good even if i'm a little spin and welcome to another edition of focus on our focus tonight is education and specifically we're focusing on the new program at rice university which is called teach first class and on the show with me tonight is dr  and it's great having you on tonight ok glad to be and know you're very busy but we want to talk a little bit about the program and talk more about the teacher certification program and new innovative methods of residency program well in which  individuals can you know earn their their degrees to to to be teachers and make differences as teachers in the educational field but before we get into that i want to tell our audience  taught children from preschool through high school and has prepared future teachers at the undergraduate and graduate graduate levels that writer dr frey village research focuses on chiles children's mathematical thinking and has been featured in major several invitations to the white house which i'm sure will continue in the days ahead so with that said fact afraid ligo welcome to the program and let's talk a little about teach first class so what gave you the and maybe you could describe the program first ok and tell what gave you the idea for the first quest residency for sure a residency is a an opportunity for prospective teachers to begin training to be a teacher and beginning with children in classrooms from the get go so i aim this program at professionals who want to change careers they come to me and mediately i immerse them in an elementary school classroom and i basically take over their life for nine months  and in that classroom they're working with children from the first day of school all the way through spring and during that time university professors like myself are also there with them in the classroom visiting and trying to link the experiences they're having with what we know is best practices what gave me the idea is i know what other residences are doing and i'm not thrilled about some of the structure we take we take folks we have them immersed in a classroom and they're just kind of learning the how to how to teach rather than the why and that really made me a little crazy i think  we know so much about the field of education i wanted to bring that theory and that research into into play so when you think about the program so when a bit of frustration there are the residency programs in our country you know of teach teach for america and relay and these programs take really wonderful  young smart people and they prepare them to be teachers just by going in there and doing it without what i think is the needed background so i said what if we could have the best of both worlds what if we could prepare teachers being in classrooms with kids helping kids and also get the expertise from experts to help them in those situations and there then what we're looking at is the why why do we teach not just the how to do it because that's just a surface level and then you're not going to prepare teachers to have that intellectual curiosity about about children in their thinking and how to extend their thinking what if we could have all that expertise about managing classrooms but go deeper in really make a change in kids lives so it was really a reaction to why anyone can do this just go in and do it now let's really learn the theory and do it well so i wanted i wanted best of both worlds that's great a lot of times there's often said that sometimes there can be a disconnect between  how teachers are prepared and what are children or what the schools are able to give or need and i was wondering if you could really talk about that a little bit yes so traditionally what we do is we train teachers on college campuses in courses and the focus is only on the theory and we're really not understanding the realities of what teachers are facing every day in the classroom and then they go in for one semester and do a student teaching and it's kind of like fifteen weeks a little bit of a lot of rough edges and what if we had that opportunity to really understand what the needs of the classroom are the needs of the children the realities of teachers lives in this changing landscape that they're facing and at the same time then really focus on kids so instead of looking at just kind of generic this is how to teach really focusing on children's learning because i think if we put kids at the heart of it it might change some of the structures that we've had in place for decades i want to create teachers who say wait a minute this isn't working i know how kids think maybe we could change things up so i really want to create teacher leaders some reformists from the inside out so you wan career professionals people come to me they've already had they already have their bachelor's they have work experience many of them are parents and they start to understand wow schools are really important so they have all this maturity and yet they're still very idealistic and want to make a difference in the world so that's my population i recruit all right then they come to me and we work immediately with kids in classrooms and what's exciting is they're they're working side by side with the teacher and so when they finish in the spring time they are able to walk right into their own classroom and what we found is these teachers are getting hired because our regional districts are very excited about this program and they are they are the first ones looked at for employment so that's a little plug for the program because they've had this immersive intense experience ok and do they give you feedback and you reflections upon their you know experiences yes in fact  three of the residents from my first cohort are working in the very school where we're located ok so districts are excited here they're training it's like they have the entire pipeline they have  they have these teachers prepared to teach in their schools with their curriculum with their philosophy with their mission the same professional development that their teachers are getting these residents are getting so they don't