Month: October 2021

GLOBAL
Association for Teacher Education in Europe [ATEE]. The programme of the ATEE 2021 Conference – online on 28 & 29 October – is now live!

London Review of Education. Call for Papers: Rising to the challenge of teacher education to prepare teachers for today’s world [Deadline for draft papers: 30 June 2022]

Sydney Morning Herald. ‘The joy of teaching’: Plan to find 3700 new teachers to plug school shortage   The NSW Department of Education will promote the joy of teaching, poach teachers from overseas and identify regional students suitable for the profession while they are still in high school as part of a multi-pronged plan to avert a looming teacher shortage.

The Guardian [Nigeria]. Improved teacher education will solve problems in the sector, says provost   Provost, Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (AOCOED), Ijanikin, Prof B.B Lafiaji-Okuneye, has assured that with improved teacher education, the college will help in fixing the challenges confronting the sector.

UNITED STATES
Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation [AAQEP]. Quality Assurance Symposium: March 22-24, 2022 [early bird registration through Nov. 19, 2021]

Chalkbeat. Black teacher workforce declined sharply as Michigan students left city districts — study   The state education department has mounted several efforts to attract and retain more African American educators, from encouraging students to return to their home districts as teachers to supporting alternative certification programs, which offer a fast track into the teaching profession. Such programs have proved appealing to would-be educators who are Black at a time when the number of Black students entering traditional teacher prep programs has fallen. In Detroit, training programs for district support staff have already put dozens of people, many of them African American, into classrooms for the first time.

Council of Graduate Schools.  Graduate Enrollment and Degrees 2010 to 2020.  Consistent with previous survey cycles, business (87,045), education (75,083), and health sciences (67,126) were the three largest broad fields for first- time graduate enrollment in Fall 2020. These three broad fields collectively represented 45% of first- time graduate enrollments

EdWeek. Advice to New Teachers From a 20-Year Veteran: 7 lessons I’ve learned from two decades in the classroom

Hechinger Report. Funding and training is rarely available when your child care is friends, neighbors   Unlike licensed child care workers, FFN providers do not need to follow state child care regulations or meet health and safety requirements — unless they receive state-funded subsidies to provide care for a lower-income child. They are also not required to undergo any formal child development training before they begin to care for children.

Milwaukee Neighborhood New Service. Trouble finding child care? You’re not alone, and here’s why.    Johnson said she would like to see investment in teacher prep programs such as the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center, or MTEC, and the Literacy Lab. She said doing so would help ensure a steady supply of qualified teachers to keep early childhood education centers enrolling closer to their licensed capacity.

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Board of Regents Meeting, Oct. 18-19
Higher Education Subcommittee.
*Proposed Amendment to Sections 52.21, 57-4.5, and 80-1.13 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to Removing the Face-to-Face Instruction Requirement for the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) Training
*Proposed Amendment to Section 50.1(l) of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Definition of “University” 
Feb. 2021: “University means a higher educational institution offering a range of registered undergraduate and graduate curricula in the liberal arts and sciences and doctoral programs registered in at least three of the following discipline areas: agriculture, biological sciences, business, education, engineering, fine arts, health professions, humanities, physical sciences, and social sciences.”
Oct. 2021 following public comment: “University means a higher educational institution offering a range of registered undergraduate and graduate curricula in the liberal arts and sciences, including graduate programs registered in at least three of the following discipline areas: agriculture, biological sciences, business, education, engineering, fine arts, health professions, humanities, physical sciences and social sciences.”
*Recognition of the Board of Regents and Commissioner of Education as an Institutional Accrediting Agency   VOTED: That the Board of Regents will not submit an application for renewal of recognition by the Secretary of Education as an institutional accrediting agency at the expiration of the current term of recognition on May 9, 2023.

NYPost. More than 20K public school staffers across New York aren’t fully certified   NYSED’s Emergency COVID-19 Certificate allows applicants to “work in New York State public schools or districts for two years while taking and passing the required exam(s) for the certificate or extension sought,” according to the agency’s website. Previously, aspiring educators and other employees had to complete their certification entirely before working with students.

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. With NYC’s ‘gifted’ program headed for overhaul, here’s what some experts say should come next   With training and support, many teachers can meet the needs of most students in their classroom, he said. But in many of the schools and districts he works with, “it winds up being implemented really inconsistently,” especially with newer teachers.

