In this episode of The Best Of Us, we sat down with Karen Demoss, Executive Director of Prepared To Teach.

We started out discussing the barriers to high quality teacher preparation, the misconceptions in understanding student work, and the importance of seeing students struggle via local teacher preparation programs rather than just thinking about it in the classroom.

Karen then went on to share her thoughts on key considerations in designing new teacher induction programs, why co-teaching is such an effective way to grow aspiring teachers, and advice on how to maximize the impact of co-teaching.

Listen now:

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00;00;01;10
Jeremy Rogoff

Hi. I'm Jeremy Rogoff, co-founder and CEO of Kick Up and host of The Best of US podcast. On this episode, I sat down with Dr. Karen DeMoss, Executive director of Prepared to Teach. Dr. DeMoss brings a wealth and diversity of experience to her work. She has served as professor and Chair of Education at Wagner College, Director of the Institute for Urban Education at the New School National Director for Research and Evaluation at New Leaders and Faculty in Educational Leadership at the University of New Mexico.

Prepared to Teach is part of the Bank Street College of Education and partners across the country to make sure that everyone who wants to be a teacher can afford to attend a quality preparation program. In this wide ranging conversation, Karen and I discuss the barriers to high quality teacher prep, what it looks like for districts to effectively partner with prep programs, and why pairing classroom learning with clinical practice is essential for aspiring teachers to truly understand student misconceptions.

Lastly, Karen connects the principals of teacher preparation to designing high quality new teacher induction programs and talks about why co-teaching is such an effective form of learning for aspiring teachers.

00;01;19;01
Karen DeMoss

Good morning, Jeremy. It is such a pleasure to be here.

00;01;22;10
Jeremy Rogoff

I am super excited to chat with you. I really enjoyed our first conversation to prepare for this podcast and love that we get to speak with somebody who's focused on what happens before teachers get into the classroom full time, because that is such a huge part of the educator experience. So I thought we could start with the problem: what is the problem of underprepared teachers, what are the costs of that, and what are some of the barriers to high quality teacher preparation?

Because I think we all want better prepared teachers, but it's been a decades long challenge to get there. So help us understand, what are some of the problems getting in the way?

00;02;07;05
Karen DeMoss

Jeremy, that's my favorite question to answer. Pretty much why we exist is to get rid of those major barriers. But let me first start by saying I'm also excited to be speaking to the side of the house that does the work while teachers are in the classroom.

So our firm belief is that by linking these two parts of our educator ecosystem together, the pre-service and the in-service, we will have a better system.

It will happen. It is not unthinkable that we can actually fix our systemic problems. It's actually within reach. So thank you so much for having me on the show today. This problem really is one that's been hidden to us for a long time. 

I often talk about a metaphor that Heath & Heath use in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. They talk about difficult change being like trying to turn an elephant around. And if the elephant is going to turn around, three things are going to have to happen. The elephant is going to have to want to turn around. 

And that is in our minds as people in the education world: the systems. Whether you want to think of the universities or the districts or the unions, the big old things. They've got to want to turn around. 

Second thing that has to happen is the people who are riding the elephant have to know what they're doing. And we often have heard conversations, especially in the last couple of decades, that we don't have the right people on the bus or in the right seats.

So there's two theories about why we can't make this change. That either the systems — the elephant — doesn't want to turn around or the people don't know what they're doing. So those are two things that do have to happen if you want big change to happen. Our experience is systems do want to change. Just like you said, people do want to do great jobs as educators. Heath & Heath say, a third thing also has to happen.

There has to not be something blocking the path that the elephant can't get around. And that is why [Prepared to Teach] has existed for the last seven years to address. We like to say that what has been blocking the path is the cost of teacher preparation. Now that, taken at its face value, might sound like programs are too expensive, but that's actually not the case.

About two thirds of the costs of going to college are actually living expenses. So even if I go through a very inexpensive program, I still have my living expenses that I need to pay for. So the incentive, while I'm trying to get certified, to go through a fast track program is super high for the individual and totally understandable.

