A Residency Mo(ve)ment?

9.20.10 By Jesse Solomon

It’s an exhilarating time here at BTR.  We were just awarded a federal i3 grant (one of 49 winners out of roughly 1700 applicants), and we just made our match (raising an additional 20% in private funds).  The September 20th issue of Time magazine has a cover story featuring BTR.  The school year just started; our eighth cohort of Residents is working and learning alongside dedicated mentors, and nearly 300 BTR graduates are serving students throughout Boston.  Everyone is full of promise – excited about what they’re doing, eager to learn.

It’s a great moment for us.

And yet the question I keep returning to is, Will it be just a moment, or will it become a movement?

Fifteen years ago this September, I helped open the doors of a brand new charter school in Boston – part of the first class of charter schools in the state.  Like today, there was so much promise.  We had been able to assemble a great team of people and almost completely controlled the way the school ran.  In some ways, the school was a great success.  We sent all of our graduates to college, we built a competency-based system that focused on student learning outcomes, not on course inputs.  We made lots of mistakes, too: we had high attrition, we had students who still had to take remedial classes when they got to college.  There were a number of other charter schools which learned from us, both from our successes and mistakes, as they built their own schools.  The best charter schools today are far better than we were in those early years.  We were proud of the work we accomplished, but also proud to help lay the foundation for what is now referred to as the charter school movement.  If you look at charter schools today, I think there are some useful lessons for teacher residencies.  There are some great charter schools – and some great charter school networks.  There are also some bad ones, and lots of mediocre ones.  Unfortunately, the word charter is not synonymous with quality.

We don’t want that to be the case with residencies.  We are at a critical time in what I hope is a developing residency movement.  A few years ago, three early residency programs (Chicago’s Academy for Urban School Leadership, Denver’s Boettcher Teachers program, and BTR) got together to form a national organization called Urban Teacher Residency United (UTRU).  Today, there are 17 residency programs associated with UTRU.  These residencies are run by some of the best educational organizations out there – New Visions for Public Schools in New York, the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, the Denver public schools, and Aspire Public Schools, to name a few.  I have been thinking about what will allow these programs – and others – to shape a successful movement.

I hope that we can help some of the new organizations starting residencies to create better programs than the three founding residency programs.  We started UTRU, in part, to accelerate the development of new residency programs by contributing our own learnings and missteps so that others could benefit from them.  This is critical if we are to become a movement.  If each new program starts at scratch, we are not moving forward, we’re just expanding.  However, if new programs start further and further ahead of their predecessors, we have a chance to make progress.  It’s happening – but how will we ensure that it continues?

I believe that the critical issue for the movement is to focus only on quality.  For us – at BTR – that means student learning.  There is only one goal we ultimately care about, and that is the learning of our students.  For the residency movement overall, the ultimate goal should not be that some good residency programs exist.  The goal has to be that residency programs are synonymous with quality.  We need to learn from the charter school example, or the example of Professional Development Schools.  We have to hold ourselves to high standards of quality, or this moment will remain just that – a moment – and not turn into the movement we all hope it will be.

That takes hard work.  Honest learning isn’t always pretty, or easy, and it can’t be done in isolation. Residencies must not only share best practices, enabling others to learn from all of the work that’s being done across programs, they must also share worst practices.  Bob Hughes, who runs New Visions, uses the analogy of the Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) practice in medicine.  Briefly, the M&M protocol ensures that all major mistakes are discussed and analyzed by a team so that the mistake is not made again.  Regular M&M conferences are now required of all accredited medical residency programs.  [Forgive me, those of you who are in medicine, I’m sure I didn’t get that quite right].  In education, we too often take our worst mistakes and hide them, or too easily accept them as just part of the work – ensuring that we and others will not learn from them so we don’t repeat them.  We can’t continue to do so.

Will we choose to hold ourselves to the very highest public standards, even when it is not expedient to do so in the short term?  Will we continue to push ourselves and our colleagues to improve our performance dramatically?  After all, dramatic improvement is what we need.  Even the best teacher preparation programs have a long way to go before they consistently graduate highly effective teachers.  We have the opportunity to continue building upon the knowledge we’ve gained, in collaboration with the immensely dedicated and talented people who are a part of the residency movement, and to expand on the momentum that has brought us to this moment.  Our students deserve as much.