Categories
Teacher Education

Week of July 22 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Inter Press Service. Finland’s Education System Leads GloballyIn terms of what other countries, such as the United States should learn from Finland, Dr. Samuel E. Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University had this to say… Second, we should follow Finland in preparing teachers with high-quality master’s programs in pedagogical theory and practice”…

OECD.
1) TALIS Initial Teacher Preparation study   Australia, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway and the United States, with Wales (United Kingdom), are participating in the study.
2) Teaching, collaboration and the future of education: insights from teachers in the Slovak Republic   …organised by Slovakia’s premier teacher training institute, Metodicko-Pedagogické Centrum (MPC), in collaboration with the OECD, and supported by Teach For All. The forum aimed to encourage greater collaboration among Slovakian teachers, but there was considerable debate around exactly how to create a culture of collaboration in schools. 

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE. Testifying Before Congress, VCU Education Dean Urges ‘Immediate and Innovative Action’  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.

AAQEP. CFP Quality Assurance Symposium, Feb. 27, Atlanta [deadline July 31]

Chalkbeat. How one Illinois program aims to train more resilient, longer-lasting teachers   Students teach in the morning, then attend trainings in the afternoons. They receive a $2,000 stipend — a modest amount, but better than unpaid student teaching positions. Golden Apple requires that participants commit to teaching for five years in a high-poverty or academically low-ranking school. 

EdSource. Plan to expose all students to physics missing one element — teachers   Sixty physics majors graduated from Long Beach State this past school year, according to Galen Pickett, a physics professor at the university. Of those, 10 are expected to go on to become credentialed physics teachers…

EdWeek.
1) Beto O’Rourke’s Education Plan: A Surge in Federal Funds, With Equity Strings Attached   He also proposed providing teachers with student debt relief, working with minority serving insitutions to diversify the teacher workforce, reforming school discipline to decrease racial disparities, boosting school infrastructure funding, fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and providing incentives for teachers to seek additional training and graduate degrees.
2) K-12 Dealmaking: Age of Learning Partners With HMH, Pearson Lands Egyptian Testing Contract; ETS and Khan Academy Partner on Teacher Prep   Teacher candidates can use this product to create a personalized learning plan to prepare for the Praxis Core Academic Skills for Educators (Core) test, an exam required by many teacher preparation programs.
3) Teacher-Preparation Programs Again Have a Choice of Accreditors. But Should They?   In one notable example, Teachers College, Columbia University—the first and largest graduate school of education in the country—switched from CAEP to AAQEP and is in the early stages of the accreditation process. “The issue for us fundamentally is that CAEP is a very top-down compliance approach, whereas AAQEP is much more about peer-review—there is really a much more holistic approach to meeting standards,” said Kelly Parkes, an associate professor and the chair of the teacher education policy committee at Teachers College. “We need an accreditation process that would allow us to be flexible and sensitive to our context and our needs. … As a leader in teacher preparation, … you need to have room to have innovation and try [it] out for a year or two, … rather than being cookie-cutter.”
4) To Recruit More Teachers of Color, This District Posted a Unique Job Ad    “We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job, and that candidate may be one who comes from a less traditional background. We would encourage you to apply, even if you don’t believe you meet every one of our qualifications described.”

Education Writers Association. School Discipline Reform: Easier Said Than Done?  Ask your local colleges’ teacher education programs if they are educating aspiring teachers about techniques to avoid student suspensions. Classroom management is always the toughest part of a new teacher’s job, and recent college graduates may face a particularly hard time if they are unaware of restorative justice or other new strategies many public schools are now embracing. 

New York Times. It’s Easy to Forget, but a Program to Forgive Student Loans Already Exists: Democrats are campaigning to fix an issue that is already starting to resolve itself for many teachers and other public servantsSince undergraduates legally can’t borrow that much federal money, the forgiveness program is surely dominated by graduate students. A sizable number are most likely public schoolteachers, half of whom have graduate degrees.

Washington Post.
1) Amid teacher shortages, Virginia takes steps to lure students into the profession   The 188,000-student school system has issued teaching offers to graduating high school students who participate in the Virginia Teachers for Tomorrow Program, which aims to attract students to the field of education and help bolster the state’s supply of teachers. The high school students are invited to return to Fairfax as teachers once they have graduated college and become licensed, said Fairfax Superintendent Scott Brabrand.
2) The Mueller report: An educational tool for teachers — and a surprising hit with book clubs

 

NEW YORK STATE
New York Post. Regents get set to guarantee even more bad New York schools   This follows a sustained drive by the Regents to reduce teacher-training standards, water down state tests, abandon efforts to hold teachers accountable and on and on.

