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Response: How Universities Are Recruiting More Teachers of Color
By Larry Ferlazzo
Response: Barbara Seidl and Cindy Gutierrez, University of Colorado Denver
Dr. Barbara Seidl, Associate Dean in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver, supports the school’s multiple teacher education pathways and has over 20 years of experience in preparing teachers for diversity.
Dr. Cindy Gutierrez, Director of the Office of Partnerships in the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver, leads the School’s extensive school and community partnership network focused on innovative clinical preparation of urban teachers:
“The NxtGEN Undergraduate Residency”
The Next Generation of Educating Diverse Teacher Project, or NxtGEN, is a unique Four Year Undergraduate Residency (4Y-UGR) teacher preparation program created through a partnership between the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) and a diverse, high-poverty urban school district, Denver Public Schools (DPS). NxtGEN is aligned with the district partner’s needs and builds upon the transformative teacher preparation agenda of the School of Education and Human Development at CU Denver.
While 15% of teachers are of color in DPS, the majority of students (79%) are of color and 36% are identified as English Language Learners (Colorado Department of Education, 2013). Additionally, like most high poverty, urban districts, DPS faces high teacher turnover each year with nearly 22% of the district’s 5000+ positions needing to be filled this coming year.
The NxtGEN 4Y-UGR aims to address these issues, creating the “next generation” of teacher education designed around the recruitment and preparation of teachers equipped to support the education of children in our highest need schools. The residency is framed by several key components. NxtGEN recruits local talent through high school, community college, and paraprofessional pipelines to bring in residents who are from the community, whose goals are to stay and work within the community and who better reflect the diversity of students in DPS. NxtGEN residents serve in newly designed, three year, district paid paraeducator internships.
These paid internships provide three years of extensive clinical experience and are a means for mitigating some of the financial barriers many first generation college students experience. Residents then participate in a full, final year residency that combines district specific curriculum with university coursework that includes an endorsement in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education. Throughout the residency, students are provided academic, social, and emotional support by the NxtGEN Student Support Center. These supports are designed around principles of cultural responsiveness and target the strengths and needs of first generation college students. Finally, NxtGEN graduates receive two years of differentiated induction within a cohort model.
The NxtGEN residency represents innovation along several lines. It takes the idea of partnering to a new level with the distribution of responsibility much more evenly distributed across the university and district. The residency also moves even further toward a clinical approach where extensive classroom experience and coursework co-mingle in a tightly integrated model of delivery. Finally, it reconceptualizes initial teacher education as the period encompassing preservice education and the first years of teaching, thus requiring that new teachers continue to receive targeted, differentiated support as they grow from beginners to accomplished teachers in their first years of teaching. This next generation of teacher education is a much-needed response to the call to prepare a more diverse teaching force for our diverse students.
At the beginning of its second year, NxtGEN has 10 graduates and 42 current students. Of this number, 31 % are of color, 20% are bilingual with 6 different languages spoken, many are first generation, and close to 50% come from the local Denver Metro community. These numbers indicate that the strategies used in NxtGEN to both recruit and support diverse, local talent are having an impact.
