ADEYEMI STEMBRIDGE, PhD
Brilliant Teaching Residencies
Empower Your Teachers. Energize Your Students.
A Brilliant Teaching Residency is job-embedded professional learning in which educators design a standards-aligned, learning experience, teach it with students, study what happened, and refine their practice together.
The Residency Cycle
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DESIGN
Teachers bring the standards and content they actually teach. Through the careful consideration of the five planning questions, teams clarify the learning they want, establish targets for rigor, anticipate students’ emotional experience, name indicators of engagement, and identify opportunities to respond to particular learners.
TEACH
The team brings the plan into a real classroom. The lesson may connect to an ongoing unit or introduce new learning. The work becomes visible, testable, and grounded in the students’ experience.
DEBRIEF + REFINE
Educators examine how students responded: what supported engagement, what sparked connections and understanding, and what they would revise. Reflection is anchored in collaborative experience rather than abstraction.
A SHARED PLANNING LANGUAGE
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The Culturally Responsive Education mental model brings six themes and five planning questions into conversation.
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Participants leave having designed, tested, studied, and strengthened an actual learning experience together—in addition to new ideas for how to approach the craft of teaching.
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WHAT THE RESIDENCY BUILDS
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Greater coherence among standards, rigor, assessment, engagement, and responsiveness
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A practical way to make Equity integral to instructional design, not an addition after the lesson is built
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Stronger professional judgment through collaborative inquiry into real-time classroom evidence
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Shared language that supports instructional coaching, team planning, and continued improvement
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Learning experiences in which vulnerable learners have meaningful on-ramps to access, contribute, and flourish​​
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FAMILIAR PRIORITIES, DEEPER PRACTICE
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The residency can align with district priorities such as standards-based planning, instructional rigor, culturally responsive practice, student engagement, formative assessment, PLC learning, and coaching. Its distinctive contribution is to connect these priorities inside one lived cycle of design, enactment, evidence, and reflection.
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​​​​​​​​​FLEXIBLE BY DESIGN
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Typically three days
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One school, multiple schools, or cross-school cohort
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Includes the Brilliant Teaching app to capture, develop, and carry teachers’ thinking forward
Download Brilliant Teaching Residency Overview 1-Pager...
From Instructional Design to Student Experience...
The Family Narrative was a culturally responsive learning experience designed with a team of 4th-grade teachers. It's described in Chapter 1 of Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom (2020). Students interviewed family members, uncovered themes within their families’ stories, and brought those themes into conversation with the academic content of the classroom. The project offers a glimpse of what a residency is ultimately designed to help educators do: create rigorous learning experiences in which students’ identities, relationships, and cultural fluencies become meaningful resources for engagement and learning.
Adeyemi Stembridge, PhD
Dr. Adeyemi (Yemi) Stembridge works as a thought partner, not an evaluator. He creates the conditions for educators to think critically, creatively, and artfully about what meaningful learning requires of them and of their students. He is the author of three books and creator of the Brilliant Teaching app. He's conducted professional development for K-12 teachers and taught in teacher-education programs for more than two decades.
TEACHER COACH
There was so much time allotted to discussion, reflection, application. I appreciated how Dr. Stembridge chunked the new learning into smaller pieces and allowed ample time for collaboration with colleagues.
SCHOOL DISTRICT PROFESSIONAL LEARNING LEADER
Yemi helped us internalize the need to understand, validate, and care more deeply about our students.
TEACHER/ELA COACH
I really appreciated the five planning questions and they changed the way I do things. I focus more now on what I want students to know and be able to do 5 years from now so that points me more in the direction and thinking about project based learning and subject area integration.