The universities that we work with, many of them have zero debt for graduation. Very, very high tuition discount rates. The problem is candidates still have to be able to eat and pay their rent while they're getting their certification paid for, while they're doing their studies. So our work has been trying to break down the barrier of the fact that candidates can't afford to work for free.

Most of them cannot afford to work for free. And if they can't afford to work for free, they're going to become — they’re either going to choose not to become teachers or they're going to become teachers through a program that gives them the salary of a teacher. So that means they enter the classroom, they're underprepared, they're working heroically.

If you've ever seen an alternatively-certified teacher inside a class and they are working night and day and super hard, but they are underprepared for the work. We've set them up essentially for failure. And the turnaround rate of those underprepared new teachers is so much higher than teachers who are prepared through either traditional or the better route, the residency route.

It is absolutely clear that we need to be sure everybody can afford to go through a high quality program. And that's what our program does with districts. We support districts working with their teacher preparation programs to redesign programs in partnership with their university or other teacher preparation program provider to redesign those programs so that instructional dollars and HR dollars can come to bear on the cost the candidate has to pay while they're trying to live, while they're getting their certification.

00;06;24;13
‍Jeremy Rogoff

I love that because we've spoken to Laurie Matzke, who works at the North Dakota Department of Education, and their focus has really been on making the pathways easier for paraprofessionals to get into the profession and to be able to learn how to become a teacher on the job. In this case, you're talking about a more, I think, structured and holistic path to teacher preparation, one where it's a true residency model.

Can you talk a little bit more about the role that prepared to teach plays when it comes to bringing together these different stakeholders, the districts and the higher education providers?

00;07;01;28
Karen DeMoss

Yes. So we like to see ourselves as a catalyst. So when a district says “Hey, we would like to strengthen our pipeline,” [or] “Hey, we'd like our candidates to go through these fabulous yearlong programs that we've had grant funding for, but they can't afford them without some pay. Can you help us work with our districts?” We bring together the partnerships and we talk about the principles that are behind what it looks like to have a redesigned program that both meets district instructional needs and supports the candidate in learning. 

One of the really dynamic aspects of the kind of work that our partnerships engage in is thinking about what those instructional models look like inside the classroom while someone is becoming prepared.

Those instructional models actually do support what you're doing in your classrooms this year. They serve as a super important way for mentor teachers themselves to grow in their sense of leadership in the profession. And they support student outcomes, including achievement and other things like behavior.

00;08;21;18
Jeremy Rogoff

So you focus on almost making the experience for the candidate more cohesive so that they're entering a district and entering a school where they have a better understanding of the instructional model, a better understanding of what it looks like to be successful in this particular environment. Is that a fair way to summarize it?

00;08;42;10
Karen DeMoss

That is a fair way to say some of the programs work. So what is different is if you think about undergraduate students — I mean, most undergraduate students don't say “I'm going to go to this college so I can get a job in that school district.” Most undergraduate students go because they like the football team or their best friend is going there or they got a scholarship, right?

So your undergraduate match for where somebody ultimately is going to have a job is not necessarily going to be about preparing them for an instructional approach in a certain district. In addition, you often have districts that don't really have a lot of openings. Even so, there still are some districts that don't really have annual openings. They're very stable districts. Everybody loves to work there, but they might like to have residents in their schools because of the benefits inside the school. So the instructional model is not so much learning an instructional model of a district, but being sure that the partnership has an instructional model that supports learning in the classroom for the K-12 student, the P-12 students, and also supports the residents’ learning. 

That pre-service co-teaching model has been developed from the special education co-teaching models, which have proved very effective when they are used well. There are adjustments that you can make so that a pre-service, not-yet-certified teacher can be working side by side with the certified mentor teacher in the classroom. And those don't have to be an all day every day kind of experience, but they really help the candidate become integrated into instruction, instead of observing and doing a sample lesson here or there.

