GLOBAL
CNA [Singapore]. More support for early childhood educators, outdoor learning to be enhanced: ECDA … organising peer sharing session for educators to share experiences in conducting outdoor learning, as well as advanced training courses for educators and trainers who attended training sessions in outdoor learning in 2019.
Education Business (UK). DfE cuts and cancels some teacher training bursaries. The government has cut some teacher training bursaries as well as scrapping others altogether, it has been revealed in new guidance on initial teacher training funding for the 2021-22 academic year.
Florida State University News. USAID-Florida State University partnership set to boost teacher training systems in Zambia. Over the five-year period, the “USAID Transforming Teacher Education Program” will give more than 60 Zambian teacher educators the skills to deliver effective instruction to 9,000 college and university students studying to become primary grade teachers.
GMA News Online. PRC exec: ‘Open enrollment’ behind low LET passing rate among teachers; CHED disagrees The lack of strict admission rules for aspiring teachers is one of the reasons behind the low passing rate among education graduates who take the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET) in the Philippines, an official from the Professional Regulation Commission on Monday. During a Senate committee on basic education hearing on quality of teacher education and training, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian asked why only an average of 30% and 48% of elementary and secondary education graduates who take the LET have passed in recent years.
UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) Issue Brief Explores Financial Challenges Facing Future Teachers The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) released today its latest issue brief, How Do Education Students Pay for College? The report provides colleges of education a closer look at the financial pressures impacting education students..
2) Registration open. 73rd Annual meeting: Resisting Hate, Restoring Hope: Engaging in Courageous Action [Virtual Conf. Feb. 24-26, 2021]
3) Strengthening Teacher Preparation: Transforming Clinical Practice Back in 2015, a group of department chairs, administrative leadership, program directors and faculty at Jackson State University formed a task force to write a plan for transforming our teacher preparation program. In that plan, we identified areas of strength and areas we needed to improve.
Chalkbeat. How do you create a more diverse teacher force? Hire your own graduates, Chicago says. The district is partnering with City Colleges of Chicago and Illinois State University to offer scholarships, financial and career counseling, and eventually preferential hiring to district graduates… The program will also encourage more men to become teachers. My Brother’s Keeper, created by former President Barack Obama to address racial disparities facing young men of color, also will partner with the district.
Education Week.
1) To Root Out Racism in Schools, Start With Who You Hire. Brooks-DeCosta’s [TC EdD ‘17] doctoral leadership program at Teachers College focused on anti-racist leadership, and part of it required her to write a racial autobiography identifying the first time she became racially aware or the first time she became aware of her race, who she is, and how she identified…
2) Yes, Teachers Are Still Being Evaluated. Many Say It’s Unfair … the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers issued a joint statement along with state administrators’ associations warning that “teachers are not primarily trained to provide remote instruction and qualified evaluators are not trained to evaluate remote instruction.” Districts should focus on evaluations on “formative feedback and support” instead of summative ratings, the groups said.
Hechinger Report.
1) Getting rid of gifted programs: Trying to teach students at all levels together in one class “I have gone to a lot of conferences about educational diversity that were held during the weekday during the school year,” said Amy Stuart Wells, professor of education at Teachers College… “There were no teachers at these conferences. There was a lot of talk about moving kids around. There were a lot of recommendations thrown out there. But when it came to how they’d really work, the attitude was, ‘Let’s let the teachers worry about it.’ ”
2) Why decades of trying to end racial segregation in gifted education haven’t worked: Is it even possible to make a concept that has racist origins more equitable? And testing only students whose teachers or parents are aware of the program and request it; few teachers get trained in gifted education, so their recommendations are often based on stereotypes…
3) Why we need a new generation of special education teachers To ameliorate shortages, districts and programs may depend on teachers who have been certified in alternative ways, via fast-tracked models, or rely on part-timers. This means that teachers step into the classroom with less preparation.
InsideHigherEd. Graduate Enrollment Grew in 2019 Other fields with year-over-year increases in first-time graduate enrollment include engineering (+5 percent), health sciences (+3.5 percent)… and education (+0.4 percent).
Learning Policy Institute. Sharpening the Divide: How California’s Teacher Shortages Expand Inequality. Analysis of statewide teacher supply and demand factors indicates that there are three main factors driving shortages in California: the decline in teacher preparation enrollments, increased demand for teachers, and teacher attrition and turnover. However, the relative weight of supply and demand factors can vary from district to district.
