CEHD Faculty Detail Vision for Future Ready Teachers
January 26, 2026
By Kristine Hojnicki
The statistics are stark. Across the United States, more than 86% of public schools report difficulty filling teaching roles. In Virginia, nearly 3,700 teaching positions went unfilled in a single year.
This is the reality that George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) is working to address. As the alma mater for one-third of all teachers and nearly half of all administrators in Northern Virginia, CEHD is launching Future Ready Teachers, a bold initiative that will have a positive impact on the educator pipeline.
Audra Parker
For faculty leaders Audra Parker and Kristien Zenkov, this isn’t just about filling vacancies in schools across the region. It’s about fundamentally redesigning how teachers are trained, supported, and retained.
Removing barriers, building residencies
Parker, the Director of the Office of Teacher Preparation, identified the first hurdle to pursuing an education degree: the staggering financial and personal costs of becoming a teacher.
“Not only do our students have to contend with the tuition and cost of living expenses typically associated with college, but they also complete unpaid field work as part of their preparation, which can limit work opportunities,” she explained. In fact, aspiring teachers face a gauntlet of hidden costs along their journey—including licensure exam fees, travel to schools, supplies, and a capstone, or full-time, unpaid student teaching experience. “Many have to work multiple jobs in addition to their schoolwork and extensive fieldwork.”
The Future Ready Teachers initiative meets this challenge head-on.
“The guiding mission is to create a pathway to support individuals who want to become teachers but might not otherwise enter the profession due to associated costs,” Parker said. “The goal is for them to start their careers debt-free and profession-ready as a result of high-quality field work and internship experiences.”
Through donor support, the program will provide full-ride scholarships and, crucially, cost-of-living stipends. This financial stability, Parker noted, is what unlocks the program’s most effective tool: the residency-based experience.
“We’re trying to remove the financial barriers so that students can spend as much high-quality time in the field as possible from day one, culminating in a final year-long residency,” she said. “Residency models are a well-researched, well-documented pathway in terms of their positive impact on teacher retention.”
The Future Ready Teachers initiative also directly addresses another core goal for CEHD: diversifying the profession. As Virginia’s largest and most diverse university, “George Mason has a real opportunity in terms of impacting the diversity of our teaching pipeline because of our student body,” Parker added.
A partnership-oriented focus
Once the financial barriers are lowered, what does that high-quality training look like?
Kristien Zenkov
For Zenkov, Secondary Education professor, the answer is partnership. He clarified that George Mason’s approach is the antithesis of just lecturing students on theory and hoping for the best.
“We long ago jettisoned the ‘cannon method’ of making matches for our students’ clinical experiences: we don’t shoot students out of a cannon into the field and hope they land somewhere safely,” he said. “We’re intentional with our partner schools and mentor selection.”
This intentionality is the core of George Mason’s clinical, in-school preparation. “Our students are as close to as embedded in classrooms as they possibly can be with mentors who are specifically selected to work with them,” he explained.
Zenkov and Parker, whose work focuses on building strong Professional Development Schools (PDSs) with districts like Fairfax, Prince William, and Alexandria, see this as a fundamental shift in teacher education.
“There has been a significant shift in the field towards a clinical- and partnership-oriented focus on educating educators,” Zenkov said. “We recognize that we are not just preparing folks at the university to send out into schools but that our school-based teacher educators are our partners.”
This approach creates a virtuous cycle: “When school-based educators become mentors, not only do our students benefit, but the educator benefits, and the kids benefit,” Zenkov said.
Support lasting beyond graduation
With one in three teachers planning to leave the profession within two years of graduation, both Parker and Zenkov stress that their support cannot end after these new teachers have a diploma in hand. That’s why the Future Ready Teachers initiative was also intentionally designed to support retention by providing coaching and mentoring well into a new teacher’s career.
“The program also creates a potent, cross-institutional mentoring model where students receive coaching from someone who knows them from their teacher preparation experience and can work in collaboration with their school division,” Parker detailed.
It’s what she calls “a robust shared induction experience” or building a vital bridge from their time being a student to then becoming a confident, career-long educator.
This comprehensive vision—removing financial barriers to enable deep, partnership-based residencies that contribute to long-term success rooted in long-term support—is how CEHD plans to positively impact the field of education.
“Future Ready Teachers makes becoming a teacher and staying in the profession an attainable goal,” Parker concluded.