Giving Compass' Take:

• The Blue Valley Unified School District in Kansas City has a teacher prep program that trains undergraduate students to be educators.

• Will teacher prep course help incentivize more students to pursue teaching careers? 

• Read about this other teacher prep program that has also seen success. 

Dylin Coburn is a junior in high school, but he’s spent a surprising amount of time at a school that’s not his, observing an art class he’s not even taking. It’s not about making more art though—it’s practice. When he gets older, Dylin wants to teach, and thanks to a forward-thinking career readiness program in his district, he’s already gaining classroom experience, learning how classes are structured and designing an art workshop he hopes to one day implement at his own school, which currently does not have an art teacher.

“Art is something that I'm really passionate about,” he explains. “It helped me through a lot of things, and I kind of want to be able to help kids through art.”

Like Dylin, senior Jada Harper hopes to be a teacher too someday, focusing on early childhood special education. Next year she will head to Chicago’s DePaul University to study education, but with a significant leg up from her future classmates: She’s spent months embedded in a preschool classroom, observing and supporting the teacher, meaning she has a good idea of what to expect when she one day has a class of her own.

Where most future teachers don’t get into classrooms until the middle or end of college, Dylin and Jada are part of a unique teacher prep program at the Blue Valley Unified School District here in this heartland suburb of Kansas City. Some students in the program work on special projects related to areas of interest, such as Dylin’s art workshop. Others move through a more traditional slate of teacher prep, logging dozens of hours creating lesson plans and trying them out with students by the time they graduate high school.

The goal, program leaders say, is to give students a chance to explore careers in a hands-on way much earlier than usual.

Read the full article about teacher prep program by Stephen Noonoo at EdSurge.