New York Times. School Is (Whisper It) a Form of Child Care: And child care, at its best, fosters children’s development. So how did we come to treat them so differently? In the 1800s, school was transformed state by state from a few weeks of instruction by a teenage girl in a one-room house into a system of formal classrooms with grades and professional teachers.
University Business. Navigating the COVID-19 maze. Teachers have needed to adapt their pedagogy for online instruction. States have been necessitated to implement flexible licensure requirements. And EPPs have been asked to provide innovative solutions that ensure teacher candidates are qualified to meet state licensure and certification requirements.
USNews. Amid Shortage, WVa College Students Can Substitute Teach West Virginia education officials will let college seniors who are studying to become educators apply for immediate substitute teaching jobs in public schools due to a critical shortage.
Washington Post.
1) How ‘good’ parenting can make for ‘bad’ democracy Resource availability for highly qualified teachers, engaging curriculums and suitable facilities are a function of the school-financing schemes states adopt… Administrators and teachers can be taught how to create school environments that minimize marginalizing student experiences on account of race.
2) In new memoir, the father of ‘multiple intelligences’ explains how he conceived his famous theory – and why he exhausted family and friends The theory became highly popular with K-12 educators — though is now often misunderstood as wrongly equating “multiple intelligences” with the concept of different “learning styles.” Gardner never said that, though debunkers of his theory have claimed he did.
3) School reading classes still in a slump without more social studies “Social studies has long been neglected in American primary school,” the authors say. “Elementary teachers are often taught that students should ‘first learn to read, so they can read to learn,’ even though youngsters can learn a lot about the world before they can decode.”
NEW YORK STATE
LOHUD. For new teacher, 21, remote learning means connecting with students she hasn’t met Zepeda, who grew up in New Rochelle and graduated from New Rochelle High School in 2016, was hired by the district last year for a one-year spot at Isaac Young Middle School… She stayed close to home for college, graduating from the College of New Rochelle in only three years… Maria Gomez, a guidance counselor at New Rochelle High School who was Zepeda’s counselor, said Zepeda was “laser focused” on math and later on becoming a teacher.
NYSATE/NYACTE. Discussion with NYSED Leaders. The New York State Association of Teacher Educators and the New York Association of Colleges for Teacher Education are pleased to host a discussion and question and answer session with New York State Education Department Leaders [Wed. Oct. 21 4pm]
NEW YORK CITY
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Clinically Rich Programs in New York: Urban Teacher Residency at the American Museum of Natural History “We wanted to create a program that addressed the shortage of middle and high school Earth Science teachers and embodied AMNH’s mission of research, education, and the dissemination of knowledge about the natural world,” says Maritza MacDonald [TC EdD ‘95], senior director of education and policy emeritus… The result was the American Museum of Natural History Richard Gilder Graduate School’s Earth Science Residency Program—the only museum-based residency model for teacher preparation in the world.
Teachers College.
1) Beyond the Grid: The Untold Story of Harlem’s Fight for Quality Education …the number of teachers of color in Harlem rose sharply from 1972 on — particularly in District 5 schools. White and Rogers attribute that increase to several factors, including the de facto segregating of black teachers to black neighborhoods, the emergence of alternate routes to teaching, the development of new models of school governance, and “curricular and pedagogical priorities tied to accountability and market-based competition charter schools.” There are positives and negatives to each of these trends, but, the authors conclude, “one outcome that has remained elusive through these years is the development of a stable, diverse, cadre of teachers who are well-prepared to teach District 5 students.”
2) Paul D. Coverdell Fellows 35th Anniversary Video On January 20, 1985, the Peace Corps Director, Lorette Miller Ruppe signed an agreement establishing the first Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program at Teachers College, Columbia University. The TC Peace Corps Fellows Program was the first Fellows USA (now Coverdell Program).
3) The Roads Not Taken? There aren’t many for aspiring researcher, administrator and teacher Catherine Cheng Stahl She volunteered as an aide teaching reading to third- and fourth-graders, and it felt so right that she stayed on at Wellesley for a fifth year, taking additional education classes before leaving to teach biology and chemistry at a rural Connecticut high school.
