Learning & Teaching Concentration

About Learning & Teaching

Learning & Teaching, Georgetown University’s Teacher Residency Program, centers on the education of the whole learner. Whether it is building relationships with students, honing your instructional practice, gaining pedagogical content knowledge in your licensure area, generating insights into classroom dynamics, developing a cultural competence to bridge worlds of experience, or understanding how data can inform your craft, the goal is to ensure that you have the instructional skill and professional awareness to spark and spur learning for every student. We currently offer licensure training to work with English language learners (ESL/ELL) in K-12 settings.

Our Teacher Residency Program is designed to prepare K-12 educational professionals who have interdisciplinary skills and focus on the assets that children bring to school, rather than focus on deficits that undermine learning. These interdisciplinary skills and an asset-oriented perspective are necessary to promote effective instructional practices for children with diverse needs in an urban context. These skills and perspectives lead transformations of classrooms, schools, and districts to ensure a just and equitable education for all children.

Full-Time Course Sequence

Students attending the program full time work at their Residency Experience during the day and attend their coursework full time in the evenings.

Part-Time Course Sequence

Students attending the program part time attend their coursework part time in the evenings and work at their Residency Experience during the day during their second year.

First Year

Second Year

Core Courses

EDTR 5001: Culturally Relevant Education & Social Justice

This course explores the relationship between social justice and the context and practice of education in a democratic society through a systems thinking lens. Students investigate how systems of power, privilege, and oppression have historically shaped and continue to shape the contours of the US education system and contribute to unjust outcomes for students from historically marginalized backgrounds.

EDTR 5002: Advocating for Learners

This project-based course serves as a capstone experience to candidates’ time in the M.A. in Educational Transformation. It connects intersections of advocacy, policy, and teaching so that aspiring policy actors know what it means to be connected to the work of teachers and community members and teacher candidates animate their role as advocates and changemakers in larger policy structures.

Residency Courses

EDTR 5201 & 5202: Teaching Residency I & II

Teaching Residency I and II constitute a two course sequence that will integrate coursework on instructional design utilizing the framework of Understanding by Design and universal design for learning along with on-site support, supervision and classroom observations. Through face-to-face class sessions and online modules, students will develop a repertoire of instructional design strategies to engage learners and ensure student achievement. On-site classroom observations will help students implement instructional strategies learned in the course and provide formative and summative evaluative feedback.

Concentration-Specific Courses

EDTR 5203: Creating Productive Classroom Communities

This course explores research, theory, and practices focused on the facilitation of productive learning environments, and examines their usefulness and limitations in the particularities of the individual teaching context. Through studying these theories, students develop, enact, and evaluate teacher-student, student-student, teacher-family relationship-building praxis.

EDTR 5204: Child and Adolescent Development

The goal of this course is to explore research and theories on the growth, learning, and development of children and adolescents from diverse perspectives. Educators will understand fundamental theories of child development and learning, sociocultural perspectives, and how these theories affect overall well-being.

EDTR 5211: Critical Educational Linguistics in K-12 Settings

In this course, students are introduced to issues in the field of educational linguistics while mastering a working knowledge of how to apply linguistic theory and research to classroom language learning. As a result of participation in this course, students will be equipped to bring a research-based understanding of linguistics to bear as they evaluate and develop strategies to meet students’ language skills, development, and needs within the social and policy context of schools.

EDTR 5212: Second Language Acquisition, Instruction, and Assessment

This course will cover theories of language acquisition and development, including bi/multilingualism in education; factors that influence English Learners’ school learning (SLIFE, culture, previous experience, etc.); classroom-based assessments and associated issues for English Learners; and the use of quantitative data for equity in K-12 English Learner education.

EDTR 5213: Language & Literacy Development in Content Areas

The course equips students with the foundational knowledge about literacy development in the content areas. Students take Language & Literacy Development in Content Areas simultaneously with Teaching Residency II so that a dialogic relationship exists between the course and the K-12 residency classroom experience.

EDTR 5214: Emergent Bilinguals School Culture, Policy, and Learning

This course examines the role of culture in learning, particularly language learning, for students and teachers, exploring research on the interaction between cultural identity and learning in schools with particular attention to issues of equity and English. The nexus of culture, identity and learning is of crucial importance in light of increasing demographic diversity in the US school age population and the disparity in academic outcomes often experienced by culturally and linguistically diverse learners.