So the instructional model of the district may be different from district to district, but the idea of the pre-service instructional model being integrated is more what we focus on.

00;10;36;08
Jeremy Rogoff

Got it. That's helpful. And when you think about a sample district that you would work with, because our audience is primarily district leaders, do you work nationally? Do you focus in particular regions? Who are the right types of districts that could be a good fit for partnering with Prepared to Teach?

00;10;53;18
‍Karen DeMoss

I will say any district that wants to do this work is the right fit. The question is always where resources come from for my team. Most of our work is funded to support the spread of the ideas. And so we have philanthropic funding for a lot of our existing partnerships, though we do also have contract funding.

So that’s the only limit on where we will work. As long as people are interested in this partnership and transformation about what it looks like to develop residencies. We work anywhere from South Dakota to San Diego to Albuquerque to New York, so we are all over the country nationally. And the kinds of models that work in a place like the University of South Dakota's partnership with 22 districts looks really different from the kind of work we're able to do in the state of New Mexico, where the state itself has said they want to create a community of practice to support this work across the entire state, across all of their 80 districts in 13 programs. So it varies place to place in terms of what the work looks like and how local it is. But any district can do this work with their partners.

00;12;09;00
‍Jeremy Rogoff

And one of your key levers is really promoting what best practice looks like. Even if they're not directly working with you. You promote resources on your website, you host webinars to help district leaders understand what are some of the principles and practices that they should be focused on.

00;12;29;17
‍Karen DeMoss

We're fond of saying we're trying to work ourselves out of a job. So your district constituents who want to help that move along quickly. We have lots and lots of resources on our website. They are all free. They are all also open source, so they are Creative Commons license. People can rework them, reuse them. Just with credit for where they got the original ideas from.

And then we want to support people's storytelling around what they've been able to do because sharing the story of what happens in one place helps another place be able to figure out how to do it. We're not a particularly tightly linked system, so efforts like yours through this podcast to share what's happening across are super important. We publicize a lot. We do go to a lot of conferences and we create a lot of resources that share people's stories.

00;13;24;23
‍Jeremy Rogoff

So I want to talk about stories and storytelling and drill into maybe a particular case or a district or a partnership that has worked really well. But before doing that, I think there's an important definition to make clear that you wanted to make sure we talk about, which is deep partnership, this idea of districts and higher education providers partnering with the right mindset. Can you talk a little bit about what is deep partnership and why does that matter to the work that you're doing?

00;13;51;08
‍Karen DeMoss

Yes, So our two systems were developed, of preparation and K-12 school, [they] were developed completely separately. We did not design them to work in tandem. In fact, one might even be able to take a look at some history and say there was an intentionality on the side of higher ed when it took over the normal schools to actually separate itself from anything that felt like K-12.

So there is a chasm and those are structural chasms. Also, it's an ideological chasm, but it's actually not mostly. Most of us like it when we go to schools and we like it when we go to university classrooms. We feel the similarities. We feel those connections. So the question is how can we create a system for, in particular, educator preparation?

And I did intentionally say educator there because principals are part of this ecosystem gap also. Being able to create a really strong linkage between the systems. So you're almost establishing a third space for teacher preparation that is co-created and co-shared in terms of responsibility and design and vision and whatever one wants to do around continuous improvement.

Those pieces are really in a third space in between the university, say, and the district, wherever that preparation program may happen to lie. And we work with community colleges that have both post-bacc programs. We work with regional service centers that have certification-only programs. So when I say teacher preparation, it can be in any of those systems, but the concept of the partnership is critical.

So I'm going to share one really concrete example of how when you design a partnership, you suddenly get all sorts of degrees of freedom to change what happens in teacher preparation. Today, if I'm a university and I care deeply about being sure that all of my candidates receive what they need to receive in terms of opportunity to learn the way our system is structured, I do not have any systematic way to ensure what is going to be happening in those separate classrooms they go to for their student teaching, for their clinical practice.

