Before reading about MATCH Teacher Residency, please familiarize yourself with MATCH Corps. All MATCH Teacher Residents are MATCH Corps Fellows.
MATCH Corps began in 2004. Our teacher certification program was launched in the Fall of 2008.
Background
Since its inception in 2004, the MATCH Corps service year, which mostly involves tutoring, had always served as “incidental preparation” for some people to become teachers. After completing the MATCH Corps year, some would be hired directly into charter schools; others would join programs like Teach For America or New York Teaching Fellows, and others would get masters degrees from more traditional programs, like Columbia or Duke or Harvard. Based on their feedback, we realized that we had the opportunity to add some teacher-specific training to the MATCH Corps year. For those who wanted it, we could weave in Friday/Saturday and July training with the mission of making them unusually effective and confident first-year classroom teachers.
The Program
Training lasts 12 months (August through July). Most graduates will go on to become English or math teachers in "No Excuses"-style urban Charter Public Schools (though we hope some go, in teams, to reform-minded principals in traditional high-poverty public schools). Upon graduation, residents commit to two years of full-time teaching in an urban public school.
Again: All MATCH Teacher Residents are part of MATCH Corps. The MATCH Corps tutoring experience is the foundation of learning for the teacher training. We believe a critical aspect to becoming a classroom teacher is to develop a sense of how different types of kids learn (or fail to). One way to develop that sense is to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours side by side with one or two kids at a time.
MATCH Teacher Residents also undertake an AmeriCorps commitment during their year at MATCH. While most of their Monday – Thursday tutoring work is at MATCH, some is at more traditional Boston Public School classrooms, including some of the schools facing the most acute challenges. In addition, the year includes community service projects with one another and MATCH School students.
Compensation
This AmeriCorps affiliation grants them a slightly higher monthly stipend than MATCH Corps only, as well as the AmeriCorps education award at the end of the year.
Timetable for Those Interested in the 2010-2011 Cohort
Mid-August 2010: MATCH Corps training begins.
September 2010: MATCH Teacher Residency begins on Friday afternoons and Saturdays concurrent with the start of the school year.
January to June 2011: Trainees teach English or math classes on Fridays afternoons and Saturday mornings. There is an enormous amount of coaching and feedback, and most of the other hours are dedicated to improving week over week.
May to June 2011: Trainees likely to get job offers for September 2010 as full-time teachers. High-performing charter schools are particularly interested in our teachers. Our first cohort is mostly in the Greater Boston area, but also in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Newark.
July 2011: Full-time student teaching in our summer academy; residents/trainees receive Massachusetts "Initial License."
September 2011: Begin work as full-time teacher in a school in Boston or elsewhere around the nation.
Description
Training happens concurrently with the one-year MATCH Corps experience.
Tuition-free (supported by philanthropists committed to improving the human capital pipeline into high-poverty schools).
Combines best practices of Teach For America (very high bar for applicants) with a uniquely high dosage of 1-on-1 coaching.
Five key skill areas: automatic response to student provocations; "Sposato Method" for building 1-on-1 parent and student relationships; planning and executing crisp lessons; aggressive time management of the 60-hour teacher work week; and specialized knowledge in math or English instruction.
More focus on practicing real-life situations; less focus on theory.
Builds on the several hundred hours of 1-on-1 tutoring that each trainee does as part of MATCH Corps. We believe this allows trainees to develop some intuitive understanding of "how kids learn" by separating out all of the complexities introduced when teaching 20 or more students at once. In particular, experiencing hard-won success with challenging students allows each trainee to *conclude* that all kids can learn to high levels, rather than simply being asked to repeat that notion as a mantra.
Trainees learn mostly from experienced teachers rather than traditional professors.
Intense: The combination of full-time MATCH Corps work duties, plus weekend teacher training, creates an intensity not unlike medical school.
Accountable: trainees evaluate every hour of training all year, providing the coaching team with a feedback loop that allows us to constantly improve. Ultimately, we evaluate our training by measuring the success of teachers in their first year on the job (i.e., the gain over baseline of all their students in math and English exams).
