Paid tuition and a mentor, too: Arizona program aims to support new teachers
Corrections & Clarifications: The name of Geneva Epps Mosley Middle School was misspelled in a previous version of the article.
Before she was a classroom teacher in training, Aldith McConney spent almost 15 years as a substitute teacher and a site supervisor for after-school programs in New York City.
Travis Ball was a real estate developer for two decades before he began his training to become an educator.
And Minh-Triet Dao moved to a career in Arizona classrooms after he was laid off from his nonprofit job in Los Angeles.
What they have in common: They are three members of the inaugural class of educators-in-training in Arizona’s first-ever teacher residency program.
Modeled on a medical residency, the master's degree offers subsidized tuition and years of mentorship to new educators with the hope of forestalling the lack of support and burnout that have helped feed Arizona’s dire teacher shortage. It is the first program in Arizona affiliated with the National Center for Teacher Residencies.
The program is run out of Northern Arizona University with a $5 million investment of federal COVID-19 relief funds from state schools Superintendent Kathy Hoffman's office. The two-year program offers a living stipend, a tuition-free master’s degree and a job at a partnering school district. Residents can also apply for health care coverage and child care stipends.
This first round has 24 residents, who were chosen by a selection committee after three rounds of applications, a teaching demonstration, a data analysis project and a research article discussion.
What the Arizona Teacher Residency offers
Teachers-in-training attend class at the Phoenix-area Arizona K-12 Center after school on Tuesdays and all day Fridays for the first year of the master's degree, and in the second year will conduct coursework as well as complete a thesis. Issues they are trained on include how to show students support, conduct culturally responsive observations and make lesson plans to accommodate specific student needs.
The group will have more formal access to other staff whose specific role is to offer them support: a program coordinator at each district where they are placed and ongoing mentorship in their often most difficult first years on the job.
Victoria Theisen-Homer, the director of the new Arizona Teacher Residency, said that the more teachers are supported, the more likely they are to remain in the job.
"When they do have issues and concerns, they will have been prepared through coursework, but also prepared to reach out to folks for support," she said.
They will be enrolled as master's students at NAU, and starting this fall, teach under the guidance of a veteran classroom teacher through December before moving to take over a classroom in January.
The residents have been placed in Phoenix-area classrooms in the Osborn, Roosevelt and Tempe elementary school districts at the start of the school year and are expected to commit to those districts for three years after graduating.
For some of them, it will be a continuation of a path of working in schools, but with the higher salary — and increased responsibility — that comes with being a classroom teacher. For others, it's a shift into an entirely new profession.
For Theisen-Homer, the residency is also the fruition of a long-held effort. Theisen-Homer had previously co-authored a report while a doctoral researcher at Arizona State University to gauge support statewide for a teacher residency program, and then moved to the Arizona K-12 Center, a professional development center run out of Northern Arizona University.
Now, with the heady weeks of choosing residents and getting them settled into their new schools behind her, Theisen-Homer said she is feeling increasingly hopeful about the future of teaching in Arizona.
“It’s not an easy job at all. You have to want to do it,” she said. “And those are the teachers that become the great teachers.”
A search for meaning for aspiring teachers
The inaugural members of the Arizona Teacher Residency each have taken a series of different paths to teaching, many with experience as substitute teachers or classroom aides. What they have in common is a sense of meaning they connect to working in the classroom.
Like Alyscia Etsitty, whose grandmother, mother and sister were all educators. And as a student herself, growing up on the Navajo Reservation in rural Chinle, she saw firsthand the value of having indigenous educators who could connect with students’ families and speak Navajo. They made a difference in encouraging young people to feel connected to their school.
“It does give them hope that anybody can do it,” she said. “If they see an Indigenous person successful, you know, it gives them more of a path and a kind of hope.”
She received her bachelor’s degree in early childhood multicultural education in New Mexico. Then she taught under an emergency certificate in an Arizona school before that certificate expired.
“I’m not just thrown into the classroom where it’s an either sink-or-swim kind of feeling,” said Etsitty, who will work in a fifth grade classroom at Clarendon Elementary School in the Osborn School District. “I just wish this was around sooner.”
For McConney, who came to the residency with nearly two decades of deep experience in schools and with children, the residency offers the possibility to deepen her practice as an educator and learn some of the new technology that has become a mainstay of learning.
And it's an opportunity that may not have been possible without the stipend, she said. "It's very challenging to work and go to school and be a teacher resident," she said. "Having that burden off financially is a big advantage in my learning process."
She will teach in the second grade classroom at John R. Davis Elementary School in the Roosevelt Elementary School District.
Many of the fellows had also tried their hands at online teacher certification but found it lacking without the hands-on classroom training.
Minh-Triet Dao, who will be working in a middle school social studies class at Geneva Epps Mosley Middle School in the Tempe School District, found his experience in online teacher training difficult.
“It wasn't really relevant and relatable to being in the classroom,” he said.
It didn’t stop him from pursuing the path.
His parents, both teachers in Vietnam before immigrating to Los Angeles, wanted Dao to be a math teacher. But he was drawn to social studies, as well as the opportunity to work with immigrant students like himself.
Now Dao wants to start a club called "Empowering Pacific Islander Communities," named after a nonprofit in Southern California, at the school where he is teaching. “I can empathize with the situation they are going through,” he said.
After two decades as a real estate developer, Travis Ball was drawn to teaching to do work that felt like it would affect young people and address a teacher shortage crisis he had been reading about for years. He dove into a “nerve-wracking” first experience as a substitute teacher in Peoria. But he quickly found a sense of community among staff, and a job that kept him on his toes.
