Read more about required forms and docs. Each applicant is asked to prepare a five-minute sample teaching lesson to deliver during the interview.
Read more about how to prepare your sample lesson. Applicants will also prepare to share a proposal about a case activity related to eliminating racial discipline disparities. The interview is a distinctive part of the TFA application process and consists of three major components: a sample lesson, a case activity, and a personal one-on-one interview. Due to COVID precautions, all interviews will take place virtually this season, via Zoom, an online video conferencing service.
Each interview will be 90 minutes in length. Please note that we only hold interviews on weekdays. We understand that interviews can be a bit nerve-wracking.
Rest assured, our interviewers are excited to meet you and learn more about you. Redefine the future for students at Teach For America. At Teach For America, we know lasting change can happen: All children will get the excellent education they deserve. Our Admissions Process At Teach for America, we maintain a selective admissions process, where we want to learn about your unique talents, achievements, and experiences.
During the application process, you will: Upload a resume Provide your school history and transcript details Discuss your interest in joining TFA and your leadership experience Select your interview time preference. Before Your Interview You will need to provide references.
Jones is known as a no-nonsense veteran teacher, and I had found her quite intimidating before I realized she is incredibly kind. I went through a teaching program, and I taught in four different classrooms before I ever had these kids on my own.
The intercom buzzes to announce a five-minute warning before testing will begin, and that reminds Ms. Jones of the labyrinthine set of test procedures to come. You know we have to cover ourselves. Jones is not fixing to be on Channel 2 tonight. By the end of the school year, I felt like I would scream if I ever heard the phrase cover yourself again. Within Atlanta Public Schools, this phrase embodies a general spirit of fear and intimidation, not to mention sad tolerance for the fact that teachers are seen as little more than passive cogs in the wheel of the city's education machine.
Valuable minutes of classroom instruction time were lost to filling out accident reports when kids occasionally fell out of their chairs or poked each other with pencils. When I was once asked to fill in for an unexpectedly absent colleague, one of her second-graders chose to confide in me about his abysmal home life.
I immediately reported the incident to an administrator, who reacted with what appeared to be annoyance that one more paper had to be filed at p. This was an administrator who really does care about children and wants to improve their lives—but the all-important duty of covering the legal interests of the district can make crucial social work feel like just another rubber stamp. My immediate reaction was shock that so many teachers could be complicit in something so outrageously dishonest.
Midway through the school year, though, I came to understand exactly how it had happened. APS has some of the best teachers in the country, but surviving in the district means covering yourself, and during standardized testing this means ensuring objective success. In a top-down, ruthless bureaucracy like APS, teachers are front-line foot soldiers, not educators encouraged to pursue their calling.
Atlanta Public Schools teachers spend countless hours teaching to exhaustion, spending their own money on classroom supplies, and buying basic necessities for their poorest students, only to be reminded constantly that their job performance will be judged according to test answers bubbled in by wobbly little fingers barely able to hold a pencil upright.
Teaching children is inherently much more intimate, messy, and personal than any office job could ever be. It's about guiding, pushing, and spending most of your waking hours with other people's children, whether they need a Band-Aid, a bear hug, or a fresh set of markers that their parents can't afford.
Many teachers in schools like mine would agree that often the most-struggling students improve in ways that will not be reflected on the state test.
They might learn to say please and thank you, or they might master a set of academic skills that still will not be enough to pass on-level, or they might gain a healthy dose of self-respect. After a year in this environment, I realized I could understand how, when the annual testing frenzy rolled around, a lot of teachers chose to put their heads down, tune out, and cover themselves.
Teach for America cited the Atlanta scandal as a sad example of what is wrong with education's status quo, one of the many reasons America's schools need even more reform and innovation.
But what occurred to me, as I worked my way, ill-prepared, through Atlanta Public Schools, was that the two systems are not as far apart as either might like to suggest. TFA strongly encourages its teachers to base their classes' "big goals" around standardized-test scores. Past and present corps members are asked to stand to thunderous applause if their students have achieved some objectively impressive measure of achievement, and everyone knows that the best way to work for and rise through TFA ranks is to have a great elevator pitch about how your students' scores improved by X percent.
Nor is the organization a stranger to controversies involving performance measurement. Whether or not the numerical data is broadly accurate, I can attest to the pressure within TFA to produce proof of student gains without much oversight or guidance. By the end of my time at TFA and Atlanta Public Schools, I came to feel that both organizations had a disconnect between their public ideals and their actual effectiveness.
But in my experience, many if not most corps members are confused about their purpose, uncertain of their skills, and struggling to learn the basics. A follow-up analysis of the Mathematica data showed that Teach for America teachers produce significant student achievement gains in math, regardless of how well students were performing beforehand.
Department of Education study of secondary math teachers showed Teach for America teachers to be more effective than other teachers at their schools. I would not be a teacher today without the support of TFA, and the majority of my incredible colleagues are Teach For America alumni.
My principal—the most effective school leader I have ever witnessed as a teacher or a student—is a TFA alumnus. Unfortunately, many TFA alumni including myself allow sentimentality to blind us to the harsh practicalities of TFA and its place in the education reform movement.
The truth is, TFA teachers within their two-year corps commitment window do not, by and large, have tangible positive impacts on their classrooms. The natural extension is that if you join TFA, you will most likely have a neutral or negative impact on the academic gains of the students that you teach.
TFA is not a traditional teacher-education program. One study on the subject has shown that when compared a relatable cohort, teachers in the same schools who are untraditionally prepared and less likely to be certified, novice TFA teachers perform equivalently—but not superior—to those colleagues.
This seems disappointing but not terrible. You might not be the next Jaime Escalante Stand and Deliver, anyone? Not so fast. The same study indicate s that novice TFA teachers actually perform significantly less well in reading and math than credentialed beginning teachers at the same schools.
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