NYSED Board of Regents. Appointment of Deputy Commissioner for P12 Instructional Support VOTED, that the Board of Regents approve the appointment of Dr. Kimberly Young Wilkins to the position of Deputy Commissioner for P12 Instructional Support.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chankbeat. NYC ditched its school turnaround program months ago. Principals are still wondering what comes next.   Teachers at the same school received training from Teachers College to improve writing instruction, which the principal linked to gains in student performance. But it’s unlikely, the principal said, that the school will continue the training for new teachers without the financial support of Renewal given other competing demands on the school’s budget.

City Journal. Classrooms of the Absurd: New York’s public school system embraces social-justice education theories—even as the city’s successful charter schools show what really worksIt’s complete nonsense, as is so much of the effluvia now leaking from America’s graduate schools of education, such as “implicit classroom bias”—the notion that white teachers can’t instruct black students without first having subconscious racism washed from their brains.

NYDailyNews. Non-unionized Pre-K teachers say new pay raise leaves them in the cold   At least for now, the pay raise City Council Speaker Corey Johnson heralded as “historic” only applies to about 300 certified, unionized teachers. Another 1500 non-unionized educators with identical credentials, according to city estimates, are still waiting to hear if and when they’ll be included.

Philanthropy News Digest. Columbia’s Teachers College Receives $6 Million for Dance Institute   “As a result of Jody’s foresight, commitment, and generosity, there are now generations of new certified dance teachers teaching in K–12 schools and a growing corps of faculty at universities and colleges,” said Barbara Bashaw, TC’s Arnhold Professor of Practice, director of the Dance Education Program…

Teachers College. Making Dance Education an Institution: Jody and John Arnhold Give TC $10.45 Million to Advance Dance Education Nationwide   These relationships will inspire new thinking and scholarship and foster professional networks and standardized practices to further formalize pre-K-12 dance education and teacher preparation as a field of academic study and inquiry. 

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of July 15 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
BBC Teach. Teach First offered places to 82% of assessed applicants   The charity, which aims to place high-flying graduates who might not ordinarily consider teaching in schools serving disadvantaged communities, has recruited 1,735 trainees this year.

The Global Initiative on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Historic recognition by States of the Abidjan Principles on the right to education by top UN human rights body

International Education News. Headlines Around the World: TALIS 2018 Results [commentary by S. Abrams, TC’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education] U.S. teachers report a teaching load that has increased by 78 minutes per week. Such an increase did not happen for the teachers in the countries surveyed in 2013. Again, their average in 2013 was 19.3 hours per week. If we look at the countries in the 2018 TALIS study that were included in the 2013 study, we get an average of 19.9 hours a week…

International Society for Music Education (ISME). Call for Papers 34th World Conference [Helsinki; 2-7 Aug., 2020]

Sydney Morning Herald. Teaching degrees miss the mark on reading instruction   Only 4 per cent of university units have a specific focus on early reading instruction, while 70 per cent do not mention any of the five key elements of reading instruction that are recognised by the NSW Department of Education…

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. AACTE Board Approves New Strategic Plan Framework

Association of Teacher EducatorsSummer Induction Symposium for New Professors (ISNP) [Burlington, VT July 26-30]

