professional Educator License (PEL), which is necessary to teach in the state. Upon completion of this first year, candidates are eligible to work as full-time teachers in CPS as they continue to take the classes necessary to receive an ESL and bilingual endorsement. All teacher residents are required to have a bachelor's degree, a 3.0 undergraduate GPA average, a passing grade on a Spanish language proficiency exam, and until recently, a passing grade on a basic skills test.¹⁶

Before receiving their final school site placement and CPS mentor teacher, candidates take summer courses five days a week at NLU’s downtown Loop campus. Once the school year starts, residents work in their CPS classrooms four days a week (M–Th) and take classes at NLU on Friday. They also receive ongoing professional development from CPS and work closely with the faculty supervisor who teaches the graduate courses and also observes residents in the field. Each resident receives discounted tuition at NLU and a $35,000 salary from CPS. Of this, $15,000 is provided as a zero-interest loan which will be paid back to the district incrementally over the course of three years. “At the very basic level, it's just a part of us trying to build some sustainability for the program model.” She added, “we can then reinvest those dollars to support residents who come in the future.”

In the second year, program graduates take five additional courses with their cohort with the goal of earning their ESL/bilingual endorsement before the start of the next school year. However, two of these courses are offered online and three follow a blended model that combines in-person meetings with online components. This blended design is due in part to the preferences of the residents, who stated emphatically that they preferred face-to-face instruction. As one resident reflected, a key strength of the courses were in-class discussions that helped enhance learning. “Even though we are all part of the bilingual residency, we all come from different perspectives and different points of view [based] on our own experiences,” she said. “And so I learned from their perspective and I was able to share mine. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions. I wasn’t afraid to share my opinion because I knew it was going to be respected and open a dialogue. Our professors allowed that to happen and we were able to learn from each other.” This type of dialogue is simply not possible through an online format, said another resident.

The program design was the result of a collaboration between CPS, NLU, and NCTR, which received a $300,000, 18-month grant from the Chicago Community Trust for consulting services and technical assistance for the design and launch. NCTR Program Director Christine Brennan Davis said NCTR assisted in three key areas:¹⁷

• Partnership and program sustainability, which included clearly defining roles and responsibilities and helping to formalize the partnership through the creation of a memorandum of understanding, providing financial modeling, and helping to map out a theory of change for the residency.
• Recruitment and selection, which included revamping a school training site and mentor recruitment and selection. NCTR helped CPS create an application process for sites, along with visiting schools to observe prospective mentor teachers and interview principals.
• Aligning coursework with clinical experience by supporting NLU and CPS to ensure that coursework is aligned with what residents are experiencing in the classroom. This included helping CPS and NLU map out co-teaching models that allow for a gradual increase of teaching responsibilities for residents and mid- and end-of-year surveys to provide implementation feedback.

Resident Recruitment, Selection, and Support

When the pilot residency program launched in 2018, a majority of the cohort was made up of current employees of CPS (as are a majority of residents in the 2019 cohort). As Benjamin Felton, executive director of teacher recruitment and equity strategy at CPS explained, “we think that the person who has been an excellent classroom assistant for the past six years is a really good bet to be an effective teacher.”¹⁸ Since the residency program is housed in the talent division at CPS, program recruiters have access to a wealth of data that allow them to target prospective candidates. For example, they can pull together a list of current non-certified staff who have a bachelor’s degree and reach out with information about the program.

When it came to recruiting prospective participants, Butts and her team were attentive to the question of how to build an equitable and accessible selection process. She said, “We put a lot of thought and design into the interview process for residents, [as well as] how to build a budget that is both sustainable and also helps to break down [financial] barriers for program entry.” To that end, the program has built-in funding support for testing, licensure, and registration costs and emergency funds to help residents who may need support purchasing books or paying their tuition.