New York Magazine. Will Ending Gifted and Talented Programs Help Desegregate Schools?   “Even though Gifted and Talented education is my field of study, I can’t really bring myself to shed a tear over their demise,” said James Borland of Teachers College at Columbia University, who studies the effects of these programs on economically disadvantaged students. “For years they were bordering on disgrace. It was a really disturbing difference between the makeup of regular classrooms and the Gifted and Talented classrooms. It’s been that way for a number of years, and the department hasn’t really done anything that I’m aware of to remedy the situation. So there is no choice other than to pull the plug on the whole thing.”… Brilliant NYC… will aim to offer accelerated learning to all 65,000 kindergarteners. To do so, the mayor said, the city will retrain all of the city’s kindergarten teachers in addition to hiring new ones.

 

 

GLOBAL
CBC News. Ontario announces new Indigenous curriculum for Grades 1-3   However, those changes have been criticized, both for the lack of consultation in the lead-up to them, and for the amount of training teachers are given prior to being expected to teach the curriculum.

Education International. Improving the status of teachers through intelligent professionalism   The responses identified that status is affected by teacher pay and working conditions, is related to workplace stress, influences the attractiveness of teaching as a career for young people and impacts whether qualified teachers want to remain in the classroom. 

International Task Force on Teachers. Teachers in Crisis Contexts: We must invest in their strengths, not rest on them [by Danni Falk and Chris Henderson from Teachers College, Columbia University.]  3. Enable teachers to support all learners by continuously investing in and dramatically improving the nature and quality of teacher preparation, continuous professional development, and sustained support.

NYTimes. GONE: Nearly 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. Their families now search for clues among the dead.   Among the most widely known examples: the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in the town of Ayotzinapa. An investigation under Enrique Peña Nieto, the president at the time, placed blame on a local drug cartel and the municipal police. But that explanation has been widely condemned by international experts, including the United Nations…

Washington Post. Millions of Indian kids have been out of school for 18 months. The break threatens decades of progress.   Some state governments have attempted to stem the mounting learning losses with local initiatives. In Odisha, a poor state on the eastern coast of the country, a government initiative supported by UNICEF connected trainee teachers with out-of-school kids in villages.

UNITED STATES
Chalkbeat.
1) ‘Alarming’ shortage of child care workers in Philadelphia prompts recruitment event   Jackson said that the minimum requirement for her center to keep its top rating from Keystone Stars is a high school diploma with two years of experience or a child development associate credential, or CDA, which can be obtained online and is the equivalent of nine college credits toward an early education degree.
2) Four reasons why schools are facing crippling shortages    Short-term bonuses can help, but make less of an impact in increasing the supply of teachers or other certified jobs like counseling that require longer-term training.

CivXNow. State Policy Menu   *Pre-service Teaching Requirements: States should strengthen pre-service requirements for civics teachers by requiring undergraduate courses in U.S. Government and U.S. History, as well as undergraduate course work in the unique pedagogy of history and civics. States should also implement a fellowship program to encourage humanities and social science graduates of color to join the social studies teaching profession.

Colorado NewsLine. Congress has a plan for universal pre-K. Will states opt in?   If the congressional plan grandfathers in a workforce that is not required to have a four-year degree, that could in turn affect the quality of education some children receive, he said. Often private or home-based day care providers have two-year degrees or high school diplomas. States would be able to decide on the teaching skills needed in order to bypass a degree requirement. 

Education Week.
1) Combating the Problems With Facebook and Instagram: 8 Tips for Teachers
2) I’m Back in the Classroom With a Ph.D. and Some Advice for Policymakers   I spent time with the elusive psychometricians who created those value-added models of teacher performance. (Turns out, many of them were not thrilled their models were used to judge teacher quality, particularly when the models were attached to pay-for-performance schemes.)… The university where I work, like others, has been seeing declining enrollment in teacher-preparation programs.

Inside Higher Ed. Change Comes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Most of the reforms are temporary, but they’ll still help hundreds of thousands of borrowers chart a renewed path toward loan forgiveness.   The overhaul is intended to fulfill a “largely unmet” promise to wipe away the student debt of teachers, military service members and others working in the public sector.

MarketScreener. Nation’s Largest College of Education Celebrates American Education Week with Scholarships for Current and Aspiring Teachers.  Western Governors University’s (WGU) Teachers College will mark the National Education Association’s (NEA) 2021 American Education Week Nov. 15-19 by announcing its WGU Loves Teachers and Become a Teacher scholarship programs, together totaling $6 million, for current and future education professionals who wish to pursue bachelor’s or master’s degree programs in the Teachers College. 

