Educators and Social Responsibility: What This Means to Informed Citizenry

By Lynn M. Gangone

Educators and students are facing unprecedented times. The challenges both students and their teachers confront today vastly affects the efficacy of even the best educator’s efforts to create and foster students’ zeal for learning and to contribute to the society they will one day shape. Yet, educators must stay committed to fulfilling their social responsibility now more than ever before.

What Should Social Responsibility Look Like in the Teaching Profession?

This varies from educator to educator, so the answer to this question is complicated and multi-faceted.

Education is about opening minds, creating new knowledge. It is an expansive endeavor. In theory, education should provide us with the understanding and capacity of what it means to be a citizen of this nation and the world. Our nation’s founders understood the importance of an educated citizenry. Today, I believe that we need educators to support both a students’ academic development and citizen development.

New TAG is Committed to Urban Education

By Amanda Wilkerson and Deshawn Chapman

 In the fall of 2019, educational leaders of AACTE will have another opportunity to access and join a meaningful Topical Action Group (TAG). The Urban Education TAG is brand new and serves as a special work group committed to establishing a storehouse of information with reliable resources to bolster and practically support urban educators. Additionally, exciting programming is already underway in the form of webinars, podcasts, research dissemination, and professional networking opportunities.

The timing of the group’s formation is significant. The TAG is launching during a period in our profession wherein education is rife with concerns. It is no secret that within our field there is growing inequality experienced by

Highlights from Sept./Oct. JTE Issue

By Katrina Norfleet

The  September/October 2019 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE)  is now available online, while printed copies are arriving in the mail to subscribers around the country. Below is a summary of the articles included in Vol. 70, Issue 4, 2019:

In “Teacher Agency and Resilience in the Age of Neoliberalism,” members of the JTE editorial team, Tonya Bartell, Christine Cho, Corey Drake, Emery Petchauer, and Gail Richmond, address how the articles in this issue provide insights into ways educator preparation programs can support teachers in developing and enacting agency. They discuss how making small shifts or adaptations in everyday teaching practices can create more just and equitable teaching and learning.

In the paper, “Whiteness as a Dissonant State: Exploring  One White Male Student Teacher’s Experiences in Urban Contexts,” Stephanie Behm Cross of Georgia State University, Nermin Tosmur-Bayazit  of Fitchburg State University, and Alyssa Hadley Dunn of Michigan State University, suggest that Whiteness itself is a dissonant state. The authors argue that

Making the CASE for Equity in Schools

By Diane Angelucci

This article originally appeared in Rowan Today and is reprinted with permission.

Even in the best school districts, obstacles to equal education and opportunities can hide far below the surface

To help districts unearth and address these issues, the Center for Access, Success and Equity (CASE) in Rowan University’s College of Education has forged equity-focused research practice partnerships with several school districts—one of CASE’s three research areas. CASE is establishing research as central to the College of Education in three ways — through partnerships with districts, through grant-funded research, and through the College’s Ph.D. program.

“I can’t speak enough about our experience with CASE,” said Piera Gravenor, superintendent of Delsea Regional School District, which has worked with CASE for the last two years.

The Teacher Educator Journal Releases Top 10 Articles

By Katrina Norfleet

The Teacher Educator national peer-reviewed journal recently shared the top 10 most downloaded articles in the first three months of 2019. The most downloaded article in 2018 was “Current Issues in Teacher Education: An Interview with Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond” with 2,726 downloads. Other popular articles cover a range of topics including multicultural teacher education, perceptions of ELL students, student stress and coping, and teaching reflective practice. The full list of the top 10 articles are included in the table below.

AACTE President and CEO Lynn M. Gangone serves on Editorial Advisory Board of The Teacher Educator, a forum for promoting discussion among educators who seek to challenge existing boundaries in the field. The journal invites AACTE members to submit notable work on current

Testifying Before Congress, VCU Education Dean Urges ‘Immediate and Innovative Action’

By Brian McNeill

This article and photo originally appeared in VCU News and are reprinted with permission

Andrew Daire, dean of the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University, testified at the U.S. House Wednesday about how VCU is working to prepare high-quality, dedicated classroom teachers and encouraged Congress to support similar initiatives across the country.

“Immediate and innovative action is required to address the challenges in high-needs and low-performing schools with families living in generational poverty and disparities in student learning outcomes,” said Daire, testifying before a joint U.S. House Education and Labor Committee subcommittee hearing on “Educating our Educators: How Federal Policy Can Better Support Teachers and School Leaders.”

“The challenges faced by many of our schoolchildren, and in many of our schools, are not average and will not be met with average efforts,” Daire said in his prepared testimony. “We need to be bold and aspirational in our desires and efforts to address these challenges.”