skip a beat and then they're hired right in the district in that same school so it's very exciting and now now we're visiting their classrooms ok so what i do is i take the whole school and i think of it as a learning laboratory and we use the medical model of rounds we do in the structural rounds ok and so i'll go visit we've been visiting my former students classrooms and now they're getting to be the model teachers so it's really nice kind of tight feedback we've created so you slowly building the pyramid i know beth but it's a nice thing it's a nice gift and when individuals change careers obviously they have different reasons for doing do they have a concept of teaching and children and they've volunteered in schools they've been teacher aides so they kind of have that inside look ok the other half of the population has romanticized it students so they think oh it's so easy it looks so easy and they want to change lives and all that's wonderful but if they're coming from corporate the corporate sector they don't realize the emotional intensity exhausting my students are doing their in schools all day they have the graduate work that goes along with that but there's children in their lives that they're thinking about around the clock and i think that emotional intensity is how do you prepare someone for that until you do it why do people you know decide to leave their profession for a minute you second  a lot of folks realize the social responsibility of teaching and it and i see that in folks that have their own children another reason people leave is  leave their current jobs to go into teaching because they don't feel fulfilled sitting behind a desk doing the same thing over and not interacting with people i hear that a lot they want to get out there and they want to work with with people and they want to work with children i had a conversation with a prospective student just this week she's been a lawyer for decades and she has had such help with her child that she wants to pay it forward idealistic mature people who really want to make a difference so it's i feel very lucky to be working with this population they they're smart they're idealistic they keep me invigorated about why i got into one just stopping the rest of your life for nine months and financially ok so you're not earning an income you're paying to take coursework ok this is twenty one credits  at a university when you're not physically at the university but your you need to pay tuition and that's the national cost but then the lifetime cost is most likely going from  folks coming out of the corporate world are taking a salary cut overall so it's not like you're going to hit it you know strike it rich from being a third grade teacher so it truly is the non nonfinancial the psychic rewards that they're looking for a new trial i would love to change that in our culture and kind of turn our values upside down and really put teachers at the top of the pay scale that's a different what the overall cost is you know and you know the financial cost of the individual to be gauged the program like this but before we talk more about that maybe you could talk a little more about you know why does this program what is the specific innovation about this program is different from another program say like teach for america the signature difference is that you're not in a classroom alone you have professors there with you and that's the cost over all i mean so i right now i have nine residence and i have four professors ok so that's that's a nice ratio and that's an expensive ratio right ok so instead of you just go into a classroom of again nine months good luck you know maybe he'll make it where in there with you sometimes shoulder to shoulder observing kids making the invisible visible or we'll see something happen so i'm a math person maybe there's something at this mass center you're running and then i'll pull all my residents out and we'll have a two hour seminar about that topic we're breaking down the barriers between the theories over here and go do it over here the practical piece and we're doing it in the moment ok so you know we learned when you know just just in time learning  when we're working on some theories we can then run down the hall and see it in action with real kids so that's the difference you have professors in the elementary school was spending my whole weekend in elementary school wonderful it changes the way i teach and also it's a benefit to the district the district has us there for professional development informally in hallways in the faculty lunchroom we're talking theory we're talking teaching with the in service teachers as well so it's this really symbiotic collaborative the student growth objectives you know the park estimates that are so especially one that connects to a teacher's evaluation that's right and so i was wondering whether you had any thoughts innovative thoughts about how what would motivate school districts to say you know what it's a great program you guys and we like to sign on how do we do it so i mentioned that districts can if you're a host district you can prepare teachers in the way you want teachers for your district so that's one but more immediate for the classroom teacher in the fall for four days a week you're having an extra set of hands in the classroom kid that's like having you know one of one of the parents there and it can be for a really little things like i really need photocopies can you help me out right here too i'm doing so can do a read aloud can you take  over here while i do this activity over here so you have an extra pair of hands in the classroom now that goes from labor day till late december and the host teacher is not needing to mediate that experience or not they're not expected to explain the why i just have an extra pair hands so that's really great for the teacher now in january when the kids come back and that person who's been in your classroom all fall the the rough edges are gone right now you have someone who knows your kid really really well and now you have someone you can call