16 Apr2021
By Gaelle Gilbert
The professional journal for teacher education, Phi Delta Kappan recently published an article about the effects of COVID-19 on teacher education programs, delving deeper into the under reporting of these programs’ struggles caused by the pandemic. The article references AACTE’s two-part member survey that chief representatives of its member institutions responded to about how the twin crises of COVID-19 and racial injustice had affected their educator preparation programs and how they have responded to these crises. The results were included in a report by Jacqueline King released in February.
Authors Kathryn Choate, Dan Goldhaber, and Roddy Theobald underscore that one of the most relevant issues facing educator preparation programs is the cut in clinical practice available to teacher candidates. To help move these students journeys forward, several states have passed emergency legislation relaxing teacher certificate requirements. The article cites AACTE’s Member Survey to re-enforce the changes happening within these programs—namely the 188 educator preparation programs (across 47 states) that have transitioned, at least partly, to a remote learning environment in Spring 2020.
13 Apr2021
By Linda Darling-Hammond and Adam K. Edgerton
This post was originally published on April 5, 2021 by Forbes, and is part of LPI’s Learning in the Time of COVID-19 blog series, which explores strategies and investments to address the current crisis and build long-term systems capacity.
After a year of struggling with distance learning and hybrid models, parents, teachers, and policymakers across the country are concerned about “learning loss” and how to recover from the educational effects of the pandemic. While many of us resist the deficit orientation of learning loss language, these concerns are certainly legitimate: As the crisis began, millions of children, particularly those in low-income communities, lacked access to the computers and connectivity that would make in-person remote learning possible, creating even greater equity gaps than those that already existed.
Furthermore, many low-income communities and communities of color have been especially hard hit by COVID-19, with higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death, as well as greater rates of unemployment and housing and food insecurity. These traumatic events, coupled with the ongoing instances of police shootings of unarmed civilians, have led to a growing and ever more visible divide between the haves and the have-nots, with many students encountering barriers to keeping up in school and others disengaging from school altogether.
12 Apr2021
By Boyce C. Williams
In October 2019, Frostburg State University (FSU) was awarded a five-year, $4.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the Maryland Accelerates: Teacher-Leader Residency for Inclusive Excellence program. This new program addresses Absolute Priority and Competitive Preference Priority I under the Department’s Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Program. By leveraging partnerships in high-need and rural schools, this innovative teacher-leader residency program will help realize State priorities in preparing and retaining highly effective teachers in the critical shortage areas of science, mathematics, computer science, English, and elementary education.
Modeled after the recommendations of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education (also known colloquially as the Kirwan Commission), the program includes a full-year practicum, mentorship, extensive classroom observation, and research opportunities with an emphasis on culturally-responsive pedagogy, mathematical problem-solving, and computational thinking followed by an extended induction program. Graduates of the program receive a Master of Arts in Teaching degree and are mentored and supported through their early years of teaching to develop competency-based practices to move them towards achieving National Board Certification.
09 Apr2021
By Ken Futernick
I spent most of my career as a teacher educator and nothing has been more disheartening than the precipitous decline in the number of people across the country wanting to enter the teaching profession. In California, where I worked for the California State University (CSU), applications for credential programs dropped by 50% over a recent five-year period beginning about 2008. While application numbers are beginning to increase, we have a long way to go as the dwindling supply of new teachers has been a key contributor to severe teacher shortages adversely affecting students in most states.
What does this say about a democratic nation that cannot ensure that every student has access to a well-prepared teacher?
A big part of the problem, of course, is the pernicious narrative about the profession itself that causes many excellent would-be candidates to choose other career paths. In 2016, I helped found EduCorps, a systemwide teacher recruitment initiative designed to tell a more accurate and compelling story about the teaching profession. Since its inception, credential program staff at many of CSU’s 23 campuses have asked university and community college professors to nominate students they consider promising candidates for the teaching profession. These nominees have shown up in great numbers at celebration of teaching events where they hear about the rewards and the challenges of teaching from former credential students working in local schools.
25 Mar2021
By Jennifer L Parks
This article originally appeared in the University of Hawai’i News and is reprinted with permission.
A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Education professor is the recipient of the 2021 Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT) Excellence in Teaching Post-Secondary Award.
With more than 30 years of experience teaching Hawaiian language and developing programs in public and charter schools throughout the state of Hawaiʻi, Alohilani Okamura said she developed a deep respect for learning the language as a graduate student at UH Mānoa.
SWCOLT is a regional world language teachers’ organization in partnership with state teacher associations from Hawaiʻi, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. Okamura, who is in the Institute for Teacher Education (ITE) Secondary World Languages, was selected for her exceptional commitment to language education.
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.
23 Mar2021
By Jennifer Manise
The Longview Foundation is seeking candidates for the GTE Fellows Program. The program is a year-long mentored virtual fellowship that focuses on integrating global learning outcomes into coursework for preservice educators.
Under the mentorship of experts in the field of global learning, each of the selected fellows will revise an undergraduate or graduate course that they teach in an initial teacher preparation program. The revised course will include global learning outcomes that will be enacted through engaging activities, resources and assessments aimed at promoting global learning. Fellows will then pilot and assess the revised course with a class of their own teacher candidates during the academic year. Applications are due April 7, 2021.
Apply now.
