26 Mar2021
By AACTE
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) released today its new video series featuring promising practices for recruiting and retaining male teachers of color. AACTE created the Black and Hispanic/Latino Male Teacher Initiative Networked Improvement Community (NIC), which included a 5-year study by 10 AACTE member institutions that implemented improvement science to address the shortage crisis of Black and Hispanic/Latino profession-ready male teachers. Key findings from their research are featured in the video case studies, where the NIC participants present their experiences and lessons learned. NIC members describe effective ways for reducing barriers, developing partnerships, building recruitment pathways, providing mentorship, and offering faculty training to diversify the profession.
25 Mar2021
By Dawn Williams
Howard University is pleased to announce its recent endorsement by the College Board to host an Advanced Placement Summer Institute in 2021. The Howard University School of Education is committed to increasing the diversity of AP educators and high school students enrolled in these courses. APSI@Howard will offer 2 cohorts for new and experienced AP teachers during the weeks of July 19-23, 2021 and July 26-30, 2021.
Our virtual AP Summer Institute will bring part of the Howard experience to AP teachers worldwide. Throughout the institute, educators will receive intensive training on the curriculum and teaching methods of AP courses while also being exposed to modules around implicit bias and anti-racist teaching and pedagogical approaches. Each workshop will include an experiential learning opportunity related to the field with the intent of modeling instruction. The workshops will allow teachers the opportunity to interact with colleagues and discuss concerns surrounding the AP courses they will teach. Please feel free to pass this information along to school and district leaders as well as high school teachers.
APSI @ Howard University is now accepting registrations.
July 19-23, 2021 Week 1 registration
July 26-30, 2021 Week 2 registration
Dawn Williams is the Dean of the Howard University School of Education.
16 Mar2021
By Candace Johnson and Michael Douglas
Houston Endowment has awarded Prairie View A&M University’s Whitlowe R. Green College of Education (WRGCOE) one of the college’s largest grants in its 141-year history. The foundation is investing $1.5 million in the College to support PVAMU’s Educator Preparation Program, increasing the number of qualified teachers of color and preparing the educators for long-term success. The grant is part of $20M in funds the Houston Endowment awarded to several Houston area organizations committed to making racial equity and social justice in Houston a reality.
15 Mar2021
By Nicole Dunn
AACTE is honored to welcome three panelists from member institution Rowan University to lead its next webinar in the Combating Racism in Educator Preparation Series. For this installment, Monika Shealey, Shelley Zion, and Beatrice Carey, who are among those leading the creation and implementation of Rowan’s DEI certificate program, will teach participants to tune into their critical consciousness to sustain a lifelong commitment to addressing structural oppression.
The Critical Consciousness in Educator Preparation webinar will take place on Monday, March 22, 1:00-2:15pm EST. In this interactive webinar, attendees will learn and practice several foundational strategies based on the certificate program modules. Whatever your role and wherever you are on the lifelong path of being a genuinely antiracist, abolitionist, and intersectional educator, you will benefit from this webinar as either a starting or reflective framework for the individual educator to live and promulgate these values through the field.
15 Mar2021
By Danna Demezier
AACTE presented a Deeper Dive session on February 24, 2021 at its 73rd Annual Meeting, “Leading in the Time of Crisis: Responding to COVID-19 and Social Justice Movements.” This panel discussion, moderated by AACTE’s Vice President of Research, Policy, & Advocacy Jacqueline Rodriguez, explored the leadership responses of three education deans to the national and racial pandemic. Although the issues raised were not easy to navigate, each dean highlighted specific strategies and intentional efforts made at their respective institution, which demonstrated the keen ability to lead with justice, compassion, and action. In listening to their responses, I noted that each response matched one of John C. Maxwell’s quote for leadership success, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”
Jacqueline Rodriguez described the deans as equity-minded leaders who start off with empathy and maintain their efforts through action.
12 Mar2021
By John McDonald
This article originally appeared in Ampersand, the UCLA Ed & IS online magazine, and is reprinted with permission.
The Center for the Transformation of Schools at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies is launching a new research initiative to inform and strengthen efforts to increase the racial, cultural and linguistic diversity of educators in California.
The project will bring together expert researchers and K-12 and higher education representatives from a variety of backgrounds to examine and identify the factors that fuel the gap in the racial identity of California’s educators and the students they serve. The research will produce an evidence-based landscape study of the challenge, as well as additional research and policy briefs that build public awareness and set forth strategies and models for state and local efforts to increase the diversity of the education workforce. The project is funded by a grant from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a national effort to increase educator diversity.
09 Mar2021
By E. Wyatt Gordon
Learner-centered design (LCD) has become a key component of digital products and platforms; curriculum and lesson planning; and non-didactic pedagogical approaches. This paradigm foregrounds the needs of learners by meeting learners where they are. LCD proposes that all designed environments should be built around the goals, needs, activities and educational contexts of users. In essence, LCDs allow for the incorporation of the whole learner by using their preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and interests as assets that can be leveraged to strengthen learning experiences.