play and co teach with not   what we advocate for is not just taking over the classroom for the new student teacher it's a shared experience so now there's two teachers in the classroom and we use that model because in the real the the benefit to the classroom teacher is in the early in the early months just an extra person in the spring time an extra person who understands the kids and what needs to happen so it's really i'm seeing it as a benefit as we prepare towards springtime testing and the high stakes at m m i meeting my s g in fact my residence are debts of student growth objectives i just want make sure your  listeners understand that here i have someone who can help me kind of really bolster kids learning and so i can meet those as geos so it's it's it's h professional can mentor a potential new teacher that are coming in and not just share the professionalism but also learn from each other that's right that's right and learn from university professors zo  were not so i'm not hired by the school district the host school district so it's very easy for me to work with teachers because i'm not evaluating them we share ideas or have you ever tried this i steal ideas from then it's as real kind of professional learning community that we've created because i'm an outsider and work very closely with these teachers so there's all this professional development back and forth and i get to reputation is growing in the education field a lot of new innovative program such as this is going on board and seems to be real good focus you know on preparing you know individuals to be the teachers of tomorrow so when you see  we talk about the vision and the purpose of the program what you see if you had your magic why haha what you see as the long term expansion of the program of teach first and the residency program and down the road i want to scale we need to get this the word out there and we need to get the small happening in other places now we are getting the word out how how to do this why it's important in fact we are invited to the white house to describe best practices we need to we need to publicize it more importantly we need to really help schools while they're helping us we need to help prepare the host teachers on how to do mentoring ok ok i can't do that right now i don't have the funds to do that but how wonderful if we had funding to develop our host teachers when they're wonderful teachers that's why we're there but they haven't been trained in how to do mentoring so that would i would wish for training our host teachers i want also to train folks like myself how to do this because it's carefully choreographed but i'm constantly improvising how do i have someone else do what i'm doing i need to create a structure i need to create curricula to help people do that i know between labor day and christmas i need this much content and i figure out where it's going to fit in but i can expect other people in the field to just jump in like that i'd like to get some support there some working on developing curricul for professors to work with teachers so i see i see a lot of challenges i see the helping the host teachers prepare i see creating  structure that is would be helpful but not too restrictive and they also say funding is a problem you know there's a will to pay for this kind of professor student ratio is expensive so  luckily i started this program with generous funding from carnegie corporation of new york and we could not have done it without their support and they understand to make change we need to start with the youngest children so of the one of the important things is that you know funding is always predicated on i'm doing the right thing and it sounds like you know we're trying to do the right thing here and hopefully they'll be recognized because it does affect you know society as a whole and is that is a good thing to do so one of things i do like to ask my guess is that we grow up and teachers are role models right for the we whether we believe it or not or ever will has taught you myself we've all been role models at some point to somebody so but my question to you is you know growing up we're still growing up but who is your who's who's been a role model to you grown up  was my science teacher and i think fell in love with biology i fell in love with learning more about it it changed my career path it changed what i've studied in life and i have to tell you that when i work with prospective teachers i always say you should contact that teacher who is a role model and i realize i never did so after thirty some years i contacted mr congo right i thank you internet i found him and told him what a difference he made in my life and hopefully through my work it's his work and all the teachers that i work with and all those children so he was he changed with life that's wonderful would like to see the the the possibility is those folks that think they could make a difference but they don't know how entrenched in my life and my job i can't go back to four years of school i want folks to see that there and look for teach first class and there's my face at my email oh guess writer and teach first class and you'll find me ok but dr judith frey voyage thank you very much for coming on the show tonight and everybody is watching if you're interested in being a teacher always want to be a teacher it is never too late it is a very hard profession is a very mentally taxing is physically taxing it is emotionally taxing but if you really appreciate the intrinsic rewards that he brings and the ability to reach to reach out to students and inform the next generation that will be taking care of us in the years to come and then please reach out to do that right university get yourself involved in the program and you know make a difference and so that's our show for tonight thank you very much for coming on thank you it's been wonderful having you here truth and until next week i'm new goldstein thank you for watching so stay healthy stay involved  active and i'll see you next week on another dish and a focus on have a good night