And so I have to be sure everything happens in my courses, in order to ensure they had the opportunity to learn. If, however, I'm suddenly in deep partnership with my district and we've had conversations about what's going on in the school, in the classroom, what can we expect our candidates to always receive? Then I can take a look at my curriculum.

I considered myself in a very dedicated teacher educator. I worked super hard on my courses so I could give my future teachers everything they could have, because teachers basically are the reason I'm where I am today. I taught the assessment class. I work really hard to try to make everything relevant and applied and authentic.

So I had all sort of stacks of real student work sets. And when we were doing the kind of work trying to help future teachers think about what my students have misconceptions about in this discipline, whether it's math or English or whatever, I would have real work sets, and I’d think “That'll do it. That's authentic.” And that question, that inquiry process, fell flat almost every semester.

And I think, “How in the world are they ever going to learn this? I just don't know what else I can do.” Once I started this work, Jeremy, it was this sort of like a hit between the eyes kind of a moment. I realized “Of course, they can't identify the misconceptions. They've never heard students talk about it, so they don't know what those misconceptions are yet.”

Occasionally a student who himself or herself had the misconception would bring that up in class— but once you have this kind of deep partnership, I, as a faculty member, am very happy to turn over the “How do you work with learning through students misconceptions and what you do about them in the real context?”

Then we as a program, I in my class and we as a program, have new space to perhaps add some more special education coursework. So perhaps that's a dual certification now or a bilingual coursework. It is this deep partnership that is the foundation for enabling all of the kind of structural shifts that can happen. And those structural shifts in partnership can also, because you now feel that more of the work is happening in the class, can facilitate the schools and districts saying, “Wow, there's super instructional benefit here and these people intend to stay in our district.”

Why don't we look at some of the ways that the $20,000 per teacher that we spend on replacing teachers every year, or maybe some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions of dollars, that the state or district is receiving in Title I or Title II dollars from the feds. How about if we think about different ways that we can restructure some of our assumed district level roles and allow this more deeply partnered person to come into our school building and be financially supported so they can spend their time learning how to do this super important job of teaching.

00;19;34;10
‍Jeremy Rogoff

Such a powerful example, the one that you gave about really understanding the misconceptions in student work and how important it is to actually have the experience of seeing students struggle and not just thinking about it in the classroom. There are certain things that just cannot be accomplished in the theory of a classroom and have to be seen and experienced through the eyes of a student teacher and ultimately through the eyes of their students.

I'm curious — there's so much in that process of creating that third space I could imagine feeling a bit abstract. Are there specific stories where you've seen that deep partnership take place and it make clear the impact that it can have for the district, for the student teacher, for the higher education institution, that brings those disparate pieces together?

00;20;31;27
‍Karen DeMoss

Absolutely. So there are many stories of parts of an entire system shift that I could share. But last year we had sort of like a whole system shift. And as a preface, while I think the individuals on both the district and the program side in that particular situation are amazing, there are individuals on both sides who are amazing all over the country.

So I want to say that I believe it is becoming easier. The ideas are more fertilized across the country. And so it's actually a little bit easier to do some of this work now than it was, say, four years ago. So that's the story of hope, even if you haven't started today, because it was pretty much a fresh start when we started a year ago with some intense design work for CNM, which is Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

We had been working for about six years with Albuquerque Public Schools, with programs out of Houston. And they had some beautiful models. APS was already supporting a one semester program for the special education candidates. The state, through some other work that we were a part of the discussions around, had just decided they were going to give $35,000 to candidates who were going through residency programs.

And so everybody knew this might happen. It did happen. And CNM said, “Let's change our program so that everybody is going through this residency full year. How do we do that?” So the process was the university, the college and the district sat together in a room for a day, and we brought some of the principles that they might want to think about. Principles such as “You will have a much stronger program design, much more ability to have that guaranteed viable experience for your candidates.”