23 Mar2021
By Anna Joseph, Ofelia Schepers and Kathryn Young
The widespread prevalence of trauma and subsequent impacts on student learning and behavior is well known and documented. PK-12 schools across the nation are integrating trauma-informed practices (TIP) to better respond to the needs of children who have experienced trauma. Furthermore, there are an increasing number of educator preparation programs that offer trauma training to their teacher candidates. This blog outlines one educator preparation program’s efforts to prepare its students in TIP.
The Metropolitan State University of Denver School of Education (SOE) in partnership with local non-profit Resilient Futures is integrating TIP into its entire curriculum. TIP is merged seamlessly with existing course learning objectives, ensuring that all students graduate competent to recognize and address the needs of children who have experienced trauma in their future classrooms and school settings. It is important for novice educators to have TIP integrated into their overall teacher preparation rather than required as an additional class or training to their already-crowded programs of study. With TIP integrated into course learning objectives, students understand how TIP is fundamental to all aspects of teaching and classes and not supplemental or add-on.
08 Mar2021
By JTE Insider
Listen to the recent JTE Insider podcast by the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team. This blog is available to the public, and AACTE members have free access to the articles in the JTE online archives—just log in with your AACTE profile.
This podcast interview features insights from the article “What Do Surveys of Program Completers Tell Us About Teacher Preparation Quality?,” by Kevin Bastion, Min Sun, and Heather Flynn. The article was published in the January/February issue of the Journal of Teacher Education.
25 Feb2021
By Katrina Norfleet
AACTE is pleased to announce that Teresa Foulger, Kevin Graziano, Denise Schmidt-Crawford and David Slykhuis are the recipients of the 2021 AACTE Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education. The foursome are being recognized for the development of the Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs) and for their efforts to broadly disseminate the TETCs to teacher educators. The recipients are being presented with the award at today’s virtual AACTE 73rd Annual Meeting Awards Forum.
22 Feb2021
By Jerry Berberet
The Journal for Success in High-Need Schools, is seeking articles and columns for its Volume 16, Number 2, Issue theme – “Education in a Pandemic Age: Evolution or Transformation?”
The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest and by far the most severe of several pandemics (e.g., HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola) global society has experienced in recent decades. COVID-19 has dramatically affected all sectors of education and society, including teaching and learning; how schools are structured; student, teacher, and parent/family relationships; and has thrust eLearning front and center in all aspects of education. In shuttering virtually all schools and colleges and with nearly all students “sheltering in place,” COVID-19 transformed, at least in the short term, the trajectory of the decades-long evolution of online and distance learning. As teachers scramble to develop their classes online and schools struggle to make technology more widely available, families must adjust to new realities with children at home. Already there are wider impacts on work, leisure, and family life, not to mention jobs, careers, social organization, governance, international relations, and the global economy. The timing and magnitude of these changes are open to speculation, but it appears that at some level they will be long lasting, even as the duration of COVID-19 and the likelihood of future pandemics on our complex, highly interactive Earth society are unclear.
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.
08 Feb2021
By Megan Reister, Heather K. Olson Beal, Tracy Ensor, Emily Regan Wills, Mary Ellen Cashen and Shelby Gull Laird
In Part 1 of this article, the authors talked about how as teacher preparation program professors in different areas of the United States, they managed to still provide valuable, worthwhile, and innovative professional development for their preservice educators and graduate students who are in-service teachers, despite the myriad ways in which COVID-19 derailed the spring semester.
In Part 2, the authors share the feedback from their students who participated in the virtual professional development.
We, six collaborators, banded together to provide professional development for pre- and in-service teachers’ professional learning experiences during their transition to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020) through a self-initiated professional learning community (SIPLC) (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). Adopting this widely practiced research method among teacher educators (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2013), the collaboration aimed to deepen the understanding of preservice and in-service teachers’ experiences in the SIPLC as they transitioned to remote teaching under the pandemic (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Song et al., 2020) using Zoom recordings.
01 Feb2021
By Carolyn Phenicie
AACTE congratulates the four National Teacher of the Year finalists, all of whom have earned a degree from an AACTE member institution. To view their full profiles, visit the CCSSO website.
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) announced that four exemplary educators from across the country are finalists for 2021 National Teacher of the Year:
01 Feb2021
By Megan Reister, Heather K. Olson Beal, Tracy Ensor, Emily Regan Wills, Mary Ellen Cashen and Shelby Gull Laird
In Part 1 of this article, the authors talk about how, as teacher preparation program professors in different areas of the United States, they managed to still provide valuable, worthwhile, and innovative professional development for their preservice educators and graduate students who are in-service teachers, despite the myriad ways in which COVID-19 derailed their spring semester.
Many years ago, during a class on educational administration in my [Megan Reister] master’s program, a guest speaker shared an inspirational mantra he lived by as principal of a large elementary school. He shared the quote, “Prior planning prevents poor performance!” and then went on to explain how he incorporated intentional planning, thoughtful conversations, and open communication with colleagues and staff at his school to create an atmosphere of intentionality and accountability within and outside the classrooms.
As a professor of special education and early childhood education in Ohio, that expression came to mind more than once as I experienced the tumultuous second half of a semester that no one could have predicted or planned for thanks to COVID-19 in Spring 2020. No one could have prepared for what occurred—schools closing, moving to remote teaching, working full-time from home while also managing children at home full-time without the usual supports. One could hardly be faulted for poor performance no matter how much planning happened on the fly. I could only shake my head as I thought back on that statement about planning and performance that made such an impact in my early years of teaching in early March when the news broke that the university was taking a week to figure out how to move to online teaching for the next month and then again, once plans were changed and it was determined the whole spring semester would be moved to online learning.
