Virginia Commonwealth University Introduces New Program for Improving Quality of Teaching

To keep its edge over the rest of the world in the field of science and technology, the US needs to look after its school education system along with the universities. Experts are worried about the lowering performance in the field of science and engineering in the students belonging to minorities. This will also transcend to college-level education. That’s why they emphasized the dire need to improve the quality of teaching at the school level. This might be solved by educating the school administration about their teacher training system, and offer more time in classroom teaching to enhance their skills. Teachers are vulnerable to the low levels of output which tends to frustrate them; they might leave teaching because of it. It is one of the very concerning topics to be handled with care, as the students are the people who suffer the most from this.

The Innovative Residency Programme

A new program has been introduced in public schools of Richmond, Virginia by Dr. Andrew P. Dire, Dean of the School Education at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), who is trying to bring the change in this practice. This new initiative will allow young teachers to work for a long period of time in the classroom while completing their higher studies. It will also train the mentors who will help the new teachers to get accustomed to their new job and keep helping them to solve different scenarios at least for one year. This little experiment is already showing promising results as the retention rate of new teachers as high as 96% in Richmond as compare to the rest where it is about 62%. Among which 42% were from minorities, 13% from Virginia, and 25% from the rest of the US. The head of the program, Therese Dozier told that this program will cost a significant amount of more money per student than the traditional training method. As it cost around 20,000 Dollars to replace a teacher. The new legislation that is in work will provide the broader aspect that how is the US education system can use the allocated fund to put out the better kind of training for the new teachers. Apart from budget implications, the institutions must learn to successfully put the residency program in place. VCU is very lucky to get financial backing from Margaret A. Cargill a visionary philanthropist. The program has a good potential to eradicate the deficiency in training of the new teachers. But the time will tell whether it will get the much needed financial backing or not, to get the desired result.