Welcome!

Welcome to my blog!

This blog is to document the next year of my life. In June, I began an urban teacher residency, one of the newest strategies for preparing post-undergraduate adults to teach in high-poverty schools. The purpose of blogging about my experiences is two-fold. First, I hope it will serve as a kind of diary (hence the name!) chronicling my experiences throughout the year. Second, I hope it can be of some help to people, especially people considering an urban residency or deciding how to get a teaching license.

Now, at this point, you might be asking, "What exactly is an urban teacher residency?" You can read all about it and find out which cities have residencies here, but I'll summarize it for you. It's nothing like a traditional teacher prep program. Urban teacher residencies (UTRs) recruit recent college graduates and career changers who want to make a career out of teaching in a high need area in their city. The process is extremely competitive, often having a 10-15% acceptance rate. Applicants are required to have good academic records, work experience, experience with kids and/or high poverty communities and/or minorities, and a burning desire to improve education for high-poverty inner-city kids. Usually applicants are only admitted to teach in high-need areas, like ESL, special education, and secondary math and science. The programs were originally modeled after the residency system in medical school. While residents take graduate classes for a master's in education, they work as residents under a mentor teacher in a high-poverty classroom in their field. Over the course of the year, they gradually take on more teaching responsibilities under the guidance of their mentor and UTR staff. After the first year, residents obtain their teaching license and master's degree, and are hired to teach as regular teachers. Sometimes, residents receive a living stipend during their residency year. They commit to teach in high-poverty schools for three or four years after the residency year, and in exchange get some of the cost of the master's degree paid back as they fulfill their commitment.

UTRs are very unique. Unlike traditional undergrad programs, they require their residents to have extensive life and work experience. Residents also spend a full year training, as opposed to traditional student teaching, which is only a semester. Unlike Teach for America and many teaching fellows programs, residents begin teaching with a traditional license, not an emergency or alternative license. UTRs also have a much longer commitment, 4-5 years instead of two. And UTRs specifically recruit people who want to be career teachers.

Over the next few days, I'll be talking about why I decided to do this program and commenting about my experiences so far. In late August, school will start and hopefully I'll have plenty of interesting things to share.

Before I sign off, an important disclaimer: This blog is entirely anonymous. At times, that means I'll need to be intentionally vague or change certain facts, including names and locations. Although this is inconvenient, I think it is necessary and important to protect both my job security and the identities of the people I'm working with and for. Although I don't plan on hating this program (in fact I plan on absolutely loving it!) there may be times when I need to speak critically about certain aspects of the program and the school system. My anonymity will allow me to do that safely. Hopefully this blog can contribute positively to the discussions surrounding how best to improve or 'fix' education in the US.