December 9, 2025 — The Residency Design Academy (RDA) team recently traveled to Dillon, Montana for a visit with our RDA partners at the University of Montana Western. The visit was impactful in understanding the landscape and needs of the community that the University of Montana Western serves and productive in determining partner strategy toward designing and launching a new teacher residency program.
Montana is the fourth largest state in the nation with a population half the size of Chicago. Dillon is located in the southwestern part of the state and has just under 5,000 people living there. Montana is nicknamed the “Treasure State” for its history of mining, and the RDA team found that there’s plenty of treasure still to be discovered there. The University of Montana Western’s innovation and best practices in partnership and residency year experience were unassumingly found everywhere. The university is a hub for a statewide teacher residency program and has created a sprint degree and a para-to-teaching program that have residency-based components. Our NCTR RDA team are working with the university partners to enhance and reinforce their para-to-teaching program while, at the same time, supporting their thinking on how to use their thoughtfully designed programming and deep relationships to reach their goals in extreme rural areas.
Montana is working toward being unmatched in terms of partner strategy, cohesion, reach, and tight mission-aligned teacher residency program implementation, and we are looking forward to the progress we’ll make together to reach their goals.