Chapter 5: Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program: A Partnership Between the University of South Florida College of Education and Hillsborough (FL) County Public Schools

The Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program (UTRPP) was created in 2011 as a direct response to the national calls for clinically-based, urban- focused preparation programs. In contrast to what Zeichner (2012) calls “superficial efforts” to locate a traditional preparation program in P–12, UTRPP applies emerging research to redesign learning experiences for all stakeholders. The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) began the Blue Ribbon Panel Report with a call to integrate knowledge and practice, coursework and fieldwork:

This call demands practice to be at the center of teacher education programs and involves a shift in focus from what teachers know to what they are able to do (Ball & Cohen, 1999). The report explicitly states the need for innovative programs to respond to and research the efficacy of new models that create close partnerships between school districts and teacher preparation programs. Despite increased attention toward residency models as a means for meeting this call, little research has been conducted to determine the effectiveness of such programs, and none have been conducted to study the broader impact on classroom teachers and principals. In one study of residency programs, Papay, West, Fullerton, and Kane (2011) found that teacher candidates who graduated from the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) program were initially less effective than their non-BTR peers, based on measures of students’ standardized assessments. However, BTR graduates improved more rapidly on these measures with experience and remained in the Boston Public Schools longer than non-BTR peers. BTR graduates, then, have the potential to reduce the disruptive effects that impact a school’s ability to develop instructional capacity, develop strong cultures, and increase student achievement (Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013).