Learn Magazine: Fall 2021, Issue 3

After two years of hosting GSE’s teacher residents, the leaders of Buffalo’s Hutchinson Central Technical High School began this year with three new residents teaching biology and French.

Gary Crump listened, with deep discouragement, to a judge give a sentence that put three young Black and Hispanic men in prison for life for crimes that could have been prevented with education. In that moment, he decided his time would be better spent working with young men in a classroom than as a legal advocate. He remembers thinking, “There’s got to be a way I can have an impact on young men of color.”

After two years of work in Buffalo Public Schools, the GSE Teacher Residency Program team of faculty, PhD students and educator collaborators developed a program template to share with other graduate schools.

After its launch last year as a GSE pilot project, the Buffalo Aspiring Leadership Academy, or BALA, continues this year with nine candidates working with principal-mentors in nine Buffalo Public Schools. Design elements are similar to the Teacher Residency Program: Members of this year’s class work in schools and do GSE coursework that completes the requirements of the New York State School Building Certificate, a qualification for any school leadership position in the state.

Being a teacher resident during the pandemic, with its upending shift from teaching in a classroom to virtual lessons, fortified Tara Strade, BA ’19, MS ’20—as a graduate student and as a teacher in training. She had no choice but to find ways to balance her studies and lead second grade classes alongside her mentor teacher.

As Tanika Shedrick, MA ’06, begins her fourth year as principal of BUILD Community School, the school’s partnership with GSE and its Teacher Residency Program has helped turn the historic Black school into a learning lab. Shedrick, a member of the program’s steering committee, can see how the five residents placed at BUILD during the program’s first two years have contributed to a dynamic environment for everyone—administrators, teachers and students. This year, the school is hosting five residents at once.

Bobbie Finocchio’s first teaching experience launched her career as an advocate for change and, three years ago, led to a job as one of the leaders of UB’s three-year-old Teacher Residency Program: As she began to work as a teacher educator associate and help lead this new program in Buffalo Public Schools, she was motivated by her own experience as a new teacher at 21.