From Education Intern to Avid Holmes Program Advocate

By Jerrica Thurman and Donna Sacco

AACTE’s Jerrica Thurman first met Donna Sacco in 2015. Sacco was one of three doctoral students from George Mason University (GMU) who worked as an AACTE education intern, assisting in advocating for high-quality preparation programs and with its marketing communications. Thurman was pleasantly surprised when she saw Sacco at AACTE’s 2019 Washington Week with her two Holmes doctoral students from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). It was during her AACTE internship that Sacco learned about the Holmes Program and determined to make a personal contribution to help diversify the teacher workforce by becoming a Holmes advocate. The following summary highlights an interview Thurman had with Sacco about her journey from an intern to a change agent in education. 

What piqued your interest in the issues of teacher diversity as a doctoral student at George Mason University and student intern at AACTE?

Before my doctoral program, I was a special educator with a master’s degree in bilingual special education. For my entire career, my focus has been on culturally and linguistically responsive instructional practices. Part of my drive came from the stories my father told me about the obstacles he experienced in his childhood as the son of Italian immigrants. He was a brilliant man but never went to college. He had one advocate who helped mentor him in appreciating the arts but had no teachers who were advocates, role models, or who understood his background. Once I began researching teacher education, I was surprised to learn that the teaching force is composed of roughly 80% white female teachers. How had I missed that obvious point? I am a white female who was teaching mostly boys of

CCSSO’s Latest Report Offers Key Recommendations for Ensuring Equity for Students with Disabilities

By Jerrica Thurman

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) recently released Ensuring an Equitable Opportunity: Providing a High-Quality Education for Students with Disabilities, a report that details policy and practice considerations around individualized education plans chiefs and state education leaders can reflect upon and implement in ensuring all students, especially students with disabilities, have access to a high-quality education. Students with disabilities are provided with an individualized education program (IEP) to ensure they receive specially-designed instruction and related services. The IEP is the primary mechanism for ensuring students with disabilities receive the right educational content and rigor at the right moment in their education. 

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 marked an historic win for civil rights when the doors to public education were opened for all students. For the first time, children with disabilities had access to a public education and the hope of a productive and fulfilling future. Today, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 (IDEA), the most recent iteration of that law, aims to deliver on that promise; namely, that all students with disabilities have equitable access to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment.

A Conversation with Donald Easton-Brooks on Culturally Responsive Practice

By Katrina Norfleet

AACTE board member Donald Easton-Brooks is widely known as a scholar of educational policy and culturally responsive teaching. This year, he released his book Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color. In a recent Q&A with AACTE President and CEO Lynn M. Gangone, Easton-Brooks talked about the book and how his research shows diversifying the teaching profession will ultimately improve student’s success. The following summary highlights the conversation.

How would you describe the concept of ethnic matching and its importance to student learning?

What ethnic matching initially suggests is that teachers of color can play a significant role in enhancing the academic experience of students of color. As this research and other research progress, findings have shown that teachers of color can play a significant role in also enhancing the academic experience of white students and can assist in enhancing a more culturally responsive profession as a whole.  Therefore, the concept and research related to the concept suggest that we need to diversify teacher education. Mainly because as our communities are becoming more diverse, we are seeing our public schools also becoming more diverse. Yet what is happening is that our educator profession is not growing at a similar rate as these communities of students. The research around the concepts shows that perceived knowledge or knowledge from a preceptive culturally lens can play a role in students’ understanding of concepts, learning, and processing of information. This often can lead to these students being misinterpreted by teachers and feeling somehow misunderstood by teachers if they do not have that cultural lens to understand them. That is what teachers of color can bring to the table that can be of assistance to educational systems.

New Initiative To Advance Teacher and Principal Preparation Grounded in the Science of Learning

By Gretchen Wright

Research shows that teachers are the number one in-school factor affecting student outcomes and principals are the number two factor. One important metric for those outcomes is how well and how equitably our nation’s diverse students are able to navigate our increasingly global and technologically complex world, where skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and being able to apply knowledge in a range of contexts are crucial to success. Today, Learning Policy Institute and Bank Street Graduate School of Education have announced the launch of the Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab), a new initiative to help educator preparation programs ensure that new teachers and leaders are able to provide all k-12 students with the kind of deeper learning that helps them develop those skills. 

EdPrepLab brings together 15 of the nation’s leading teacher and principal preparation programs to collaborate on further developing and documenting models for preparation that equip educators to advance  deeper learning and equity, and that can inform  other programs across the nation. The initiative will also support research to improve preparation programs and work with policymakers at federal, state, and local levels to help leverage policies that encourage the use of research-based practices that ensure new teachers and school leaders are well-equipped to provide deeper learning and to build the next generation of equitable schools and instructional education practices.

