Advancing Equity and Justice in Teacher Residency Programs:
The Why and How Six Lessons Learned
We are proud of the journey we took together this year in the California Teacher Residency Lab (The Lab), whose mission is to strengthen California’s capacity to provide equity-driven, clinically rich, teacher preparation and support. The Lab’s participating partnerships accomplished many things over the course of this tremendously challenging year. Their hard work is awe-inspiring and has not gone unnoticed. California’s students, residents, mentors, and school system are better because of their work.
The recognition of teacher residency programs in California’s May Revision of the 2021 Budget is a testament to the importance and power of teacher residency programs to recruit, retain, and support educators of color.
Having been in operation for a few years now, The Lab has learned a few things about the importance of equity-driven teacher preparation and support. In a word, we’ve learned to operationalize equity. That is, to support programs in not only understanding why equity-driven teacher preparation is so important but in knowing how to engage in equity-focused work as well. We share this with you in hopes that you too will support Teacher Residency Grant partnerships, thus creating the basis for clinically rich equity-driven teacher preparation to become the norm in California.
6 LESSONS LEARNED
- Frameworks and tools that center equity support ongoing program improvement (e.g., Bele Framework; Leading for Equity; Equity Scorecard Framework, etc.) and call attention to the causes of equity gaps in outcomes and the actions needed to close them.
2. Operationalizing equity means taking responsibility to inquire into, understand, and account for the different ways students may access educational opportunities.
3. Dismantling inequitable systems necessitates intentional work on a consistent basis — quick fixes work only temporarily or for a few.
4. Recruiting, retaining and supporting educators of color means reducing the gap between what programs say they want to do to advance equity and justice, and what they actually do.
5. Collecting data and acting on it in real-time creates subtle but necessary shifts in educators’ of color sense of belonging — they feel valued, seen, and supported.
6. Attending to the social, emotional, and academic needs of residents, mentors, supervisors and university instructors is paramount to reducing the impact of racism on teaching and to enacting equity for residents of color.
