It takes a school to raise a teacher

In this ACI Journal feature article by Robert E. Lee, Director of the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline, and Barbara Radner, learn about a program designed to improve the critical issue of preparing teachers to succeed in urban schools. Read the article (pdf) .

A New Model for Teacher Preparation

Knowing that many new teachers return home to teach is an important part of the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline.  Therefore, recruiting teacher education students from high-need schools will ultimately produce more teachers for those schools.

Illinois State University currently graduates between 1,100 and 1,500 new teachers every year, yet only a handful go to Chicago to teach.  One of the reasons why such a low number choose to teach in urban settings is because they have limited experience with urban education.  This program hopes to address this shortcoming by accomplishing the following:

• Prepare teachers to live and work in urban settings.
• Recruit students from urban schools for teacher preparation and then return them home to teach.

At the heart of this new model is a very simple concept, establish a community-based facility that provides comfortable and affordable housing for interns/student teachers, overnight lodging for Illinois State University professors, classroom space for seminars and other instruction, computer/Internet instructional laboratory and space for groups with related missions to provide other services.  When this facility is constructed, it will be the first in the nation to use this model.