Another Way to Hire the Best

Another outcome of our visit to Park Forest: I’ve become more convinced that the Professional Development School (PDS) partnership that State College has with Penn State may well be the best in the country - and the impact on our students is profound. 

Fourteen out of twenty-two classrooms in Park Forest have PDS interns in the classroom, working with the regular teacher. (Seven of those classrooms are not eligible for the program because the teachers are not yet tenured.) The result – especially after you add in a number of experienced paraprofessionals - is an adult-to-student ratio that is rarely matched in public schools. 

Application to the PDS program is highly competitive, so these college students tend to be enthusiastic and intellectually curious. In addition, interns spend not one (as is typical for traditional internships), or even two semesters in the classroom, but the entire public school year, ending in June. So when we hire a former PDS intern, we are pretty clear about the quality of teacher we are getting.