Solomon began teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, and he was overwhelmed. Some of the students were learning English and others were on individual education plans. I was not prepared for that level of complexity. A veteran teacher was in the next room. I copied what she wrote on her board every day before school. He remembers that she would talk to him about what she was going to do that day. That is how I learned to be a teacher.
Solomon co-founding the Boston Teacher Residency in 2003 after teaching high school math for a decade, to help new teachers become effective urban educators. Solomon is the executive director of the Boston Plan for excellence, a nonprofit organization that oversees the program along with two charter schools in a Boston neighborhood that is highly diverse and multilingual. He leads a network of teachers at the Dudley Neighborhood School. Solomon says that being a great teacher is not an option. Building networks is a requirement of the job.
Frank Solomon was an MIT biology professor and his mother was a school librarian. At MIT, he majored in math and was inspired to create a course on town-gown politics. He found that he needed more training for teaching in urban schools after earning a master's degree from Harvard.
BTR is modeled after a medical residency and guides teachers from one-on-one interactions to small group lessons. They are coached by mentors as they practice with other adults and students.
Solomon says that the goal is to make students enjoy learning and be challenged to do their best. BTR has trained more than 700 teachers, half of them teachers of color, and helped create a network of dozens of other teacher residency programs across the country. Solomon watched the first students graduate from college. Solomon says that our country teaches that not everyone is smart. In BTR, we aim to teach a mindset that holds everybody in class accountable for being brilliant, and we support teachers on the skills needed to push for that.