The teacher residency program in CPS offers candidates a high level of guidance and assistance navigating a bureaucratic system. “I think one of the key levers,” Felton said, “is the relationship between the recruiter and the resident. We are supporting them through everything. First, you give us your transcripts, and then we support you to take all the tests that you need. And then we support you with matriculation into the university.”One bilingual teacher resident told us that the support offered by CPS was part of what made the program attractive. She compared the residency program with an online master’s in education program and realized that she would get more benefit from “partnering up with CPS” than doing it on her own. She noted that the residency would allow her to earn her degree in a year and put her on a faster track to increasing her salary than if she went through a traditional program that would take more time to complete.¹⁹

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 application process. CPS recruiters and the enrollment staff at NLU work closely together 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 students into all of the university’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 and eases any concerns. Some residents have previously tried to enter a graduate level education program but were unsuccessful because of 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,” Salas told us.²⁰ And this is why having sufficient designated support personnel is so critical to the success of these programs. Salas notes that the majority of support staff are Latinx and speak Spanish, which helps students feel more comfortable and empowered for success.

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 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 EL 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 Kapadia 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.²¹ As part of his or her initial preparation over the summer, each resident plans, researches, and goes on a community walk to learn more about the neighborhoods where his or her 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.²²

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.²³ 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. As one resident shared with us, she “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.”²⁴

Challenges

CPS provides one example of how districts can work with local educator preparation programs to design pathways into teaching that are designed to both meet the needs of the district and to provide Latinx teacher candidates with extensive supports to help them persist and succeed in their professional goals. The residency program is still in its early stages and, while it shows great promise, there are a few challenges that stand out.

Program Operations

CPS is a very large school system with layers of processes to navigate (e.g., hiring, benefits, etc.). The residency program has many components that must work together to create a seamless experience for residents, which makes it quite labor intensive for the staff. Felton described the operation side of the program as a “beast,” given the many moving parts that require attention: resident pay, placement, benefits, and the process of finding and supporting mentor teachers. Given the operational lift, he suggested that other districts who are thinking of starting a residency program have a good plan in place to support running it.

The bureaucratic nature of a large school system can also have implications for aspiring teachers. As the bilingual residency program seeks to broaden its pool of candidates beyond paraeducators already working in CPS schools, the support offered to help candidates navigate the process may also need to deepen. “A special education classroom assistant … [who] has been a part of CPS … is somewhat familiar with the structures,” Butts pointed out. “Imagine coming into that system for the first time, and never having [had to] enroll in benefits, or anything at all. And there's just so many moving pieces.”

Alignment Across Preparation and Practice

NLU has deep experience partnering closely with school districts across Illinois to ensure its curricula are aligned with local contexts. there is a tension in designing residency programs that both meet the needs of a district and align with evidence-based best practices taught as part of teachers’ preparation.

Scott Sullivan, an NLU faculty member who oversees a different residency program with the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL)—a partnership that has spanned 16 years and counting—told us that since candidates spend most of their time as a resident in the PreK–12 classrooms where they will ultimately work, those field experiences often trump the learning in their graduate courses.

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.”²⁵

But the strength of these partnerships varies, in part due to time and communication. To help foster alignment of expectations, program partners use a matrix that includes month-by-month expectations for the resident, mentor, and NLU faculty and field supervisors that helps provide a residency structure.

Resident Feedback

Teacher residencies are extremely demanding programs and can be all-consuming for the student. Given that reality, the supports and feedback offered to residents can be critical to ensuring their persistence in the program. When asked about how the program could be improved, one resident reflected that she would have liked for CPS to check in on each resident to ask about their experience on a regular basis. She said, “We started out as 12. Unfortunately, not everybody was able to complete the program together. We all have different things happening in our lives and just checking in and making sure personally, how’s everything going. Just because it is such an intense program. We all knew that it was going to be intense, but I think experiencing it is much different than just reading about the expectations.” She acknowledged that offering these check-ins would be challenging given the numbers of residents in the cohort.

Beyond check-ins, another resident noted that she would have appreciated more direct feedback from CPS on how she was doing in the program and how it aligned with the expectations of the district versus the expectations of NLU. This resident said, “At the end of the day, that’s who you’re going to work for, Chicago Public Schools, so for [the district] to tell you, ‘this is working well or this is working well’ [would be helpful] because what might work well for NLU might not work well [for CPS], but that’s what we learned.” Ongoing conversations with residents would help ensure clear expectations throughout the course of the program.