“Our world has changed significantly since the U.S. education system was first developed, and students today need an education that supports and prepares them for that more diverse, technology-driven, knowledge-based society,” said Learning Policy Institute President Linda Darling-Hammond. “That means we need to prepare teachers and school leaders to provide this kind of education. Fortunately, we have research to guide the way. There is a wealth of new knowledge about the science of learning and development, how social and emotional skills support academic learning, and how to ensure that students really understand what they have learned.”

UT to Launch Program to Support Diversity in Teaching

By University of Tennessee News

This article and photo originally appeared on the University of Tennessee News website and are reprinted with permission. 

A new program aimed at increasing the number of licensed teachers from diverse backgrounds will launch this summer in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences.

The program, Increasing Teacher Equity to Address Community High Needs (I-TEACH), is funded by a Tennessee Higher Education Commission grant recently awarded to the college to support diversity in education and to fill critical teaching shortages across the state. The two-year program supports 12 eligible teacher candidates for 33 hours of coursework and clinical practice. Candidates who complete the program will graduate with a master’s degree in teacher education.

Higher Education Equity: Learning Experiences Via Multiple Pathways

By Jamie Hipp

The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.

Teacher educators love to talk. We lecture, provide oral directions, read passages aloud, ask countless questions, and verbally redirect. In addition to the auditory quality of teaching, we have also mastered the visual. Anchor charts, word walls, and mnemonic device posters are endemic in teacher preparation classrooms today as we dutifully prepare the next generation of teachers. Graphic organizers, mind maps, color-coding, and visual aids are also ubiquitous. In the never-ending struggle to meet the needs of all learners, the partiality toward auditory and visual aspects of teaching is biased against students (both adult learner and their future PK-12 students) who do not prefer to learn within those modalities.

New AACTE Research-to-Practice Video Series on Special Education Now Available

By Brandon R.T. Frost

AACTE is excited to share the latest videos of its Research-to-Practice Spotlight Series on Special Education this spring. The video interviews feature faculty, students, and school district leaders who work with Portland State University (Portland, OR) and Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, OH) to implement extensive clinical preparation for teacher candidates pursuing careers in general and special education. The link to view the video series is now available!

In my recent blog post, I shared a brief introduction to the new Research-to-Practice Spotlight Series. The videos highlight exemplary practices of the two teacher preparation programs for ensuring their candidates are ready to work with all students, including students with disabilities.  Though different in many programmatic elements to address their local contexts, each university designed their programs to equip all teachers with the skills necessary to instruct the diverse needs of their student population.

The Master’s Program in Secondary Dual Education at Portland State University features dual certification in both general and special education at the secondary level. Entrants to the program come with an undergraduate degree in a content area and engage in two years of extensive and increasing involvement in clinical settings in secondary schools. Principals consider the program transformative in terms of the skills graduates bring to their classrooms.

Washington Updates: Student Aid, Brown vs. Board of Education 65 Years Later

By Jane E. West

This blog post is written by AACTE consultant Jane West and is intended to provide update information. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.

Today marks the 65^th Anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court landmark decision that established the principle that separate is not equal. How far have we come? Much to contemplate here. You will see below that a House education panel spoke loud and clear on that topic: we have a long way to go. 

1. Trump Proposes Taking More Funds from Pell Grants – to Fund Moonshot? Huh?

This week President Trump submitted to Congress some revisions to his original budget request. Notably, he took back the proposed cut he originally made for Special Olympics (after great bipartisan outrage); but he also added a new cut in the form of an additional $1.9 billion to the Pell grant surplus. It appears that the Pell cut would go toward funding the President’s proposed 2024 NASA moonshot! Education advocates were outraged. As Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education put it: “Do I want to make college more expensive to fund space travel to the moon and Mars?” Hmmmm …

The President had already requested a $2 billion cut in Pell funding.  So the total $3.9 billion recission would result in the Pell surplus being exhausted by 2022! This request is likely to be ignored on Capitol Hill, as no one—Republican or Democrat—ever really contemplated cutting Special Olympics.  And while the Pell Surplus has been modestly raided in the past, a $3.9 billion cut is highly unlikely. 

CEEDAR Webinar Highlights Culturally Responsive Education

By Erica D. McCray

The CEEDAR Center will present Culturally responsive education: A course enhancement module (CEM) designed to ensure every educator meets the needs of each learner on Tuesday, May 21, 1:00 p.m. (ET). Registration is now open.

The CEEDAR Center, an OSEP-funded technical assistance center is proud to collaborate with national organizations, technical assistance centers, and stakeholders across the country to ensure that every student with a disability has an equitable opportunity to achieve. Teacher and leader development through policy, preparation, and program improvement is central to our mission. Our partnership with AACTE provides an opportunity to support AACTE’s strategic focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.