Happy Nice Mall

When Jesse Solomon ’91 first started teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1990s, he was overwhelmed. “I had 25 students working at eight different grade levels; some were learning English, some were in individual education plans,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for this level of complexity.” Fortunately, there was a senior teacher in the next room. “Every day I went before school and copied what he wrote on the board. He would tell me what he was going to do that day and how he would think about the whole curriculum,” she recalls. “This is how I learned to be a teacher.”

In 2003, after teaching high school math for a decade, Solomon replicated this experience on a larger scale by co-founding the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), which helps new teachers become effective urban educators. As executive director of the nonprofit Boston Excellence Plan (BPE), Solomon oversees the program with two charter schools in Roxbury, a densely populated, low-income Boston neighborhood that is diverse and multilingual. He leads a network of teachers at Dudley Neighborhood School (K–5) and Dearborn STEM Academy (6–12), many of whom come through BTR. “Being a lone wolf and being a great teacher is not an option,” Solomon says. “Building networks is a necessary part of the job.”

Solomon grew up in Cambridge, where his mother, Vicki, was a school librarian and father, Frank Solomon, an MIT biology professor (now emeritus). While at MIT, where she majored in mathematics, her interest in urban studies inspired her to create a course on town dress politics. Despite earning a master’s degree from the Harvard Institute of Education, she found she needed more targeted training to teach in city schools.

Modeled after residency in medicine, BTR guides teachers from one-on-one interactions to small group lessons and whole classes. Mentors coach them as they practice first with other adults and then with students.

The goal is what Solomon calls “ambitious teaching” that is both “challenging and engaging” so that students enjoy learning and are challenged to do their best. BTR has trained more than 700 teachers, half of whom are teachers of color, and has helped create a network of dozens of other teacher residency programs across the country. This year, Solomon watched Dearborn’s first students to graduate from college. “Clearly or not, our country teaches that not everyone has to be smart,” Solomon says. “At BTR, we aim to teach a mindset that holds everyone in the classroom accountable for excellence, and we empower teachers with the skills needed to push for that.”