Mission Statement

The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

NYU Steinhardt advances knowledge, creativity, and innovation at the crossroads of human learning, culture, development, and well-being. Through rigorous research and education, both within and across disciplines, the School’s faculty and students evaluate and redefine processes, practices, and policies in their respective fields and, from a global as well as community perspective, lead in an ever-changing world.

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The Department of Teaching and Learning

Teacher education can no longer be limited to the preparation of professionals whose knowledge is solely concerned with the teaching and learning process. Our teachers must be educated to confront directly the lives of today’s students, their families, the school, and the community. Teacher education must be dynamic. Our students must be informed, and our curricula must be continually reformed and revitalized by emerging theory and research in a broad range of specific subjects and foundational disciplines. The Department of Teaching and Learning has organized its courses, developed its programs, integrated university course work with school-based experiences, and designed research, demonstration, and training grants to achieve five goals:

1. to build a department that prepares educators, broadly defined, with a coherent vision of change and of their roles in achieving it;
2. to build an educational community with common themes and understandings that cross traditional conceptions of levels of study, faculty/student roles, academic areas of specialization, and cultures, while recognizing the particular requirements of diverse specializations;
3. to build programs that prepare educators with a solid grasp of the historical forces that have shaped schools, of the philosophical positions that shape ideologies, and of the complexities of learning and teaching in a multicultural, multiethnic world that is constantly subject to change from social, political, and technological forces;
4. to build a scholarly community rooted in reality and firmly committed to improving urban education; and
5. to build a relationship with our students, alumni, field-based professionals, and community that creates support groups and networks that will serve them as they meet the difficulties and challenges of teaching.

NYU Teacher Residency

The NYU Teacher Residency draws on the University’s founding mission to prepare urban teachers to tap urban energies.  We offer a school-embedded immersion experience, where resident interns are engaged in schools through positions such as teacher assistants and paraprofessionals, with robust, consistent, and ongoing support provided both online and in-person by Residency Directors, Teaching Mentors, Content Mentors, and Faculty instructors.

The program’s module-based learning environments are inquiry-focused, student-centered, video-rich, and linked throughout to real-world classroom practices. The faculty who lead and teach in the program pride themselves on blending content expertise with expertise in pedagogy and educational theory and practice; resident interns will find that their peers serve as mentors and guides as well.

While successful completion of the program leads to a master of arts in teaching degree, graduate resident interns will be recommended for a teaching credential only when they successfully demonstrate that they have mastered the competencies needed to be effective teachers and mentors to all the learners in their classrooms.

With strong emphases woven throughout its modules on content expertise, literacy instruction, special education, teaching emergent bilinguals, universal design for learning principles, educational technologies, and attention to equity and diversity, NYU’s Teacher Residency offers a truly integrated, cutting edge approach to training highly effective teachers who will be leaders in their schools and change agents who will revitalize and rejuvenate urban education.