Design a New Teacher Residency
With NCTR’s help, you’ll understand and work towards implementing a high-quality teacher residency in your community.
Teacher residencies are the most comprehensive model of teacher preparation in the nation. New teacher residencies play a critical role in recruiting teacher candidates of color to the profession and in improving district and university goals around teacher diversity, impact, and innovation.
What is a Teacher Residency Program?
Programming Overview
NCTR consultants meet monthly with program leadership to provide framing for upcoming sessions and gather understanding of program context. Participants will surface challenges, collaboratively address dilemmas with input from expert and experienced consultants, and leverage the teacher residency model and wealth of NCTR data to apply learning in service of impact goals.
Programs will participate in NCTR’s curated curriculum, which includes collaborative exercises, targeted resources, promising practices from NCTR Network partners, informational videos, and facilitated learning experiences. The curriculum is delivered via consulting and during monthly learning institutes facilitated by NCTR consultants. Institutes can be delivered virtually or in person and include all partners who are contributing to the teacher residency program design.
The customized learning progression of institutes includes consulting on foundational elements of the teacher residency model:
- Partnering and Designing for Equity
- Residency Leadership
- Residency Year Experience
- Financial Sustainability
- Resident Recruitment and Selection
- Mentor Recruitment, Selection, and Support
- Training Site Recruitment, Selection and Support
- Graduate Support
The Site Visit is an annual, facilitated visit to a Network residency in which partners observe and reflect on promising practices and implementation of the teacher residency model.
NCTR collects:
- Annual data as an ongoing record of program growth. NCTR provides access to visualization and analytics from survey data, including comparisons to Network averages, which can be used to show programs’ collective and individual impact.
- Annual surveys of programs’ shareholders, including mentor teachers, teacher residents, principals, and graduates, then collects the data, presents visualizations, and supports goal-setting related to program effectiveness and teacher resident preparedness.
- NCTR’s policy and advocacy team engages lawmakers, foundations, and other education policymakers with a focus on advocacy efforts to sustain and scale the teacher residency model.
The Residency Design Academy curriculum embeds support to prepare clients to apply with their state or the federal U.S. Department of Labor to become a registered teacher apprenticeship program. As emerging programs design and prepare to launch their teacher residencies, consultants share essential information about how to align residency elements to apprenticeship requirements, so that all RDA members are eligible and prepared to apply for registered apprenticeship status by the end of the engagement, providing options for extended federal support and funding.
Annually, program leaders, educators, and advocates who work with the teacher residency programs in the NCTR Network come together for a multi-day convening to share ideas, successes, and to learn from one another in a professional learning community. During the convening, Network partners engage in hands-on working sessions to build knowledge and skills on a particular theme or topic area of critical importance. Experts from multiple areas share the latest research and promising teacher preparation practices.