TNTP Teaching Fellows reviews

The program is basically a scam. The program gets income from two sources: government grants and sponsorship from charter school organizations. The charter schools also get government grants to run their summer school programs. You sign up to this program and give a charter school that you do not get to choose for weeks of free labor. They will work you like a dog. Expect a ten hour work day plus commute and frequently even homework. Don't think you'll get weekends off either. Some people have it significantly worse than others. If you signed up for a SPED certification that's more work. If they give you two lessons to teach per day, that's more work. How well you do in the program is almost completely random. You will be assigned a random grade to teach at a random charter school. Some schools have small class sizes (as little as 3 or 4) and some have huge class sizes (as much as 44 students in one classroom). Some schools have nice desks, clean white boards, and plenty of tech, others will have folding picnic tables, scratched white boards that don't erase, and whatever tech could be scrounged together at the last minute (and may not work). These differences are not taken into account when you are evaluated. Evaluations are also random. They happen on random days and at random times. The difference between passing and failing the program can come down to when your observer decides to walk in the room. They only stay for ten minutes and will grade you on parts of your lesson that they didn't observe. If you're trying to enter the field of education you probably already have an idea of what kind of teacher you want to be. You may have a vision of yourself as an educator based on the kind of educators that helped you as a child. TNTP does not care. They have a specific kind of teacher they want and expect to have a bad time if you want to go another way. If you want to see what kind of teacher they'll be making you go watch some videos from Uncommon Schools. Personally it looks like some kind of dystopian nightmare where students are replaced with robots.

The summer program was the worst 6 weeks of my life. The other fellows and some of the coaches are great, but teaching from 8:00 - 11:30 and then sitting in session from 12:30 - 6:00 was awful. To be fair I only actually taught for one hour in the morning, but I was still expected to be planning and working at the school while I was not teaching. Other people were not so lucky and had to teach for 3 hours a day and make 3 times as many plans as me. I don't know how they survived considering BCTR makes you write lengthy lesson plans where it would take anywhere from 1 - 2 hours just to make an hours worth for me. It is kind of a toss up what your summer teaching will be like and it can make it or break it for you. Some people I knew who would have made great teachers quit because their summer placement was so terrible. Also, I was teaching 7th/8th graders yet my license is in elementary education. Technically, in Baltimore you CANNOT teach above 6th grade with an elem license. I was very unhappy with this placement as it did not reflect the age group I would be working with in the fall. If you have any problems like that, you'll get a scripted response and told to deal with it because they shove down our throats that we need to be "adaptable" (which they use as an excuse to make us do whatever they want and to cover for their own incompetence and lack of planning). However, I think these issues have more to do with City Schools as a whole, which are a bureaucratic, awful mess. Overall, I did not feel prepared for the fall and too much time was spent on class room management and not actual teaching. Not to mention all the "work culture" nonsense they force you to participate in which comes off as forced and phony.