Branches

The number of new teacher candidates enrolling in preparation programs was decreasing prior to the pandemic. The pandemic has increased the rate of teachers leaving the profession. It has been a rough two years even though the current school year was supposed to be a return to ‘normal.’ Yet after the Omicron wave, everything got more challenging making the return to full-time, in-person learning after a year and a half even harder than expected. Staff shortages and students’ social emotional welfare made readjustment challenging. Substitute teachers were hard to find. There simply were not enough adults in many schools this year. The New Hampshire Union Leader published the story, T eachers retiring, but not as many as feared ,” on June 27.  “By the middle of the year, teachers said they were feeling burned out. A national survey of teachers published in late January, commissioned by the National Education Association, one of the two national teachers’ unions, reported that more th...

  Tom Schram, TRRE Faculty in Residence with TRRE Graduates UNH Teacher Residency for Rural Education (TRRE) has been an incredible journey! As Tom Schram so poignantly described in his closing at the TRRE Advisory Board meeting in June, it is the journey, not the statistics, charts or maps that truly represent the TRRE impact, it is the people in school partner districts supporting the program and the TRRE graduates making a difference each day in education.  TRRE Graduates from three out of the four cohorts gathered on June 18 at the Common Man Inn in Plymouth NH. TRREople (TRRE-people) shared lessons learned as first year teachers, celebrated TRRE graduates’ impact in rural partner schools, recognized the value of the professional TRRE network and explored future induction support opportunities for summer and beyond grant funding which ends in September 2022.   TRRE Graduates shared their experiences as first year teachers. Whether a 2019 or 2021 TRRE graduate, common ...

Eleanor Jaffee, Ph.D., Owner and Principal Consultant, Insights Evaluation, LLC. Amy Barry, MA, Evaluation Associate, UNH Carsey School of Public Policy Mona Hajnaghizadeh, UNH Graduate Research Assistant & Doctoral Student, UNH Carsey School of Public Policy Recently, Amy and Eleanor presented highlights from The TRRE Year 5 Evaluation Report at the semi-annual meeting Advisory Board on January 6, 2022. Their presentation covered TRRE Cohort 4 program feedback, teacher preparation, and graduates’ induction experience. Over time, TRRE Cohorts reported rating of their teacher preparation experience with TRRE shows an increase in the satisfaction with the quality of the program, evidence of the continual improvement process within TRRE. This finding relates specifically to each cohort’s graduation rating of preparation [represented by the blue bar] For example, Cohort 1 at graduation rated their preparation near “good” on average. The graduation average increased at each cohort’s gr...

Abbey (Filiault) Farias, TRRE Graduate, was selected last summer as the Peter C. and Kristin Van Curan Nordblom Summer Fellow at the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy. Farias proposed research on school services addressing rural homelessness in New Hampshire in her fellowship application. The final draft of her research project, A Case Study on Homeless School Liaisons in the North Country , was submitted to homeless school liaisons across the state to increase awareness of the issues uncovered in her research. What Farias learned was incredibly valuable as a teacher. Did you know The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act 1 requires schools to find and assist homeless students and it is a child’s right to stay the school year in their school of origin? Although broad support through McKinney-Vento is offered, many families and educators are unaware of it. In addition, common challenges with implementation of McKinney-Vento become more complicated in a rural se...