Vanderbilt partnering with Metro Nashville Public Schools to offer new master’s program for urban teachers

topics: Teacher Preparation

Dean's Office press release

February 8, 2010

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Those wishing to teach in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools will have the opportunity to earn a Vanderbilt University master’s degree designed expressly for them beginning this summer, Vanderbilt and MNPS announced today.

    The new program is focused on improving teaching in urban middle schools and is the result of a partnership between Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development and MNPS.

    “Peabody College and MNPS both share a goal of improving learning for Nashville’s students, and highly effective teachers make the critical difference,” Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Peabody, said. “We are very excited to be partnering with Metro on an innovative program like this.”

    The program will prepare students to teach in upper elementary grades through grade 8 with a focus on one of three areas: literacy, mathematics or science. It will be open to recent college graduates, as well as new and existing teachers.

    “This program will serve multiple purposes,” MNPS Director of Schools Jesse Register said. “It will provide top training to our teachers, which will directly impact classroom instruction, and it will assist in our recruitment of the country’s most talented and promising young teachers.”

    A primary goal of the new program, “Master’s in Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools,” is recruiting and retaining excellent teachers who continue teaching in MNPS schools after they graduate. The program will focus on improving instruction, improving student outcomes, changing assessment practices and creating communities of reflective committed teachers dedicated to working with their MNPS colleagues to foster systemic improvement.

Students will enter the master’s program the summer before they begin teaching in a Metro school. All will be eligible for hire by Metro since they will have already received teacher certification. The students will begin teaching in a project-affiliated MNPS school the first fall, and will complete 30 hours of coursework in two years.

    The first group of 24 students will enroll this summer. Individuals interested in applying to the program should contact the Peabody College Office of Graduate Admissions at (615) 322-8410 or visit the Peabody College Web site at http://www.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/mnps.xml. Students will attend the program tuition-free but will agree to teach in MNPS schools for three years following graduation.

The curriculum will include rigorous courses that will be supported by on-site coaching and mentoring from Peabody faculty. Every semester students will participate in a seminar that will address urban issues and provide a setting for discussing classroom instruction.

    Peabody researchers will track the progress of the program and document its creation and implementation so other universities and school districts may one day replicate it.

    “We believe this program will be sufficiently distinctive, indeed innovative, that it may become a lighthouse program of its kind nationally,” Benbow said.