A program aimed at improving teaching in urban middle schools will begin enrolling students this summer. The result of a partnership between Peabody College of education and human development and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), it is geared toward students who want to teach in Nashville public schools.
Students will attend tuition-free but will agree to teach in MNPS schools for three years after graduation. The new Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools master’s-degree program is open to recent college graduates as well as new and existing teachers.
Students will prepare to teach in upper elementary grades through eighth grade with a focus on one of three areas: literacy, mathematics or science. The program will focus on improving instruction, improving outcomes, changing assessment practices, and creating communities of reflective, committed teachers dedicated to working with their MNPS colleagues to foster systemic improvement.
“This program will provide top training for our teachers, which will directly impact classroom instruction,” says MNPS Director of Schools Jesse Register, “and it will assist in our recruitment of the country’s most talented and promising young teachers.”
Students will enter the master’s program the summer before they begin teaching in a Metro school. All will be eligible for hire by Metro because they will have already received teacher certification. The students will begin teaching in a project-affiliated MNPS school the first fall, and will complete 30 hours of course work in two years.
Peabody faculty will provide on-site coaching and mentoring. Every semester students will participate in a seminar that addresses urban issues and classroom instruction.
“We believe this program will be sufficiently distinctive, indeed innovative, that it may become a lighthouse program of its kind nationally,” says Camilla Benbow, the Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Peabody. Peabody researchers will track the progress of the program and document its creation and implementation so other universities and school districts may one day replicate it.
Find out more: www.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/mnps.xml