January 7, 2025 — Driven by a deep understanding that collaborative design and cross-organizational relationship building are at the heart of impactful teacher preparation, Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) School of Education in Lawrenceville, Georgia launched its Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Grant Residency in 2022 in partnership with Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS). The grant residency was designed with the intention of centering the National Center for Teacher Residencies’ (NCTR) Levers for Equitable Teacher Residencies, with an emphasis on the lever Partnering and Designing for Equity. Since the residency began, GGC’s leadership team has continued to focus on strengthening their relationship with the GCPS district and school leaders, in an attempt to overcome logistical challenges and communication barriers preventing them from finding time to collaborate and work together.
The TQP Residency’s leadership team was aware from the start of gaps between college coursework and clinical experience, and the need for more effective strategies to align their vision for mentoring to the knowledge and skills GCPS mentors were bringing to the work. In both cases, improving programming called for more effective and frequent communication between the residency leadership team and GCPS. Two years into the program, the TQP Residency team is excited to report significant improvements in their ability to: (1) seek meaningful impact from a diverse range of collaborators; (2) make decisions rooted in perspectives from the communities being served; (3) mobilize support; and (4) align their mission and vision statements with the programs’ core design elements. This collaboration feels informative, supportive, and promising, as evidenced by an increase in GCPS school leader attendance at meetings from 4 to 15, and a recent designation of a line item in the GCPS annual budget for teacher resident stipends.
When asked what led to these successes, Director of Field and Clinical Experiences Dr. Anita Anderson cited the following NCTR programming:
- community learning experiences, during which the GGC team was exposed to new content and collaborated with other teacher residency leaders;
- site visits, where her team viewed teacher residencies in progress and heard about best practices;
- data provided by NCTR that demonstrated the impacts of teacher residencies nationally and prompted consideration of new forms of data her team might collect; and
- consulting focused on identifying specific steps she could take to reach more school leaders and encourage them to consider the implications of the impact data her team had been collecting since the start of the residency.
With guidance and support from the NCTR staff and leaders across the network, GGC is proud to reflect back on how they strategized to design these partnering and designing efforts and the successes this partnership is now experiencing.