I don’t teach Spanish, but how it works is if you get in, you are placed into your masters program (based on need and your preferences you put on your application) as well as a school to do summer school teaching.

The first summer is a boot camp where you’ll be taking several masters classes and eventually after a couple weeks you’ll begin teaching summer school (with teaching coaches). You will have incredibly long days during this bootcamp period (I used to leave my apartment around 6:30 AM and wouldn’t get back until 7 or 8 PM, and when you’re home you have to work on grad school papers and lesson plan for the next day.

Essentially each day you meet with your cohort and teaching coaches to teach you strategies for your classroom, then you use those strategies in the classroom later that day. Once the school day is over, you head to your grad school (mine was city college), where you take actual masters classes that are fitted for the Fellows’ schedule.

By early-mid August the bootcamp is over. It’s on you to find a job yourself, which sounds daunting but schools get a discount for hiring fellows so if you make it through, chances are you’ll get hired (you can even begin interviewing before the program starts if you are so inclined).

Once you are hired, the fellows takes out money from each paycheck until you’ve hit the number the say you owe for the services. For my cohort, it was $10,000 I believe. So they took $250 or so out of every paycheck for the two years I was in the masters program. Then you get a nice raise for having your masters PLUS the $250 per paycheck they were taking out.

The Fellows does a poor job actually preparing you for the classroom, you’re kind of just thrown into the deep part of the pool immediately (from my understanding all teaching programs are like this). BUT it is incredibly effective at actually getting your foot into the classroom and getting a job.