There are, of course, many different pathways into the teaching profession in the United States. Some new educators study teaching for years, while others take quick courses over the summer and dive into teaching that same fall. One bright side to this piecemeal approach is that educators have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

Rojas explained why now is the perfect time for the foundation to invest in teacher training: “As a profession, we have learned so much about the best ways to support and develop teachers. There are opportunities to apply those lessons to the way we support and develop teachers before they enter their own classrooms for the first time.”

The Gates Foundation funding will help expand five different teacher prep approaches, each offering distinct routes into the teaching profession. For example, the U.S. PREP National Center, part of Texas Tech University, will help university education departments partner with local school districts. Elevate Preparation: Impact Children (EPIC), a program at the Massachusetts Department of Education, will work with the state’s 71 teacher preparation programs to provide better student teaching experiences and better data about how recent graduates are performing. Two grants will support the creation of TeacherSquared and TeachingWorks, centers that will give teacher prep programs ways to share and collaborate.

But it’s the Gates grant for the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) that I find particularly exciting. Teacher residencies are modeled after medical residencies: Teaching candidates spend their days in K-12 classrooms alongside experienced teachers, learning and receiving feedback. At Bright, we’ve been interested in the residency model’s potential for a while. Last summer, we shared a story about how it’s being used at Emporia State University in Kansas.

This is the exact kind of program Jesse Solomon wished for in 1992, when he was 23 and a brand-new teacher at a public middle school in Massachusetts. Solomon was the perfect teacher on paper: He earned his undergraduate degree in math at MIT and a master’s in math education at Harvard. But soon after he began teaching, Solomon quickly realized he needed help. What he hadn’t learned was how to manage his own classroom.

Solomon needed to teach subjects he hadn’t prepared for, like history and language arts. It was a bit like training to be a cardiologist and getting hired as a neurosurgeon. (This is surprisingly common: As many as 25 percent of middle school teachers in low-income facilities are teaching subjects they didn’t major or minor in.)

Luckily, Solomon found a veteran teacher in the classroom next door who was willing to help him. “I would go into her room before school, after school, at lunchtime, and I asked her about everything she did,” he says. She taught him strategies for building routines into his teaching practices. “She made a syllabus each week to give every kid on Monday morning with all the assignments, ideas, homework, etc.,” says Solomon. “It was one of the many things new teachers do so you can focus on the conversation and ideas.”

Thanks to persistence and a helpful mentor, Solomon learned quickly. A few years later, as a math instructor at City on a Hill Public Charter School in Boston, he watched brand-new teachers go through similar struggles. He saw that they often had impressive résumés and credentials, but they didn’t know how to teach.

“You could be this incredibly accomplished person who is accustomed to being successful—everything you’ve done in life, you’re good at—and then you get into teaching and you’re just not that good right away. You really aren’t. That’s tough for people to deal with. You see classrooms where teachers are out of control. You see that people are struggling, and kids are struggling.”

Determined to find a better way to prepare teachers for the complexities of the classroom, Solomon started Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) in 2003. Inspired by medical resident training at teaching hospitals, BTR is an intensive yearlong program that combines master’s-level coursework with lots of classroom time. Each resident is assigned to a veteran teacher for an entire year and gradually takes on more responsibilities as the year progresses.

Thirteen years later, the program year is structured pretty much the same, but now all residents get to teach in Dudley Street Elementary School, the public charter school that BTR runs, which draws from one of Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods. BTR recently took over a high school, and residents will teach there next fall. All residents receive a stipend and tuition reimbursement in exchange for committing to teach for three years in the Boston public school system.

Frank Wiburn is currently a teaching resident at BTR. He applied for BTR after spending five years working with young people in New York City through City Year. Now he’s learning to teach fourth grade alongside an experienced teacher at Dudley Street Neighborhood School. He spends four days each week in the fourth-grade classroom and takes graduate courses at BTR with his fellow residents on evenings and Fridays.

Wiburn spends much of his time watching the experienced teacher he works with and asking questions. “I try to be like a sponge as much as possible,” he says. “I think about why they did certain things, and I ask questions.” Wiburn also has opportunities to teach sections and receive feedback. This culminates in a “lead week” every fall and spring, when each resident plans and teaches all the content in one area.

While Wiburn is teaching, the experienced teacher in his classroom and, frequently, a BTR faculty member observe him. “I’ve been getting a lot of feedback since the year has begun,” he says. “What I appreciate about the feedback is that it’s coherent. I’m hearing the same things from the teacher I work with in the classroom that I’m hearing from my clinical educator, who occasionally pops into the classroom.”

Most of the country’s 250,000 new teachers each year complete a student teaching internship, typically for a semester. Although new teachers often say that student teaching is the most important part of their training, the quality of their experiences vary drastically.

A National Council on Teacher Quality study estimates that only 12 percent of teaching candidates nationwide are placed with a qualified teacher who has at least three years of experience, a proven high caliber of effectiveness in the classroom, and the insight and ability to mentor a new teacher.

In fact, it’s common for principals to place student teachers with their weakest teachers as a way to support the teachers who need help. Unfortunately, teachers who are struggling to manage their own classrooms rarely make great mentors.

These low-caliber student teaching experiences do nothing to elevate the profession. Instead, they help usher droves of underprepared teachers into the classroom.