Education Week.
1) Can Media Literacy Combat ‘Truth Decay’? What Teachers Should Know
2) How the Trump Administration Is Falling Short on ESSA [by TC researchers M. Duff, P. Wohlstetter] In a recent study of the ESSA planning process, our research team at Teachers College, Columbia University concluded the sausage-making process has veered off course. Compared to the previous federal education law… Our analysis found the current administration is falling short of their end of the bargain.
3) Influential Reading Group Makes It Clear: Students Need Systematic, Explicit Phonics   Marcie Post, the executive director of the ILA…called for more teacher training, and said that ILA will be putting forth an “action plan” within the next year, that will help teachers work with struggling readers. Phonics is a part of that equation, she said.
4) Teachers Should Design Student Assessments. But First They Need to Learn How   Less than 50 percent of teachers in low-income schools reported feeling “very prepared” to interpret assessment results, and less than 50 percent of teachers said they’d received training on how to talk with parents, fellow teachers, and students about assessment results.
5) Teachers Support Social-Emotional Learning, But Say Students in Distress Strain Their Skills   Less than 40 percent of teachers surveyed by the Education Week Research Center said they received training in conflict de-escalation, and a similar number said they had been trained in child trauma. Only 29 percent said they had received mental health training.
6) The Deficit Lens of the ‘Achievement Gap’ Needs to Be Flipped. Here’s How   … in reflecting on the training most teachers receive and on the messages we send as a research community, it’s clear we haven’t always equipped educators to understand new findings and act on them in a productive way.
7) What to Do When Physics Teachers Don’t Know Physics   According to the National Science Foundation, just 47 percent of physics teachers across the country have physics degrees or certification in physics education. But students are increasingly interested in the subject, which is often a cornerstone of many professions in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Guam Daily Post. GDOE faces teacher shortage   A recent job fair held by GDOE sought to address this shortfall of educators. A number of those positions will be filled by retired teachers as well as degreed individuals who aren’t certified in education but are able to gain emergency certification.

Hechinger Report.
1) Kindergarten behavior predicts adult earning power  Research shows that teachers and parents can be trained to teach kids better behavior, the report states. Teaching kids explicitly about how to solve problems can also help.
2) What’s missing in music education? Cultural and social relevance   This training has served me well in many aspects of my professional and personal lives but, frankly, these techniques weren’t enough when I got to my semester of student teaching.

HuffPost. Jeffrey Epstein Was Their Teacher. He Became A MonsterEpstein was hired to teach at Dalton in his early 20s when he was a college dropout from both Cooper Union and New York University.

InsideHigherEd. New Data Era for Teacher Prep [commentary by B. Riley, Deans for Impact] Teacher preparation programs can improve outcomes for future teachers and their students if they use student-achievement data to inform their efforts

InsiderNJ. Booker, Norcross, Pascrell Introduce Legislation to Address Growing Teacher Shortage   The Supporting the Teaching Profession Through Revitalizing Investments in Valuable Educators (STRIVE) Act would overhaul the student loan forgiveness program by providing incremental loan forgiveness each year to public school teachers who teach in low-income schools. After seven years, such teachers would have their student loans completely cancelled. The overhaul would be retroactive, so current teachers who have been teaching for at least seven years would also have their loans cancelled.

The74. California Senate Bill Would Move State Backward on Literacy and Teacher Qualifications. That Would Be a Disaster for Our Kids  California Senate Bill 614 would abandon the state’s minimum requirement that elementary school teachers demonstrate a basic understanding of science-based reading instruction as a condition of earning a teacher license. 

The Hill. Aspiring teachers deserve time with a mentor before going it alone  Only Louisiana and South Dakota require that college students who are being trained as teachers spend a full school year as professional interns, alongside a mentor teacher, prior to being certified to teach independently. 

 

NEW YORK STATE
Chalkbeat. In a surprising move, MaryEllen Elia, New York’s top education official, will step down  Elia is stepping down to join a national firm that specializes in helping districts with school turnaround plans, but she declined to name the group ahead of the firm’s own announcement. Elia had not informed the board of her decision before making it public Monday afternoon. She will serve through August.

NYSED. Statement from Chancellor Betty A. Rosa and Vice Chancellor T. Andrew Brown  Executive Deputy Commissioner Beth Berlin will serve as Acting Commissioner of the State Education Department effective September 1, 2019.

NYSED Board of Regents, Higher Education Committee: Proposed Amendments.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Civil Eats. A NYC Urban Garden Teaches Youth Community and Justice   …a student who grew up in Coney Island, recalls a reading in Community Roots class from Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire introduced an approach called problem-posing: teachers and students teach and learn together… Freire calls the banking model of education, a one-way learning style whereby the teacher deposits knowledge in the student’s mind. 

NYDailyNews. Thinking through gifted and talented education in New York City public schools: One parent’s reflection on the system   Yes, all teachers are trained to differentiate instruction, but I am told this often works better in theory than in practice and is highly dependent on the quality of the educator.

