Method of Scale: Pilot-to-Scale

The UH program redesign included a new year-long student teaching residency as a graduation requirement for ALL teacher candidates. The program added this new program component—a year-long student teaching residency -- with scale in mind. By 2020, all undergraduates completed a year-long clinical teaching experience. This programming redesign has included a deeper partnership with school districts, better training for mentor teachers to be effective instructional coaches, more ongoing observation and actionable feedback for teacher candidates, and stronger performance-based mechanisms for assessing whether teachers are effective instructors.

Fidelity

To ensure fidelity to a new model that would be applied across the entire program, UH planned with scale in mind. It created new faculty positions that would work in district partnership sites, trained faculty throughout the change process and engaged in shared governance with district partners (where they regularly analyzed data together).

Funding

UH had a small amount of grant funding at the start of the transformation to support the transition from the existing model, but they ultimately reallocated their own resources to grow and sustain the residency model. Additionally, UH engages in cost-sharing with district partners. For example, one local district, Tomball Independent School District, reallocated one of its administrative staff members to serve as its own site coordinator.