Working Together in Urban Schools: How a University Teacher Education Program and Teach for America Partner to Support Alternatively Certified Teachers.

It is no secret: Teach For America (TFA) and traditional colleges of education have had strained relations over the past 20 years, as their approaches to teacher preparation are starkly distinct. TFA, as its mission, recruits recent college graduates, provides a five-week summer training, and assigns primary teaching responsibilities in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) classrooms for a two-year commitment, whereas traditional colleges of education aim to prepare lifelong teachers over the course of two-to-four-year teacher preparation programs. Since the beginning of TFA in 1989, academia has challenged the effectiveness of TFA teachers in the classroom and criticized the organization for the short-lived teacher preparation and limited time teachers are expected to stay in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Frelow, 2002; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Veilig, 2005; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). Due to the inherent differences between the traditional path to teaching certification provided by colleges of education and the alternative path to teaching certification provided by TFA, many universities find their ideologies of teacher education too disparate to reconcile. No matter one's perspective on whether these teachers should be in the classroom, over 3,700 new teachers entered urban and rural classrooms via TFA in 2008 across America. In 2008, there were nearly 390 TFA teachers teaching in Phoenix-area schools alone. The College of Teacher Education and Leadership (CTEL) at Arizona State University (ASU) embraced the opportunity to partner with TFA to tailor existing teacher preparation programs to meet the unique needs of alternatively certified teachers in urban schools. Rather than harp on the distinctions between ideologies and approaches to teacher preparation, CTEL and TFA Phoenix found common ground with the shared mission to better support urban teachers in classrooms with thousands of Arizona children. This commentary is part of a developing line of research focused on opportunities to explore partnerships between TFA and colleges of education. This line of research aims to better prepare and support alternatively certified teachers (i.e., teachers who become licensed to teach without a degree in education) in urban schools, rather than discredit TFA teachers and argue whether they should or should not be in the classroom in the first place. Our goal is to share lessons learned from our partnership, so that other institutions and non-profit organizations can form scalable models for teacher education in urban schools. To describe and reflect upon the teacher education program for TFA teachers teaching in urban schools in the Phoenix metropolitan area, we focus on one conceptually based question: How have two organizations partnered to adapt and modify an existing teacher preparation program to best support inservice urban teachers in the classroom? In order to reflect upon our support and preparation of TFA teachers in urban schools, we (a) describe the setting in which our partnership exists, (b) provide a literature review as basis for program development, (c) highlight four key program elements which form the framework for working in urban schools to prepare alternatively certified teachers, and (d) reflect upon our programmatic transformations to embed inservice teacher education in urban schools. Setting: The University and Teach For America Partnership CTEL and TFA share the responsibility ofpreparing effective teachers for the urban classrooms of Phoenix, Arizona. Similar to other alternatively certified teachers who enter the classroom without formal teacher preparation, TFA teachers enter the classroom with the minimum of an undergraduate degree in an unrelated field (e.g., sociology, economics, Spanish) and a five-week, intensive summer training on classroom management, instruction, and assessment. The crux of the teachers' professional preparation and development occurs while the teachers are already teaching in the classroom. …