A university in the California Central Valley and three rural district partners designed and implemented a rural teacher residency (RTR) to address the urgent need to prepare and increase retention of qualified educators serving students in rural communities. The RTR program prioritized building partnerships through data use and continuous…

Teacher residencies offer a promising approach to enhancing the recruitment, preparation, and retention of educators by addressing barriers to entering and succeeding in the teaching profession, especially among educators of color. In this paper, we examine strategies residencies might use to overcome the obstacles faced by Black educators. We…

This article traces the political, historical, and ideological roots of the Relay Graduate School of Education. Relay represents a more current iteration of alternative teacher preparation programs and emerged from the earlier partnerships between education schools and independent alternative programs (Mungal, 2012). These programs have become…

In an era of standardized exams to support No Child Left Behind, the influence a teacher candidate has on a P-12 classroom can greatly impact the academic achievement of students. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Educators (NCATE) Blue Ribbon Panel Report (2010) suggested that teacher preparation programs and school districts need…

Learning to teach is a complex intellectual and adaptive performance act. Student engagement is the cornerstone of effective instruction. Current education reform policies, such as Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and Teacher Effectiveness…

The literature is sated with calls for more and better communication between home and school. Teachers believe that parents should be more involved, but seem at a loss as to how to make that happen, and parents often feel disconnected to their child's teacher and the school. Few would argue that it is the responsibility of classroom teachers to…

What happens when a district teacher assumes the role of university student? What happens when two instructors from two different institutions are at the helm of a single graduate-level university course? The duality of these situations is recognized in the notion of what the authors termed "instructional synergy", drawing upon synergy as both…