Schooling Teachers In The Realities Of Urban Education

Jesse Solomon '91 was overwhelmed when he first began teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s. "I had 25 children working at eight different grade levels—some learning English, some on IEPs," he recalls. "I wasn't expecting that amount of difficulty." Fortunately, there was an experienced instructor in the adjacent room. "Every day before school, I simply walked over to her board and duplicated what she had written." He recalls her "walking me through what she was going to accomplish that day and how to think about the whole curriculum." "That's how I got my start as a teacher."

After a decade of teaching high school math, Solomon cofounded the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) in 2003 to assist incoming teachers become successful urban educators. Solomon, the executive director of the nonprofit Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE), is in charge of the initiative as well as two charter schools in Roxbury, a densely populated, low-income Boston area with a varied and multilingual population. He heads a network of teachers at the Dudley Neighborhood School (K–5) and the Dearborn STEM Academy (6–12), many of whom came up via BTR. "Being a lone wolf and being a great teacher is not an option," Solomon argues. "It's a requirement of the job to build networks."