The Marshall Teacher Residency produces high-quality teachers who represent the communities they serve. For five years, we’ve partnered with schools across California to build sustainable pipelines of diverse, ready-on-day-one teachers. With each new school year, our impact grows.
We cannot address the challenges facing American schools without improving teacher preparation. These challenges, including America’s persistent teacher shortage, are intimately bound to the ways in which we prepare teachers for the profession.
Powerful teacher preparation blends theory, practice, and mentorship to produce teachers who are prepared on the first day they teach and every day thereafter; who represent the communities they serve; and who persist in the profession to lead classrooms that are student-centered, data-driven, anti-racist and supportive of the whole child.
What We’re Doing
Case Study: Strengthening Teacher Retention
Nationally, about one third of college graduates are first-generation. Our residency is an affordable and supportive pathway to a professional career for teachers who would not otherwise enter the profession.
We’ve worked hard to establish sustainable partnerships with visionary local non-profit lenders, such as Hebrew Free Loan and Sequoia Federal Credit Union, to offer reasonable tuition financing options. With costs offset by partner school contributions, the program ultimately has zero cost for graduates, who receive a living stipend disbursed monthly during the residency, financial support for credentialing and testing fees, and in the end, a California Preliminary Single Subject Teaching Credential.
We’re also removing other barriers that limit access to quality training. For example, we don’t use college GPA as part of the admissions process. An applicant’s mindsets about students and education are better indicators that they possess the attributes of a powerful teacher: a belief that all students can be successful, a commitment to learning and growing as anti-racist educators, and a growth mindset.
But these aren’t just any teachers entering the workforce for the first time. These teachers are knowledgeable and well-prepared for the realities of the classroom. They are more likely to represent the communities they serve and to stay in the profession.
Nationally, about 45% of teachers leave within their first five years in the classroom, and only 50% of new teachers in high-needs schools continue teaching beyond three years. Because a teacher’s effectiveness improves with experience and professional development each year, when a teacher leaves, students and their learning suffer. This trend is especially pronounced in high-needs schools—such as those we primarily serve—and hard-to-staff subjects, where teacher turnover is higher than average.
Our 2021–22 residents identify as 68% people of color, 45% male, and 7% non-binary. Nationwide, only 21% of teachers identify as people of color.
Recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that though more than half of the public school student population is composed of students of color, a full 79 percent of the teacher population is White.
Students who have teachers and school leaders who reflect their identities experience increased academic outcomes in both the short and long term. Improved academic outcomes are associated with enhanced life outcomes, affecting earnings, economic mobility, employment, and civic engagement.
This commitment to DEI, as well as to innovation, measurement, and continuous improvement, is demonstrated by Marshall Teacher Residency’s selection by the California Department of Education and UC Berkeley as one of only eight California teacher education programs for an equity-focused cohort of program leaders. Through action research, participating programs are collaborating to improve the experiences of residents of color across the state by employing, and generating, research-based practices.
We are committed to ensuring our residents are representative of their school communities. In fact, since the beginning of the Marshall Teacher Residency, over 40% of residents have been connected to the schools where they resided.
The commitment is reciprocal. Our residency allows school partners to intentionally develop a homegrown pipeline of excellent teachers. For example, Wonderful College Preparatory Academy is a rural K–12 public charter school network serving families in Delano and Lost Hills, CA. To strengthen their schools, they’re growing their own pipeline of Wonderful alumni returning to teach in their home communities. In 2021–22, the Wonderful cohort has two residents—one alumnae and one community member. For 2022–23, they expect to increase the size of the Wonderful cohort to six residents, all of whom are alumni of Wonderful College Preparatory Academy.
We’re expanding to become a full K–12 residency.
We’ve gained accreditation for two of the most highly needed teaching areas in CA — Special Education (Education Specialist) and Elementary Education (Multiple Subject).
Our partner schools share our core values and appreciate the clinical experience and mentoring the residency provides. So in 2022–23, Marshall Teacher Residency is growing to partner with 20 California districts and public charter networks, serving over 22,000 students.
We built our comprehensive residency for aspiring teachers with the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE). Our program places hands-on practice, data-driven learning, collaboration, and mentorship at the heart of the year-long experience.
Unlike traditional teacher preparation programs, our residents are immersed in the classroom with constant and intentional opportunities to learn, do, reflect, and grow with support from their cooperating teacher and program mentor. Residents are in the classroom 6–8 hours per day, for four full days per week throughout the one-year residency, working with their cooperating teacher to co-plan and co-teach, honing their craft and skill. This preparation amounts to well over 1,000 clinical hours, far above the California Commission for Teacher Credentialing (CTC) requirement of 600 clinical hours.
Outside of the classroom, residents work with faculty to master credentialing coursework, and apply it directly to their experience in the classroom. All coursework is designed to be integrated into the clinical experience, leveraging performance tasks like case studies, cycles of inquiry, and portfolios. Mentors and faculty support coherence between the coursework and clinical experience.
“Getting hands on experience and having the course work strategically planned so that it is aligning with the school year has been making it easier to see connections between what we are learning and to how it is relevant in teaching.” — Marshall Teacher Resident at John J. Cairns High School, 2020–21
— Marshall Teacher Resident at John J. Cairns High School, 2020–21
Why is this important? Numerous studies show that poor teacher preparation leads to teacher attrition within the first several years of teaching. Preparation that is theory focused and disconnected from real school contexts doesn’t adequately prepare teachers for the reality of the classroom. Conversely, strong mentorship and intentional, substantial experience in the classroom—experience that’s directly connected to residents’ training—lead to greater retention.
of Marshall residents pass the edTPA, signaling their readiness to teach. The national pass rate for the edTPA is only 72%.
CTC staff who examined our program touted Marshall Teacher Residency’s commitment to diversity and unwavering standards of excellence.
Marshall residents earn their teaching credential by achieving two measures of quality: the Marshall Teacher Residency performance bar and the edTPA, a national performance assessment. The external assessment of the edTPA validates our internal assessment of resident performance.
Completion rates within the program are exceptionally strong, with 96% of the 2020–21 cohort completing the residency and earning their teaching credential.
School leaders who host our residents are also enthusiastic about the quality of preparation. They all believe that residents stand out among their peers, serving as teacher leaders at their school sites. Additionally, after completing the program, residents themselves feel prepared and ready to teach on day one.
Residents train in an environment reflecting shared values, including that schools be anti-racist: engaging in deep self-reflection, practicing culturally responsive teaching methods, and investigating inequities in the educational system. Aspiring teachers experience these methods and approaches as residents, before applying them in their own classrooms.
“The core beliefs of Marshall Teacher Residency are easily seen throughout all of the assignments that we have had and I find myself constantly thinking about how I can include these beliefs in my planning and in my everyday interactions with the students.” — Marshall Teacher Resident at John J. Cairns High School, 2020–21
Hosting Marshall residents enhances partner schools’ ability to fulfill staffing needs and improves teacher retention over time. Take for example, Summit Tahoma, whose faculty consists of 18 general education teachers. In just a few years, the teaching faculty at Tahoma changed from low retention to high retention. From 2017–2021, 7 out of 8 hires from the Marshall Teacher Residency have stayed and have had a direct impact on overall faculty retention.
“Alumni from Marshall are thriving…we have nearly 100% faculty retention going into next year. It’s probably because so many of our faculty went through Marshall.” —Megan Toyama, Summit Tahoma School Leader
—Megan Toyama, Summit Tahoma School Leader
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