[We asked them to] concentrate in a cluster of schools instead of all across the city with individual people, because then you can get a school-based discussion about “What are we trying to do together?” So they worked with one of the subdistricts, one of the zones in Albuquerque, and identified schools that had strong culture, but also were where the district had the highest need for strong, well-prepared staff who would not be so likely to turn over.

So that area happens to be largely Hispanic, which is the terminology largely used in in New Mexico. Many of the students’ first language is Spanish. And so the program said, “Well, if we're going to do that, it wouldn't be right to the special education students if their teachers didn't have any Spanish. So we also need to add a TESOL certification and look for bilingual candidates. How in the world are we going to do that?” So the next step was, well, if you just use your website, you're not in. So how can we think about partnering together with the zone? And they have a wonderful new halftime hire who literally is knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

And this is where people who are already in the system, so your paraprofessionals, et cetera — instead of them learning separately on the job as paras with associated coursework for a certification, they are pulling them out and letting them do the entire residency just like everybody else. So that the concept is there's really only one pathway into teaching and that is a residency, but there's multiple entry points.

So paras, totally, we want you in there. Anybody who's in food services, anybody who is leaving from health care because they're a little disenchanted or tired — they're bringing [new teachers] in through so many pathways, including, of course, through high school, direct to college. Lots of different entry points into a single pathway of the residency.

So [CNM] started doing that. And whereas in January of 2022 their program had zero applicants, in January 2023, they had 29 applicants already for their 28 positions, and they had more than doubled the numbers of [applicants] who were bilingual.

They have an almost 100% level of people who've already worked with special education students and most of them want to teach in those schools where they are doing their residency. So it is a true transformation in a single year of an entire program. And 28 people inside that one zone is a significant number of the hires that they're going to be needing in their special education positions.

So it's a very fast transformation, all because people sat down together and said, “How can we make this work? How can we change our systems to make this work?” There is one other part I'm going to add is as kind of a bonus, because I love this story and it's happened in many ways in many places. There are lots of programs that have said “Okay, a lot of this work can happen in the schools if we design tightly to make sure we're getting everything in like we want it to be for our shared sense of quality.” They decided they were going to ask all the mentor teachers about their curriculum and say “What what works, what doesn't?” They were a little hesitant. They had a couple of day retreat in the summer. They gave the syllabi. They were very happy when the mentors said, “Content's good, but it turns out the order was all wrong.” So they redesigned the order so that what was happening in the coursework more closely aligned what the mentor teachers knew they would want their candidates to have over a scaffolded period of the year.

00;27;04;28
‍Jeremy Rogoff

I'm so glad that you brought up the experience of the mentors and incorporating their voice in their feedback. That's a huge principle of ours, is to incorporate the educator voice in program design and then an ongoing implementation of that program. Can you talk a little bit more about how the voice of the educator just fits into your ethos as an organizer and into the advice that you give to those who you partner with?

00;27;30;15
‍Karen DeMoss

When we first talked, I was just so excited to hear why you started this organization and what your value set is, because we totally agree. I would say we started with a voice that has never been heard in terms of its experiences and especially financial burden while trying to become a teacher, and that is the pre-service teacher. 

We very often at the end of a program say “And so how was it?” And then we get [feedback] after the fact. Then we blame the programs themselves as opposed to thinking about why there is no linkage. Again, candidates can't afford to work for free and we don't have that deep partnership design so that we can co-design something that really works.

So we have conducted national surveys on candidates’ financial burdens. We're happy to do that kind of thing locally. Also, we've done it for the Minnesota state system and for programs across the state of Colorado, which was supportive in getting the $22,000 per year for residents, $11,000 for for just regular student teachers, to come into the system before without taking a job as a teacher and to help them be supported while they're doing their practice.

