TFA Will Train New Recruits Virtually
For the past thirty summers, Teach For America has trained their new recruits in a five-week crash course known as ‘the institute.’ The first institute trained 500 corps members in Los Angeles. As TFA grew, more institutes were added and last summer they trained around 3,000 corps members spread out among four different sites.
At the institute, corps members are split into groups of about 12 where they have a TFA alum as their Corps Member Advisor. This group is further split into teams of 4 who will work together to teach a class of students in summer school. The first week is an orientation period where corps members get to learn the basic principles of teaching and also to have discussions about race and society. The next four weeks are centered on student teaching. Since summer school is about 4 hours a day, each teacher gets to teach, on average, one hour a day for the remaining 20 days. The Corps Member Advisor will observe the student teaching and in the afternoon each day there will be a group meeting with that advisor and also some kind of lesson taught by another alum called the content specialist.
Twenty hours is not a lot of student teaching. I’ve been complaining for years that they could increase this to eighty hours if they would just get more students for the summer schools so that each teacher could teach four hours a day instead of just one. Though they only get twenty hours of teaching actual children, all corps members — like all student teachers — would agree that this were the most valuable hours in their entire training. You can talk about students in the abstract all you want and what sorts of things they will CONTINUE READING: TFA Will Train New Recruits Virtually | Gary Rubinstein's Blog