In his first weeks in a middle school science class at John R. Davis School in the Roosevelt Elementary district, Ball has been surprised at how easy his mentor teacher made leading the classroom look — and touched by the clear and ongoing respect she had with students.
“I want kids to be excited about school and excited to learn,” he said. “The relationships she has developed with our students is something I really do want to cultivate.”
Chelsey Mickelson had always been drawn to working with elementary age students, and had worked at an elementary school on her university campus in Utah. But by the time she considered becoming an educator, she was too far into a health education and promotion degree to shift.
“I was an 18-year-old who thought that I knew everything,” she said, laughing now. “The intro to education classes just weren't very engaging to me.”
And when her first job out of college didn’t pay enough to cover the day care expenses of her young son, she became a stay-at-home mom. But then she knew she needed a change.
A wage gap, a more challenging landscape
Arizona’s new student teachers are entering a particularly strained education work landscape.
For much of the history of modern American education, being a classroom teacher was a path to the middle class: a secure professional job with the possibility of tenure in some districts and, for teachers with families, time off that lined up with children's school calendars.
The financial security of teaching, and the public's engagement with it, has shifted in recent years. Teacher salaries have failed to keep pace with the wages of similarly college-educated workers. In Arizona, public school teachers earn about 32% less in weekly wages than non-teacher college graduates, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.
That gap has discouraged students from entering the field and made it harder to retain educators, the researchers said.
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Teacher turnover numbers are hard to follow nationally — the federal government does not keep comprehensive data on teacher turnovers, and neither do many states.
But initial numbers from a small sample in Arizona show that the teacher shortage this year is worse than last. A temperature check of teacher vacancies in 136 school districts around the state by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association at the start of the 2022-23 school year shows the shortage has deepened this year, with 66% of the districts surveyed, or about 89 districts, saying that they had more teacher vacancies this year than last.
In Arizona, educators work in a state that has ranked consistently among the lowest in education spending. And while the top-line numbers show a jump in school funding in recent years, per-pupil funding has barely budged when inflation and student enrollment growth are factored in.
Starting teacher salaries are lower than in many other states. And while the state Legislature gave districts funding to boost average teacher pay by 20% after the 2018 #RedForEd teacher protests, that money didn’t all make it to teachers' paychecks in half of the state’s districts.
Those dynamics, coupled with the increasing political scrutiny of teachers, have helped feed the state’s dire teacher shortage.
Teacher residencies have been put forward as one possible solution.
The Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit researching education policies, has consistently put forward teacher residency as a way to attract a more diverse group of teachers to the profession, support teachers in developing high-quality learning materials and keep teachers in the classroom longer.
Theisen-Homer said that educators in Arizona need to feel a sense of purpose toward the profession, and that’s what the selection committee looked for in choosing residents.
“To help teachers feel fulfilled, even in a context that is constantly threatening them from the outside, they need support,” she said. “It’s like mission plus preparation.”
The residency, which has funding through 2024, is one part of a landscape of other efforts aimed at strengthening the new teacher pipeline and offering support and mentorship for educators already in the classroom.
The Arizona Teachers Academy, launched by Gov. Doug Ducey in 2017, is a publicly funded program that helps pay for tuition and fees for teacher hopefuls in a state university or community college. The academy is funding the tuition for the teacher residency educators.
Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton’s Teachers College works with schools to implement the Next Education Workforce model, which includes training educators toward a more collaborative working and learning environment at the school level. It is now running in 43 schools across 10 school systems in Arizona and California.
Northern Arizona University’s Institute for Native-serving Educators supports educators from Indigenous communities with ongoing professional development, most recently supported by a $1 million award from the Arizona Department of Education.
And districts are also creating their own programs. In Kyrene Elementary, the district offers a modified grow-your-own program called the Kyrene Aspiring Leaders Academy and offers a $2,000 return stipend for educators who continue to teach at the district. And for struggling teachers, the district has a mentor program.
'I am going into teaching to change lives'
Still, the teachers-in-training in the residency are preparing themselves for some of the more challenging parts of teaching.
Growing up both in a family of educators, but also in a low-income working family, Dao said he is prepared for some of the financial struggles of teaching in Arizona.
“I know that I’ll be financially struggling for a while,” he said. “I am going into teaching to change lives.”
Mickelson, who will spend this year in a fifth grade classroom at Thew Elementary in the Tempe Elementary School District, said she feels more equipped to tackle the risk of burnout because she’s coming into the field as the parent of a toddler.
“I’m really grateful to come in having a better idea of what those boundaries can and should look like for me,” she said.
But they are also excited about building the kinds of relationships that may be unique to education.
Growing up in a wealthy and heavily white community in Oregon, Mickelson had not had many opportunities to build relationships with students of color like those she now teaches.
“There’s such a good classroom community at the school I work in,” she said. “It's very clear to me that the culture for students and the culture for staff is also a family. It's just the most positive and beautiful place to spend my time.”
For Ball, turning to teaching has given him a new sense of purpose. In the coming years, Ball would like to teach a middle school history or social studies class and consider a move into education leadership. “People would ask: Do you have a 10-year plan? With this path, I definitely have possibilities of where I’d like to be in the next five years.”
Dao has seen, in multiple ways, how relationships made in school can grow.
His dad has kept in touch with students from Vietnam who too immigrated to the United States, and they recently had an in-person reunion in Southern California.
Dao learned about the residency from his former high school teacher — Theisen-Homer — whom he and a group of other students stayed in touch with over the years.
“That's the kind of relationship I strive to have with my students.”
Interested in the teacher residency program? Get details here on how to apply for next school year.
Reach the reporter at ykunichoff@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter @yanazure.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Teacher Residency program aims to support new teachers