And that was a very complicated survey with a lot of hard data about how difficult it is for people to be able to live while they're doing their clinical practice, whether residency or not. And then after something like a 40 minute survey, candidates poured their hearts out because nobody's ever asked them. We heard that so many times across more than a thousand respondents across the country, “Nobody's ever asked me, and thank you for asking. Please share these stories.” So this sense of really asking people what they're experiencing in their pre-service programs, what they're experiencing as mentors and and currently cooperating teachers, and perhaps in the context of the district side, what they're experiencing as the people who are doing the induction supports being sure that that voice is there so that you can say, “Oh, wow, we had no idea, or we thought that might be an issue, but we didn't know how big it might be. Let's really focus on this piece and then once we get that piece taken care of them, then we'll return to the work that we all say we want to do together.” So that's been very central to our work, as our partnerships across the country have gotten deeper into these instructional models and co-designing them and thinking differently about the pre-service curriculum.

And then the teacher voice really becomes paramount because ultimately that mentor teacher is with that resident all day, every day during the school year. That person has a huge impact on what it's going to feel like for that new teacher in the following year, and what it's going to feel like during the program. So that person needs to inform the curriculum. That mentor person, that set of mentors, needs to — we often say not just be trained. Of course they need opportunities to learn, but they need to be part of the discussion of how what is coming forth in a training match to what I experienced last year, what I'm hoping to experience this year, and they also need to be part of the co-construction of what that instructional model for that partnership in that school looks like. To our minds, that mentor teacher is easily as important to a district's teacher leadership pool as any other kind of teacher leader.

And so thinking about how to bring that voice into a sort of an HR. trajectory of teacher development, so that being a mentor teacher is not seen as something you do for a program, but it's actually something you do for your district because we're bringing the future people for it, for your locality into who your profession, bringing them into the values that you have.

So they're critical in any partnership that has something like an advisory group has something like retreats. They must include the mentor teacher voices or they will be missing things.

00;32;12;18
‍Jeremy Rogoff

I'm nodding because we work with lots of districts across the country that are implementing new teacher induction programs, and the voice of the mentor and their impact that they have on the resident teacher on the new teacher cannot be understated. We actually had a chance to interview Tonya Dixon, who runs the new teacher induction program at Cypress Fairbanks in Texas. 800 new teachers every year. Just the amount of coordination that has to go into pairing teachers with mentors is huge. And then on top of that, getting the ongoing feedback from the mentors and the new teachers is such a Herculean task. 

I'm curious, as we bridge this into what our our partners can think about as they take on pre-service teachers and they become in-service teachers, are there any principles that those who lead new teacher induction programs can learn from the work that you're doing?

00;33;12;15
‍Karen DeMoss

Before I go to the principles, I want to share something that was a very happy outcome of the deep partnerships in Western Washington University with Ferndale School District. The effort of matching [where] student teacher[s] go every semester — it's a two-month process, practically full time for one person.

With the deep partnership, they decided to try something different. “How about if you bring over the portfolios of all the people who are ready and we'll bring the principals in and we'll read them and do matches in 2 hours?” The whole thing was done with only a couple of shifts, as opposed to the lingering number of shifts that sort of dragged everything out to the second month of the placement.

So there are some ways that deep partnership can provide real cost savings in terms of time, and it's possible that there might be some parallel ideas for new teacher induction leads. Maybe there are some ways that different sorts of participation in the conversation about the match [can be] more of a group process. I'm attracted to what happened in that place, because I know how long it takes to place people.

So with that aside, I do have some concepts of principles that might transfer to new teacher induction programs. And this has to do with the way we've built what we sometimes call a movement across the country for more and more and more and more places, doing the kinds of things that are really high impact in terms of shifting their teacher preparation mechanisms.

The first is that learning together is better learning. So create networks. Sure, you’ve got to have a point person. You're going to have a superintendent, you're going to have a director of this. But create networks and let those networks identify their goals. So if you think about a resident cohort and you think about bringing the mentors and the residents together with program leads, they can, as a network, identify goals of what they are trying to accomplish and let them make those goals public and then convene people to talk about their work towards those goals.

