Kaine visits VCU's Richmond teacher program

Widad Abed saw an opening and didn’t hesitate to jump through.

The principal of Richmond’s T.C. Boushall Middle School scanned the room, saw the answer to one of her school’s perennial struggles and, just as important, the people who can help her get what she needs.

“As a principal, trying to get excellent teachers, that’s a challenge,” she said. “We need teachers who can make it happen for us.”

For nearly two hours Friday, Abed hosted Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who wanted to take a close look at a successful teacher training partnership between Virginia Commonwealth University and Richmond Public Schools.

VCU’s Richmond Teacher Residency is in its fifth year of training teachers specifically to work in some of Richmond’s toughest schools. Based on the medical school model, it gives prospective teachers an entire year of teaching side-by-side with an established teacher. It then offers three more years of professional support to make sure the residents stay prepared, engaged and employed, which isn’t always a given for new teachers in urban settings.

In a pleasant coincidence, program leaders learned the night before that they’d won a five-year, $7.5 million Teacher Quality Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education that will fund the program through the 2019-20 school year.

With a group that included VCU President Michael Rao, Christine Walther-Thomas, the dean of the VCU School of Education, and RPS Superintendent Dana T. Bedden, Abed and Kaine visited an eighth grade science class being co-taught by a VCU resident and a veteran RPS teacher, then had an hour-long conversation about teacher training.

“A program like this can be a model,” said Kaine, who has been pushing for a better national approach to training teachers, especially in career and technical education.

Residents current and former, and their coaches, then took turns talking about why the program is a good model for preparing teachers.

“I’m becoming very aware of what I’m planning and what I’m saying,” said Samantha Martin, the coach who is working with resident Christal Corery in the eighth-grade science class the group visited.

“We’re growing together,” said Corey. “We have all these minds working together. We’re learning so much from so many people.”

Jonathan Walker, a former resident who now teaches English at Elkhardt Middle, said the program gave him the organizational skills and confidence to be successful.

“My first year (after the residency), I was ready to roll,” he said. “I knew what to do.”

Greg Johnson, a resident teaching history at John Marshall High, said he was learning how to apply his knowledge in a new way.

“I was confident, but I’d never worked with students before,” said Johnson, who spent four years in the military and then four in private industry. “When I got in the classroom, it really felt natural.”

Bedden made a “shameless plug” for VCU to expand the program and, perhaps, to use it as the preferred model for teaching prospective teachers.

The residency approach, he said, is a great improvement on the more traditional model of student teaching.

“We’ve known for years that the semester intern model doesn’t work anymore,” he said.

The residency model, Abed said, does.

She has worked with four so far and hopes for more.

“When I can take the guess work out of hiring … I don’t have to spend a whole year coddling or putting things in place,” she said. “When (residents) come, they are ready.”

###