Clare Melerine was teaching her 3rd graders about the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union one recent afternoon when she abruptly called out: “Mirrors on.”
The students at Joseph Davies Elementary School in Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish sat up in their seats. When Melerine began chanting—“First one that gets to space wins the space race”—the students knew to repeat after her.
It’s a strategy that Melerine learned at the University of New Orleans, where she graduated in May, and honed over the past year as a teacher-in-residence at Davies Elementary.
“Students love it,” she said, “and I love it.”
Louisiana was one of the first states to require aspiring teachers like Melerine to complete a yearlong residency, which is longer and more rigorous than the typical student-teaching stint. The requirement, which has been in place for about a decade, aimed to reduce the alarmingly high turnover rate among new teachers by giving them more pre-service experience and coaching.
Today, the residency model is not only popular with beginning teachers like Melerine, who say they appreciate the intense preparation—it’s also become a critical talent pipeline for school districts like St. Bernard Parish, whose low pay and a rural setting can make it hard to recruit teachers.
Residency programs give schools a low-cost way to train and try out educators before hiring them, which is why some school districts compete for residents like Melerine, offering bonuses on top of the state stipends they receive.
At an April event at UNO, representatives from local school systems and charter schools tried to convince student-teachers to do their required residencies with them. Along with branded pencil cases and notebooks, one recruiter offered more than double the state’s $3,300 stipend.
“It’s kind of become a bidding war,” said Melissa Nunez, coordinator of teacher education programs at UNO.
How it works
For students like Melerine, the yearlong residency is the final step before becoming a full-time teacher.
At UNO and other traditional university-based teacher preparation programs in Louisiana, students take three years of education courses. Beginning their senior year, the college students are placed in K-12 classrooms alongside state-certified mentor teachers. The residents gradually take on more classroom duties until, under the supervision of their mentors, they lead most lessons.
Davies Elementary Principal Tiffani Glapion said residencies give prospective teachers a much better understanding of the job than student teaching, which in the past might have lasted only a few weeks.
“There’s so much they were missing,” Glapion said. “But now that we have this yearlong program, they’re seeing it all from beginning to end.”
About a decade ago, Louisiana’s state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education began requiring teacher-preparation programs to include a residency year. The change came after a state survey found that new teachers felt vastly unprepared to enter the classroom and many left after their first year.
Louisiana was among the first states to adopt such a policy, which more than half of states have since enacted, according to the Education Commission of the States.
Some critics questioned the cost of the program, which includes a $3,300 state-funded stipend for residents and a $2,000 stipend for mentor teachers.
But early findings indicated that teachers who entered the workforce after a residency program had slightly higher rates of retention, according to an Institute of Education Sciences review of Louisiana’s data.
Today, most Louisiana districts have embraced the model, saying it helps them fill vacancies and mold incoming educators.
At the recruitment event in April, officials from St. Bernard Parish Schools offered to pay UNO’s student-teachers $5,000 if they did their residencies in the district. St. Charles Parish Schools offered $7,500, but only if the aspiring teachers committed to stay in the district for at least two years after their residencies.
In the classroom
Since August, Melerine has gotten hands-on experience analyzing student data, planning lessons, making photocopies, and other tasks that are expected of full-time teachers.
At the start of the school year, Melerine mostly observed her mentor teacher, Jodi Crifasi. Eventually, Melerine taught a few lessons each week, she said.
Crifasi would observe from the back of the room and write feedback in a notebook, which the pair would pass back and forth. The veteran gave Melerine guidance on lesson pacing, advising her to move on if she noticed students’ attention drifting, and classroom management, emphasizing the importance of following through after warning students about consequences.
By the end of the year, Melerine had progressed to teaching and planning all lessons, as well as handling transitions between classes, lining kids up for lunch and supervising bathroom breaks.
“I felt super prepared,” she said.
Glapion said it’s sometimes difficult to recruit teachers to come to St. Bernard Parish, whose teachers are among the lowest paid in the state. But often residents are swayed by the high-end facilities, rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, and hands-on attention from administration, she said.
That was the case for Melerine, who will return to Davies Elementary this fall as a full-time 3rd grade teacher.
A St. Bernard native who wanted to become a teacher from a young age, Melerine said she’s looking forward to being back in the same classroom and watching the students she taught this year progress to 4th grade.
“It’s truly a dream come true to be able to be here after getting to know everyone so well,” she said. “It truly worked out so perfectly.”