Of course, learning the complexities of teaching isn’t easy, even with experienced teaching coaches and a classroom full of kids. BTR is still working to perfect its model. In 2011, eight years after the program’s founding, a Harvard Center for Education Policy Research study found that BTR graduates started out less effective than other new hires in some areas during their first year of teaching. But researchers did find promising results: These same residents tended to surpass other new teachers within four to five years.

Recent data from Massachusetts looks even more promising. An evaluation of the state’s teacher preparation program graduates for the 2013–14 school year found that BTR graduates were twice as likely as other Massachusetts teachers to be rated “exemplary” and half has likely to be rated as “needs improvement.” BTR graduates were also more likely to continue teaching in the Boston public school district than graduates of other programs in the state.

One reason residency program graduates might be more successful and stay in the district longer is that their programs directly prepare them for the complexities of working in low-income schools. A teacher in that position needs a different set of skills and knowledge than one in a private school, for example. Traditional teacher preparation programs rarely offer any training on working with students who are homeless or hungry, but thousands of teachers across the country encounter these students every day. Since residency programs usually train teachers directly in low-income public schools, they are uniquely positioned to prepare residents to help these students succeed.

Residency programs have also proven to be fertile grounds for research and innovation for experts in the teaching field, much like teaching hospitals are for the medical field. A few years ago, Solomon recruited Magdalene Lampert, a well-known teaching scholar, to join the faculty at BTR. Lampert began her career as a high school math teacher in Pennsylvania more than four decades ago. In the mid-1990s, she became known in the world of teacher education when videos circulated of her students at Spartan Village Elementary School in East Lansing, Michigan, debating mathematical principles.

Now Lampert is applying an approach she helped develop called “ambitious teaching” to train residents at BTR. Ambitious teaching is a set of practices teachers use to engage all students in intellectually rigorous work, ensuring that every student can both complete a task and explain their reasoning behind it. In Lampert’s words, ambitious teaching means doing “authentic, academic work — not just answer multiple-choice questions. In math, they need to do actual work on modeling, reasoning, and problem solving.”

Like Solomon, Lampert first saw a need to improve teacher education when she worked as a math teacher. This was in the 1970s.

“People were getting out of teacher education programs and not knowing how to teach,” Lampert says. “They knew how to write papers and be good college students, but they didn’t really know how to do something different from what they had experienced when they were in school. We’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated about what it means to know mathematics and what will actually enable students to solve math problems. And it’s not memorizing formulas.”

Lindsay Eldredge, a 25-year-old first-grade teacher from central Massachusetts, uses the ambitious teaching methods she learned during her recent year as a BTR resident. She originally studied elementary education as an undergraduate at Wheelock College and had her teacher’s certification when she applied for her residency. With an undergraduate degree in teaching, Eldredge said, “I could see that one student was struggling with math or another was struggling with reading, but I didn’t have the skills to change my instruction based on that information. That changed at Boston Teacher Residency.”

Since completing her residency in 2014, Eldredge has continued to teach at Dudley Street Neighborhood School. Recently, after giving her students a lesson about writing introductions to stories, she checked in with each student, asking them to explain how they chose the introductions for the stories they’d just written. She discovered that five of her 22 students needed more work, so she pulled them aside the next day for a more focused lesson. Without her training in ambitious teaching at BTR, Eldredge says, “I might have figured that most students had it and moved on to the next lesson.”

The teaching residency model is quickly gaining momentum. As Solomon began his residency program in Boston, several similar programs were starting up in both Denver and Chicago. In 2007, these programs came together and established NCTR to promote collaboration among existing teacher residency programs and help establish new ones. Today, NCTR works with more than 20 teacher residency programs.

With this new influx of funding, NCTR will train 2,500 new teachers across the country to work in high-need school districts. According to NCTR, residency programs are uniquely suited to prepare teachers for high-need school districts because residents receive training directly in the districts where they will eventually work.

The main goal of these programs is to better prepare new teachers for the complexities of the profession so that students don’t miss out on months — even years — of quality instruction while their teachers learn on the job.

“The job is really, really hard,” Solomon says. “The notion of a teacher having five classes a day, and half of the kids are below language level — we have this superhuman expectation. There aren’t these expectations in other fields, where we expect someone to accomplish in their first year what 20-year veterans can do, but somehow we expect this of teachers.”

The stakes are high: Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other factor, according to a Carnegie Corporation study. And the affects of quality teaching go far beyond report cards. Thanks to recent UNESCO and OECD studies, we know that the quality of K-12 education strongly influences the economy, poverty rates, health, and many other aspects of society.

The Gates Foundation is not alone in recognizing teacher preparation as a key leverage point for improving education. Several other foundations recently made major investments in teacher residency programs, including the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

While improving teacher training is one way to elevate the profession, Education Secretary John King and the U.S. Education Department have another idea. They recently proposed a $1 billion budget for a program called RESPECT: Best Job in the World. (RESPECT stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching.) It aims to attract teachers to low-income schools by offering higher salaries and better working conditions.

With luck, some combination of these approaches might help give the teaching profession a boost. Better training, combined with higher pay and better working conditions, could go a long way toward attracting top candidates to fill the need for great teachers. Seems worth a shot.