National Academy of Education. Evaluating and Improving Teacher Preparation Programs: Commissioned Paper Series   As part of the Evaluating and Improving Teacher Preparation Programs project, this commissioned paper series covers key aspects of teacher preparation and evaluation methods that support high-quality preparation and continuous program improvement.

NYTimes.
1) Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas: Resources, strategies and ideas for teaching with The New York Times.
2) Troubled Student Loan Forgiveness Program Gets an Overhaul: The sweeping changes will help more than a half-million public service workers who had thought they were paying down their debt for years.   Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which sued the Trump administration over its management of the program, said the measures would bring “urgently needed relief” and “overdue changes” that would help at least 200,000 of the union’s members.

Santa Fe New Mexican. New Mexico’s teacher-prep programs face challenges amid surging vacancies   Alternative pathways are associated with higher rates of diversity compared with traditional teaching programs, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics — but research from the Learning Policy Institute also shows that in Northern New Mexico, those finishing out alternative licenses often are underprepared. That lack of preparedness could be exacerbated this year as schools return to in-person learning through the pandemic…

U.S. Dept. of Education. U.S. Department of Education Announces Transformational Changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, Will Put Over 550,000 Public Service Workers Closer to Loan Forgiveness   … U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Teachers, nurses, first responders, servicemembers, and so many public service workers have had our back especially amid the challenges of the pandemic. Today, the Biden Administration is showing that we have their backs, too.”

The 74. A New Kind of Curriculum Night: Armed With Protest Signs and Data, Diverse Group of Minneapolis Parents Demands Better Reading Instruction for Their Kids   The report, along with follow-up pieces documenting teachers’ lack of awareness and explaining why colleges of education cling to discredited strategies for teaching reading — such as having students guess at a word after looking at pictures in a book — made Hanford a household name at dinner tables around the country. 

NEW YORK STATE
Press-Republican. SUNY Plattsburgh Teacher Education programs earn full accreditation.   SUNY Plattsburgh’s teacher education programs have been accredited for a full seven-year term by the Association for Advancing Quality in Education Preparation.

University at Albany. SOE Earns National Accreditation of Graduate Education Programs   The Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation (AAQEP) has awarded full 7-year accreditation to the University at Albany’s graduate programs for school leadership, literacy educators, and special education preparation. The award includes a commendation for the literacy and special education programs (inclusive of the early childhood and childhood education programs).

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. NYC to eliminate ‘gifted’ test in overhaul of segregated program   Under the new model, the city will train roughly 4,000 teachers and hire additional teachers already versed in accelerated learning to work in neighborhoods with historically little to no gifted programming, city officials said Friday. The new program, called Brilliant NYC, will start in the fall of 2022 and will be phased into first and second grade the following years.

NYTimes. New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program: Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students.   …the city will train all its kindergarten teachers — roughly 4,000 educators — to accommodate students who need accelerated learning within their general education classrooms.

Pix11. NYC DOE employees reassigned over vaccine mandates say students, schools are shortchanged     They are vaccinated, trained specialists who say that a DOE policy related to the mandate reassigned them to schools to teach and to do other classroom educational tasks, even though they’re not classroom educators. Instead, they’re data analysts, social workers, guidance counselors, researchers and others who are connected to the DOE central office.

GLOBAL
Counter Punch. “Compulsory Irish”: the Place of the Irish Language in Ireland’s Post-Colonial Education System    The programme failed to be implemented effectively due to a lack of investment in teacher training, an under provision of additional physical spaces to teach the additional subjects, and a lack of democratic “buy in” by interested parties i.e. parents and the churches.

Irish Times. Why are there so few migrant teachers in Ireland?   One requirement at primary level is for all teachers, regardless of where they trained, to be able to teach through Irish. “For migrant teachers who did not train in Ireland, this is doable, but it takes about three years and they need to do an exam at the end of it,” says Campbell. “If they work on basic Irish and spend time at the Gaeltacht, they can pass, and there are a handful who are doing this every year.”

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  Building Digital Teaching Skills Among Teachers In The Caribbean   …in response to the significant needs of the education system in the region, UNESCO, Blackboard and the Caribbean Centre for Educational Planning (CCEP) at the University of the West Indies teamed up to launch the Education response to Covid-19: Distance Learning and Teacher Training Strategies in the Caribbean SIDS. With funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), this year-long project aims to strengthen the capacities of teachers and school leaders on digital skills and blended learning solutions. The goal is to train 10,000 teachers in the use of online education tools, resources and platforms.