08 Mar2021
By Jacqueline Rodriguez
Calling all educators! Your review and your voice is requested. AACTE is proud to work collaboratively with the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in the Learning First Alliance coalition. Our colleagues at NASSP, alongside their Board of Directors recently stated its intent to adopt two new position statements on LGBTQ+ Students and Educators and Supporting Principals as Leaders of Special Education—and your feedback is critical. Public comments are open now through March 31.
05 Mar2021
By Janel George
This article originally appeared on the Learning Policy Institute blog and is reprinted with permission.
When Congress passed the mammoth $2.3 trillion federal funding legislation—the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—last December, most of the press focused on the package’s much-needed COVID-19 relief funds and the narrowly averted government shutdown. But nested within the legislation is game-changing language that removes a long-standing obstacle to states and school districts fulfilling Brown v. Board of Education’s promise of eliminating separate and unequal schools. Effective January 1, 2021, there is no longer a prohibition on the use of federal school transportation funds to support school integration.
25 Feb2021
By Jacqueline E. King, Ph.D.
In October 2020, AACTE invited the chief representatives of its member institutions to complete a survey on how the twin crises of COVID-19 and racial injustice had affected their educator preparation programs and how they have responded to these crises. AACTE conducted a similar survey in April 2020, asking members about the immediate impact of COVID-19 on their educator preparation programs. A new report, released during the 2021 Annual Meeting, summarizes results from both surveys, tracking the evolving response of EPPs to these twin crises.
Key findings include the following:
25 Feb2021
By Katrina Norfleet
AACTE is pleased to announce Bryan A. Brown’s Science in the City: Culturally Relevant STEM Education, as the recipient of the 2021 AACTE Outstanding Book Award. Brown is being presented with the award at today’s virtual AACTE 73rd Annual Meeting Awards Forum.
Science in the City: Culturally Relevant STEM Education, published by Harvard Education Press in 2019, examines how language and culture impact effective science teaching. In the book, Brown argues that teachers need to understand how cultural issues intersect with the fundamental principles of learning, and that science education can thrive if it is connected to students’ culture, backgrounds, identities, and language.
22 Feb2021
By LaMarriol Smith
Educator preparation providers (EPPs) at six minority serving institutions (MSIs) across the United States selected to participate in Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity’s (BranchED) National Teacher Preparation Transformation Center will undergo an immersion process aimed at producing highly effective and diverse teachers.
Institutions comprising BranchED’s National Teacher Preparation Transformation Center’s Cohort 2 include Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, AL, Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, CA, Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas, University of La Verne in La Verne, CA., Virginia State University in Petersburg, VA, and West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. The pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade (PK-12) school district partners for these respective institutions also participate in the Transformation Center.
22 Feb2021
By Weade James
AACTE recognizes the challenges that many of our members are facing because of the recent winter storms. We believe that your safety and well-being are most important. As such, we are extending the application deadline for the Consortium for Research-Based and Equitable Assessments (CREA). The new deadline to apply is March 5 at 11:59 p.m. EST.
We appreciate the overwhelming interest that have been expressed to join the Consortium and hope that this extension will provide much needed respite to those impacted by widespread power and utility outages, and other challenges to their everyday needs. Given the new deadline, all applicants will be notified of their application decision on March 22, 2021.
Please direct any questions about the Call for Applications to me at wjames@aacte.org.
18 Feb2021
By Christina Sneed
“The 1619 Project” Annual Meeting Deeper Dive session on Friday, February 26, 11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. features Mary Elliott, curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and Christina Sneed, high school AP English teacher in University City Schools (outside of St. Louis, MO) who taught The 1619 Project and authored the curriculum resources for The Pulitzer Center’s 1857 Project. Inspired by The 1619 Project (which reframes U.S. history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the historical narrative), The 1857 Project examines the Dred Scott decision and the Lincoln-Douglass Debate. In this article, Sneed shares insight into her experience teaching The 1619 Project to higher schoolers and how educators can successfully implement it across curriculum.
I’ve been sharing my approach to teaching with the New York Times’ 1619 Project and was disturbed to read an article where Rodriguez (2021) explained that Republican lawmakers in five states (one in which I live) are introducing legislation to “punish schools that provide lessons derived from this project.” Unfortunately, we’ve seen this strategy used throughout history as a method to manipulate national memory. It forces reflection on the quandary, “Who gets to write history?” The answer is rooted in white supremacy. Recollect America’s Reconstruction period when the United Daughters of the Confederacy distorted the narrative surrounding who won the Civil War by using propaganda, monuments, and education-based indoctrination. They created state-sanctioned counter narratives that still plague America. Recently, Republicans used this tactic to establish the 1776 Commission in opposition to the 1619 Project. Such acts stem from fear that, if average Americans learn accurate accounts of history—without white washing, omission, erasure—white men will lose power. They fear teachers will inform students of America’s ugliest parts and sell a version of history that negatively depicts certain groups of people in order to create ”heroes” and “patriots” in others (what they’ve been guilty of for centuries).
13 Feb2021
By Katrina Norfleet
Findings show that in the public school system nationwide, only 7% of teachers, 11% of principals, and 3% of superintendents are Black. In the following Yahoo Finance Live video interview, AACTE Dean in Residence Leslie Fenwick explores this topic. She discusses the impact desegregation of public schools has had on the decline of the Black teacher pipeline and what steps should be taken to reverse the trend.
Watch the video.