The conversations, I think, have been greatly undervalued. It is necessary for human beings to make sense of their worlds, and most human beings make sense through conversation. So creating the intentional space for that sort of discussion about what people are trying to do together, not only as solo people, but as a group. Like what's our district's goal on this work and and having people identify what they want to do, I think that’s super important.

00;36;10;29
‍Jeremy Rogoff

I think that's a great overall principle for how teachers should learn. It's in partnership with each other. It's processing the learning that they're having, and it's great to hear that that is the primary principle or take away you would give to those who are leading new teacher induction programs: it’s not necessarily about the design of the program itself, but it's about what is the culture you want to create around this kind of networked approach to learning simply.

So I do know that one of the things that you mentioned earlier as a particularly effective form of learning for aspiring teachers is co-teaching. Can you talk a little bit about what you have learned about co-teaching, why it's such an effective lever for growing aspiring teachers and how can people learn more about it?

00;37;04;26
‍Karen DeMoss

So Teresa Heck at the National Association for Co-Teaching out of Saint Cloud University. I'm going to quote her: “You can't co-teach if you don't co-plan.” Co-planning is probably one of the most important aspects of co-teaching for the aspiring teacher, being there in the brain of somebody who actually knows. The opportunity to do that metacognitive work in and of itself is a huge learning opportunity for the candidate. 

Instead of thinking in theory about what a good lesson looks like, that lesson is tailored for the students. It is dramatic, for both the mentor teacher and the resident, how much more learning can happen when there is an intentional instructional design that takes really good advantage of the two adults inside the room. Co-teaching could be much more effectively applied to current paraprofessional roles.

It might be a way that existing paraprofessionals are transforming some of the existing paraprofessional grow-your-own pathways [to get] your certification while you're in your job. That co-teaching model can be adapted in ways that really enhance the learning of students inside classrooms, whether in a pre-service residency or a paraprofessional of record model. Either of those ways you can bring that and make huge impacts for students. Then, because all of that good stuff has happened, my reflection is actually on student learning instead of “I don't know what happened there, I don't understand this.” [Instead, it’s] “I'm able in my reflective periods to really focus on the student learning in ways that, without that authentic instructional experience as a pre-service teacher, I just can't do that in the same kind of way with the same kind of depth.”

00;39;12;09
‍Jeremy Rogoff

I know that you have an upcoming webinar to highlight some of this work. Can you just share a little bit more about how people can learn more about that?

00;39;20;03
‍Karen DeMoss

Yeah, very excited about it. We're going to have mentor-resident pairs in one part of the panel and then another part of a panel with the program folks talking about shifts that they have needed to engage in order for this work to happen. It's an open webinar. I'm happy for anybody who wants to hang out to come and join us.

So hope to see some of you there and I think that if there is something that the folks will get out of it at a deep level, it’s what might be my kind of parting advice for district leaders, what you ask them to think about. And it's like if you take a new look at your local preparation program providers, you might see them as something as so much more than an HR pipeline. You might be able through this kind of modeling, thinking deeply about instruction in classrooms, in partnership with them, you might be able to see them as instructional partners, bringing a lot more resources to our schools — which are, as we know, doing heroic work and can always use more resources. And those resources can become aligned through those deep partnerships.

00;40;53;08
‍Jeremy Rogoff

And it has been inspiring to talk to you. I love the hopeful message that you bring that the answers are out there, that we've made a lot of progress over the past several years. I will not forget the metaphor that you shared from Heath and Heath around turning around an elephant. And I love the work to really break down the barriers to the cost and quality and partnership among everyone that's trying to do this work well, to help teachers be more successful, to stay in the classroom so that ultimately students are successful.

So I just want to thank you for joining us. Thank you for being on The Best of Us. And if people do want to learn more about you or the organization, how can they do that?

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‍Karen DeMoss

They can visit our website, or Google “prepared to teach bank street.” My email is kdemoss@bankstreet.edu. I look forward to speaking with any of your partners or potential partners and especially just want to wish everyone a wonderful day as they once again engage in their important work.

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