What should rural teachers know about a community before they are asked to teach its children?
That question should be central to rural teacher preparation. Too often, preparation programs treat rural teaching as a variation on general practice instead of work shaped by specific communities, relationships, and assets. Local context greatly affects how rural teachers build trust, plan instruction, and engage with families. Candidates need preparation that helps them recognize both the demands and the strengths of rural teaching before they enter the classroom.
Dr Devon Brenner
Dr. Devon Brenner understands that need from years of work in rural teacher education. She is the lead author of Teaching in Rural Places, 2nd Edition, a textbook designed for preservice and beginning teachers in traditional and alternative preparation programs, as well as new rural teachers in induction and mentoring programs.
The book invites teachers to think deeply about rurality and what it means to live, teach, learn, and thrive in rural communities.
“If we act like where people live and the context in which they’re learning doesn’t matter, that’s just not the case,” Brenner said. “Students are in schools, and schools are in communities.”
The book began with a practical gap she and her coauthors identified in the field.
“We, in our own work, wanted a tool that we could use to talk to preservice teachers about what it means specifically to be preparing to teach in a rural school. Geography is often not a part of those conversations and we think it should be,” said Brenner.
Rural schools educate students in communities with distinct histories, assets, economies, and relationships, yet teacher preparation has often focused more heavily on non-rural contexts.
“If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find countless urban teacher preparation programs and almost no rural teacher preparation programs,” said Brenner.
That preparation gap becomes more critical when candidates bring assumptions about rural life into their programs.
“There’s a misconception that the only way to be successful is to leave a rural place,” Brenner said. “Negative assumptions about rural places pervade our culture at large, but also our teacher preparation programs.”
Those assumptions can obscure the real opportunities rural teaching offers. Brenner described rural schools as places where teachers can build deep relationships with families and make classroom decisions that connect to local knowledge. Those connections can support stronger instruction and a sense of community for both students and teachers.
Rural teaching also brings specific responsibilities that candidates should understand before they enter the classroom, such as the prominent presence teachers can have and how they are often asked to take on roles that larger systems often distribute across departments.
“What’s your professional responsibility for privacy for your students when you are seeing families and kids at the grocery store, in your church, at the soccer field?” Brenner said. “If you’re the only person in the science department, how do you prepare for that?”
These are the types of questions the book seeks to answer with concrete strategies. For Brenner, preparation means giving candidates ways to help them connect their practice to students’ daily lives, such as community walks.
That work starts from a simple premise: teaching happens in context. For example, in some rural schools, teachers are asked to plan across multiple grade levels, standards, and developmental stages at the same time. Multi-grade teaching techniques the book covers, such as using a shared topic with texts at different reading levels and creating routines that help students work independently, can help multi-grade teachers prepare lessons more efficiently.
However, the conditions that create unique demands also create distinctive strengths, which deserve equal attention. In the case of multi-grade classrooms, Brenner described how older students can practice self-directed learning as well as provide peer tutoring to younger students, building their own leadership skills in the process. In her own family’s experience with multi-grade classrooms, she saw those strengths firsthand.
“It was really a powerful experience in terms of both the teacher and student relationship, but then also in terms of fostering independence for the learner,” Brenner said.
Place-conscious preparation also connects directly to retention. Brenner pointed out that teachers who understand rural communities, build relationships, and develop a sense of connection to place may have a better chance of staying, especially if they come to rural schools from nonrural backgrounds.
“If teachers have tools that help them build relationships and put down roots, and they know what to expect, that might help address teacher turnover,” said Brenner.
Teaching in Rural Places, 2nd Edition offers program directors, faculty, curriculum leaders, and novice teachers actionable guidance for making rural realities central to teacher preparation and classroom practice.
This focus aligns with the Marzano Research team’s deep work in rural education. Rural success begins with local context, practical support, and respect for the many assets these communities hold. This blog begins a series of conversations with authors of specific chapters who will share further insights for preparing and supporting rural teachers.
About Dr. Devon Brenner and Teaching in Rural Places
Dr. Devon Brenner is director of the Social Science Research Center and professor of teacher education at Mississippi State University and leads NSF-funded work on rural teacher persistence and retention across rural-serving institutions. Her research focuses on rural teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention and rural education policy and she is the past-president of the National Rural Education Association. She is a co-author of Teaching in Rural Places. The recently-published second edition builds from the first edition (published in 2020) with updated data and statistics, more practitioner stories with broader geographic and disciplinary variety, a new chapter on student and teacher wellbeing, and expanded coverage of AI and other education technology.
This blog is for educational and informational purposes only and does not necessarily represent a Marzano Research endorsement of any product or program.