Archive for September, 2016

Congress Is Back! Join a Federal Update Webinar

As Congress returns from recess, so do the Federal Update webinars offered each month for AACTE members. This month’s update will be held September 20 and 21.

Each month, I’ll update you on what is happening in Washington, DC, related to educator preparation, and discuss how you can engage in advocacy for the profession. To accommodate a variety of schedules, each set of webinars is offered on consecutive days of the week at different times of the day.

AACTE to Offer Regional Workshops in 2017 for Quality Assurance Work

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In support of AACTE’s mission to build capacity for high-quality educator preparation programs, we are excited to announce plans for new regional workshops focused on performance assessment, continuous improvement, and quality assurance.

Three of these Quality Support Workshops will be offered in 2017, tentatively scheduled for spring in the south, summer in the midwest, and fall in the northwest. Specific details will be announced this fall.

Sept. 13 Webinar to Explore University-District Partnerships for Principal Preparation

On Tuesday, September 13, AACTE will host the second free webinar in its series on partnerships for principal and supervisor preparation. Please join us 12:30–1:30 p.m. EDT for “Successful University–District Partnerships to Prepare School Principals.”

This event will feature participants in two of The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative districts, Hillsborough County Public Schools (FL) and Tulsa Public Schools (OK), and two partner universities in Florida, Saint Leo University and the University of South Florida. Because the Tulsa district is working within a slightly different framework to assist principals via role and structural changes, its participation lends an “outside” voice to this webinar.

Call for JTE Manuscripts: Historical and Contemporary Issues in Teacher Education

The editors of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) invite manuscripts for a special issue on historical and contemporary issues in teacher education. Manuscripts are due February 1, 2017, and the editors anticipate that the issue will be published later that year.

As is the case in many other fields, historical events and issues in education have the potential to inform contemporary ones, and it is clear that the field would benefit from attention to the connections between the past and present.

NCTQ–Brookings Report Offers Gloomy Outlook on Teacher Diversity

A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and the Brookings Institution explores the teacher diversity shortages that persist throughout the United States. To illustrate the current imbalance between teacher and student demographics, the report notes that in order to reach uniformity between the two populations, some 1 million White teachers currently in the profession would need to be replaced with approximately 300,000 African American teachers and over 600,000 Hispanic teachers.

Pointing to problems that exist throughout the teacher pipeline, the authors predict that resolving the imbalance in teacher demographics will continue to be challenging. As the nation’s diversity continues to grow, so too will the pressure and struggle to address teacher workforce diversity, they say, requiring a long-term approach to improving it.

August 2016 State Policy Recap

Ed Prep Matters is pleased to bring you this special feature on state policy and AACTE state chapter activity. For similar recap articles from earlier months, browse the “State Directions” section of the blog.

Overview of State Policy Activity

In August, legislatures actively met in only two states, Illinois and Alaska; most other states’ legislative sessions had adjourned. No educator preparation-related bills were introduced during the month, although California enacted one bill into law that will allow city or county boards of education to issue a temporary teaching certificate to an individual with an existing certificate, including one from out of state.