The New Teacher Project’s innovative Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program trains and certifies new teachers for the neediest schools in Baton Rouge and the New Orleans area. An alternative to traditional university-based certification programs, the state-approved program delivers instruction specifically targeted to high-performing recent college graduates and career changers teaching in high-need schools. In 2007, a state-sponsored value-add study of teacher certification programs gave the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program its highest ranking for producing mathematics teachers who surpass even experienced math teachers in terms of their impact on student achievement.

 

In 1999, an alarming 13.1 percent of Louisiana’s teachers (7,162) did not possess certification in the area in which they taught.  To address this need, the state convened a Blue Ribbon Commission on Teacher Quality, charged with recommending policies that would lead to a cohesive PreK-16 system and hold universities and school districts accountable for student achievement and teacher quality. Among the commission’s recommendations: bolstering the quantity and quality of certification options available to new teacher candidates.

Through the work of the Commission in 2001, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education urged The New Teacher Project to develop and implement its Practitioner Teacher Program (PTP) as a streamlined alternate path to certification. The state approved the program, thereby allowing individuals to become certified through a combination of coursework, full-time teaching and demonstrations of content knowledge, instructional expertise, and classroom management skills.

The program’s primary goals are to increase the number of high-quality individuals who become teachers in Louisiana public schools, and to increase the number of teachers certified in critical shortage areas. The path to certification is not only rigorous, but also structured to be relevant to the new teachers’ backgrounds and needs working in hard-to-staff schools. The Louisiana PTP is specifically targeted to prepare new teachers for classrooms in Baton Rouge and the New Orleans area, where too many students have not historically performed up to state or national standards.

 

Training 900 Teachers to Be Effective in High-Need Classrooms

The Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program, now in its seventh year, has trained more than 900 new teachers for eight urban and rural school districts in Louisiana, placing many of them in critical shortage areas. Currently, more than 600 of these teachers have become certified through the PTP, while 300 are actively working toward certification.

The program centers on TNTP’s proprietary Teaching for Results content seminar series, which takes the place of traditional university coursework and is designed to meet the unique needs of career changers and recent graduates. The series provides beginning teachers with necessary skills and knowledge to leverage their existing content knowledge into classroom effectiveness. The new teachers participate in the seminar series in small, content-specific groups led by experienced teachers, allowing participants to benefit from dedicated peer support and professional development. To gain certification, candidates must successfully complete a rigorous performance assessment, which includes evidence of student achievement and survey results from principals, parents, and students. 

Practitioner Teachers have shown exceptional performance on standardized tests, with a 100 percent pass rate on all required parts of the PRAXIS examination. Through surveys conducted in May 2007, principals with Practitioner Teachers in their schools reported high levels of satisfaction with the new teachers. The teachers themselves have also given the program positive ratings. Specifically:

• 96 percent of principals reported that they would hire another Practitioner Teacher.
• 88 percent of principals reported that Practitioner Teachers placed at their schools were effective in raising student achievement.
• 95 percent of Practitioner Teachers reported that LPTP Content Seminar Leaders helped them to become a more effective teacher.
• 96 percent of Practitioner Teachers reported that the LPTP improved their ability to plan for instruction.

Importantly, the LPTP has helped the State of Louisiana make significant progress toward its teacher quality goals. In 2006, Education Week, in its annual state-by-state review of public education, gave Louisiana a letter grade of “A” for its efforts to improve teacher quality.

A year later, a state-sponsored value-add study of the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs in Louisiana found that novice math teachers prepared by the PTP were equally or more effective than both average new teachers and average experienced teachers in terms of their impact on student achievement. The study, sponsored by the Louisiana Board of Regents and the Louisiana Department of Education, measured the impact of teachers from all of the state’s teacher preparation programs—including traditional, university-based preparation programs—on student achievement. The New Teacher Project’s LPTP was the only program evaluated by the study to be rated “Level 1” (the highest of five possible ratings) in terms of the performance of teachers prepared by the program to teach mathematics. This exceptional result speaks both to the high quality of the individuals enrolled in the program, as well as the efficacy of the LPTP’s approach to new teacher training. (Click here to read Education Week's coverage of the study.)

The LPTP represents an innovative, effective option for the preparation and certification of beginning teachers in areas where the supply of teachers from traditional sources has not been able to keep up with demand. “Not only are these teachers ‘highly qualified,’” said Beanka Williams, coordinator of alternate certification and induction for the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, “they are also effecting dramatic gains in student achievement, and are going on to serve as leaders.”

In Focus | Practitioner Teacher Profile   Rose Kendrick initially used her Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry with a 4.0 GPA to work as an Environmental Chemist for Dow Chemical for 10 years. In 2001 she decided to make a career change to teaching, so that she could spend more time with her own children, and entered into TNTP’s Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program. “I was part of a professional learning community,” Rose said. “My Content Seminar Leader helped new teachers with instructional strategies as well as non-instructional issues such as how to get the students to believe in you as a teacher, gaining their trust so that you can have a positive effect on student achievement.”  After serving as a successful math teacher at Scotlandville Middle School in East Baton Rouge Parish, Rose became the Math and Science Coordinator at Glen Oaks Middle School, helping other teachers implement curriculum and use student test score data to refine instruction and improve student achievement. Rose earned National Board Certification in December 2006, and was selected to serve on NBPTS’s DREAM project, an initiative developed to encourage more minority teachers in high-need schools to pursue National Board Certification. “I could have done many different things after leaving my job as a chemist,” Rose said, “but teaching is my ministry, this is what I was supposed to be doing from the beginning.”

 

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