An Alma Exley Scholar is one of the leaders of a state-wide program that is addressing the teacher shortage while increasing the diversity of Connecticut’s educators.

Dr. Violet Jiménez Sims, whom we honored in 2008, is making a difference with the Connecticut Teacher Residency Program (CT-TRP), which is enabling university graduates to obtain teacher certification.

Prior to joining CT-TRP, she was a teacher and school leader and served on the faculty of the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. She was honored as a PDK Distinguished Educator Fellow in 2024.

Dr. Violet Jiménez Sims

Rapid Growth

The state approved CT-TRP in 2019 with the twin goals of nurturing more teachers and increasing teacher diversity. Since then, the program has grown to partner with 27 school districts across the state.

A total of 135 TRP graduates are teaching in Connecticut public schools. Over 90 percent of them identify as people of color.

Currently, 40 future teachers are enrolled in two elementary cohorts and two special education cohorts. They will complete the program this summer and are expected to be teachers of record in the fall of 2025.

Dr. Sims is managing director of academic programming and legislative affairs with CT-TRP. Her colleagues on the leadership team are Ushawnda Mitchell, managing director of residencies and financial management, and Dr. Niralee Patel-Lye, managing director of recruitment, retention, and partnerships.

TRP Featured in International Magazine

Dr. Sims is co-author of an article about the program in the Kappan magazine, a publication of PDK International, an honor society for educators. Read the full article.

As the article points out, the teacher pipeline has become much narrower over the past five decades. The number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education shrank from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

Over the same period, the teacher workforce became significantly less diverse than the students attending public schools. In the 2020-21 school year, only about 20 percent of U.S. K-12 public-school teachers were persons of color, while students of color comprised over half of public-school enrollment.

In Connecticut, that disparity is even starker. Only 11 percent of public-school educators are persons of color compared to over half of students.

Historical Perspective

Teachers of color have not always been so scarce. Black educators were present in great numbers in segregated, Black schools before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools to be desegregated in 1954. Black schools were closed, and Black students were slowly integrated into white schools. Because so many white schools would not hire Black educators, more than 100,000 Black educators were dismissed or demoted.

Promoting Diversity

Connecticut is attempting to overcome the diversity gap through a variety of initiatives. So-called grow-your-own teacher-preparation programs begin recruiting future teachers as early as high school. Other programs offer alternate routes to teacher certification that target college graduates from diverse professional backgrounds.

The Connecticut Teacher Residency Program is an alternate-route program that uses a comprehensive approach to recruit, train, and retain teachers of color. CT-TRP recruits candidates with bachelor’s degrees from any racial or ethnic background. Candidates should have a passion for working with children, experience working with marginalized communities, and a commitment to diversity in education. Most candidates are recruited from noncertified staff working in partner school districts and those working and living in the community.

Full-Year Paid Residency

CT-TRP residents take courses as part of a full-year residency model in which they also work alongside a mentor teacher in the district while receiving pay and benefits. After the one-year residency, they are assigned their own classroom where they receive mentoring support for three additional years.

Partner districts pay CT-TRP residents during the residency year. In return, the residents commit to teach in the district for a minimum of three years.

The salary, aligned with a living wage, demonstrates partner districts’ commitment to a grow-your-own approach and provides a one-year safety net (with the promise of a teacher’s salary in year two) and an incentive for residents to persevere in the program.

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Isabella “Ivy” Horan, our newest Alma Exley Scholar, has broken into print with an essay published today (10/16/2019) on the editorial page of the Hartford Courant. In the essay, Ivy shares 10 lessons that she has learned from her young students while preparing for a career in education. She’s student-teaching in East Hartford while pursuing her master’s degree from UConn, and some lucky school district is going to be happy to welcome her to its faculty next year. — Woody Exley

Ten lessons I learned from my students

By Isabella Horan

As a graduate student in education who is placed in an internship in East Hartford, I am preparing for a career teaching such things as reading and math.

But teaching goes both ways, and in many instances, my students have taught me far more than I have taught them.

Here are 10 lessons I learned from my students that can be applied to the classroom — or to life in general.

Positive relationships are imperative. Students will not learn from you if you do not show them that you are there to support them. It is necessary to build a strong classroom community in which students can make mistakes, grow and feel comfortable with one another.

Laugh. At the start of my student teaching, I prepared detailed, pristine lesson plans. When some of my plans derailed within five minutes because a student made a funny noise or accidentally burped and the whole class burst out laughing, I learned to join in and laugh, too.

Be honest. My students have varying backgrounds; some of neglect, some of love and some in between. When life is hard, my students are real about it. They talk to me, and we work through it together. That’s what a classroom family is for.

Context matters. I have had students who sometimes come into school after only one or two hours of sleep. When these students doze off during a lesson, I check in with them instead of assuming they just don’t care. We need to be understanding, and we will be appreciated in return.

Have fun. Whenever I ask for class expectations at the start of the year, every student says: “Have fun.” Learning has to be fun! We need to sell education to our students. They need to invest in it to become lifelong learners. To my little friends who remind me we need to have more fun, thank you for your willingness to play new games and dance with me across the room.

Be yourself. Kids are real with us; sometimes a little too real — like when they say you “look funny” if you put on less makeup one day. It is hard to be vulnerable with others but it is important in teaching. I let my students know what I am learning in school. I tell them I can relate to some of their stories. I tell them I still have trouble with math, too. When students see you as a real person, they start to recognize you as a role model.

Coffee. I call it my “teacher juice” and my students do, too. When my students run into the room full of energy in the morning and I look like I am still waking up, they are sure to remind me to take a sip.

Appreciate cultural capital. I have learned more about cultures, languages, and experiences from my students than I ever expected. We need to show students how to learn from and work with others who have different backgrounds than we do. This is a necessary skill in the classroom and throughout life. We need to start it young. I can teach them about me, and they can teach me about them.

Things don’t always go as planned. You can plan what you are going to accomplish in each subject each day. But sometimes students need more processing, learning and practice. We need to respect that. I thank my students who are vocal about needing more time on a certain topic.

Try your best. We tell our students to stay positive and remember that they are learning. We don’t apply this point of view to our own lives enough. During student teaching, I made a mistake during one of my first solo lessons. As I became frazzled, one of my students said, “Ms. H, it’s OK to make a mistake. You are trying your best!” I will never forget that. It’s true. I’m not just a teacher; I’m a learner, too.

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Editor’s note: Upon taking office in August, Miguel Cardona, the state’s first Latino commissioner of education, sat down for an interview with CT Mirror, which was also published in CTLatinoNews, another online publication. He spoke about the challenge of entering kindergarten in Meriden having spoken only Spanish at home, and he expressed his views on topics from bilingual education to teacher evaluation. Click here to read the interview.