Boston thinks it has the answer…the Boston Teacher Residency Institute (btr). Although the tough economic times have made teaching jobs tough to get, inner city schools have a hard time recruiting and retaining quality teachers because their applicants are not prepared to teach in that type of environment. (…”no education theory class will help Clinton Lassiter engage a student who says that her top goal for eighth grade is to not get pregnant”) “Former Boston superintendent Thomas Payzant, who helped start btr, recalls that his biggest problem with new teachers was not subject knowledge or pedagogy, but under-preparation for the environment.” “’What we were getting when teachers arrived in Boston classrooms were people who were pretty well grounded in content and had some sense of how to teach. But they were not … Read entire article »