Dive Brief:
- The Relay Graduate School of Education offers a one-year teaching certificate program and a two-year, part-time master’s degree program, and it has attracted a growing base of prospective teachers and administrators who are far more diverse than traditional programs.
- NPR reports the Relay model focuses on practice, giving students experience in classrooms and drilling classroom management techniques through intensive coaching while also asking them to master content area expertise.
- While the Obama administration is among the supporters of the Relay residency approach, which requires students to show evidence of effectiveness in classrooms before getting their degrees, critics say there is room to question the level of effectiveness and whether it is actually a superior program to traditional teacher prep, or simply a program that focuses on other areas.
Dive Insight:
Teacher preparation programs have been blamed for sending teachers into classrooms unprepared. Residency programs have been highlighted as particularly good alternatives because they give students more supported classroom experience before expecting them to lead their own rooms. While this indicates longer teacher preparation programs would offer better preparation, many alternative routes to teacher certification are shorter, which means other elements of traditional teacher prep are cut.
New teacher preparation regulations handed down by the Obama administration aim to improve the field by creating new reporting requirements to measure effectiveness of teacher prep programs and encourage continuous improvement. These new requirements could create a clearer picture of what programs are preparing the best teachers.