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). Consortium for Research-Based and Equitable Assessments   The Consortium for Research-Based and Equitable Assessments (CREA) is seeking your help to recruit teacher candidates, teachers, and faculty for its upcoming focus groups. The Consortium, which is comprised of educator preparation programs (EPPs) and state and local education agency representatives across 14 states, is examining the processes and considerations that states use to determine cut scores for entrance (i.e., Praxis Core) and teacher licensure examinations.

Chalkbeat. Tutors wanted: Inside the nationwide sprint to build big new programs to catch students up   Many programs are putting tutors through fairly rigorous training. Arkansas is requiring tutors to spend six hours learning about the science of reading and another six studying how to teach math. The Chicago, Dallas, and Denver area initiatives are paying college-age or adult tutors at least $20 an hour. Oklahoma is paying college students $25 an hour. Some are giving high school or college students course credit. And New Mexico is offering educator fellows a $4,000 stipend toward any degree in education, in the hopes of converting some into teachers or other school staff.

CivXNow. A Policy Agenda: Restoring Civic Education for Civic Strength   6. Investment in educator preparation in history and civics and diversification of the history and civics teaching corps, including development of an educator competency rubric and certification program to ensure that educators are recognized for achievement and supported in developing the skills required to teach history and civics

Hechinger Reports. Struggling readers need standards and structure based on the science of reading: Proven ways to close gaps and improve outcomes will help students catch up    There is a strong coalition of support behind the science of reading, even though it had yet to be reflected in conventional wisdom about reading instruction or widely utilized in U.S. classrooms or teacher preparation programs — until now. For the first time since the National Council on Teacher Quality began publishing teacher preparation program ratings, the number of programs that embrace the science of reading has crossed the halfway mark.

Teacher Stories. Inspiring Stories of Teachers Changing Lives   Our mission is to share stories about teachers who have elevated people’s lives, strengthened communities, inspired a passion for their subjects, and enabled students to attain what they thought was unattainable.

Washington Post. School superintendent asks: ‘Who would want to be a teacher right now?’   I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a large group of superintendents tasked with generating potential solutions. Here are some of the proposed strategies: *College loan forgiveness *Tax breaks *Housing assistance *Signing and loyalty bonuses *Limit what we expect from teachers to teaching and teaching only

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE/NYACTE. 2021 NYSATE-NYACTE CONFERENCE   This year, we embark on a new venture: a progressive, online conference. Rather than schedule all activities intensively over a two to three day period, we are offering our conference events on separate occasions throughout the fall semester. 

New York State Education Department.
1) State Education Department Awards $3.45 Million in My Brother’s Keeper Grants for Teacher Opportunity Corps II: Grants Aimed at Expanding the Rate of Historically Underrepresented Individuals in Teaching Careers  [Teachers College is one of 17 grantees]    …the State Education Department seeks to invest in programs that bolster the retention of highly qualified individuals who value equity and reflect the diversity inside and outside of our classrooms, particularly in high-need schools with recurrent teacher shortages. 
2) Office of Higher Education September Newsletter.
* Regents Items: Emergency COVID-19 certificate, Permanent School Counselor Certificate Requirements, School Counselor Bilingual Education Extension, References to Institutional Accrediting Agencies.
* Certification Test Vouchers
* Impartial Hearing Officer System for Special Education Due Process In New York City Request for Information

NEW YORK CITY
ABC7. NYC schools unveil groundbreaking Black studies program for students in grades K-12   The nation’s largest school district unveiled a groundbreaking curriculum change to teach children about the history and contributions of Black Americans.

Chalklbeat. De Blasio insists substitutes will fill staff gaps caused by vaccine refusal. Some schools have doubts.   Students with disabilities might also lose out at the Brooklyn elementary school pulling a teacher out of ICT, which mandates two teachers, one of whom must be trained in special education to teach a mix of students with disabilities and general education students.

Teachers College. $3.25 Million Grant to Fund Development of Black Studies Curriculum for NYC Public Schools  TC’s Black Education Research Collective, led by Sonya Douglass Horsford, will play a lead role in a landmark initiative to develop an interdisciplinary K-12 Black studies curriculum