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of July 8 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. TEACHER TASK FORCE SUPPORTS CALL TO #COMMITTOEDUCATION   This worrying trend is coupled with the data showing that the proportion of trained teachers has also been falling. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 50% of teachers meet the minimum required training at secondary level, and 64% in primary, because since 2000, the focus has been on solving the teacher shortage and schools have been hiring contract teachers without qualifications to close the quantitative gaps at lower cost.

OECD Directorate for Education and SkillsHow Teachers Learn. The publication… summarises the TALIS 2018 findings on teachers’ initial and professional development…

SwissInfo. Wanted: 10,000 teachers a year for Swiss schools  According to SRF, 5,000 trainee teachers graduate each year, leaving a yearly teacher shortfall of 5,000. Of these, around a fifth – 1,000 – will have dropped out of teaching within five years…

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring [GEM] Report. Education as healing: Addressing the trauma of displacement through social and emotional learning   A new policy paper …calls for better training for teachers to provide psychosocial support to migrant and refugee children who have lived through traumatic events.

University of KwaZulu-Natal. UKZN’s youngest dean makes P-Rating history  The rating, also known as the president’s award, is given to young researchers (under the age of 35) for exceptional potential, demonstrated in their published work and research outputs…Msibi, who became the youngest dean in SA when he was appointed dean and head of the School of Education at UKZN at the age of 34… He holds a master’s degree in Education from the Teachers College at Columbia University in the United States…

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) JTE Earns High Ranking, Rise in Impact Factor   In the recently released 2019 Journal Citation Reports, AACTE’s Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) achieved a 2-year impact factor score of 3.263… The impact factor increased from JTE’s last score of 3.180…
2) State of the State Webinar  For the first time since 1914, all but one state legislature in the U.S. is dominated by a single party. The result has been a pattern of conservative leaning legislation in Republican-held states and liberal legislation in states controlled by Democrats. This is a political dynamic that will have far-reaching consequences for education policymaking well into the future. 

Center for American ProgressStudent Debt: An Overlooked Barrier to Increasing Teacher Diversity   For individuals who have taught, 88 percent of Black students and 76 percent of Latinx students took out federal student loans to pay for college, compared with 73 percent of white students. As the data show, Latinx students were less likely to borrow federal student loan money than Black students, but they were more likely to borrow compared with white students. 

EdSource. Teacher hopefuls offered $10,000 to enter California State University residency program   California State University is accepting applications from students enrolled in teacher preparation programs who want to spend a year in a residency program and receive a $10,000 scholarship in exchange for promising to teach in a high-needs school for two years

Education Week.
1) 14 Questions Educators Should Ask About AI-Based Products   As for fears that AI will eliminate teaching positions, Oranje is optimistic that it will not. His hope is that AI will “actually expand teaching,” he said, and that there will be a need for more educators, rather than fewer.
2) Schools still struggling with how to teach about slavery  “It’s never OK to recreate painful oppressive events, even in the name of education,” said Mara Sapon-Shevin, a professor of inclusive education at Syracuse University, who said teachers risk harming their students’ sense of belonging, safety and inclusion. “One would never simulate an Indian massacre or having Jews march into the ovens.” Nor should teachers “gamify” painful history, Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello said, citing exercises like having students compete to remove seeds from cotton.
3) Teach For America’s Defenders and Detractors Are Both Wrong [commentary by TC Prof. J. Henig]  The story was about the evolution of Teach For America away from its founding mission “to tap idealistic graduates of elite universities to teach at traditional public schools in high-poverty areas” into “an informal but vital ally of the charter school movement.”
4) The Deficit Lens of the ‘Achievement Gap’ Needs to Be Flipped. Here’s How  We should be very cautious of measures and practices that can influence educators to perceive students, or groups of students, as deficient, unless we accompany those measures and practices with the training educators would need to implement them effectively and equitably.

Florida Trend. Peace Corps and the University of South Florida Announce New Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program  The Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program began in 1985 at Teachers College, Columbia University and now includes more than 100 university partners across the country, from the District of Columbia to Hawaii. The program is reserved for students who have successfully completed Peace Corps service abroad.

Forbes. Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers   O’Rourke’s proposal differs from the current Teach Loan Forgiveness Program in several ways. First, it would have no limit on the amount of student loan forgiveness, which compares to a maximum of $17,500 under the current program. Second, it would apply to all public school teachers, not only those who work in low-income school or educational service agencies. Third, it may not have a five-year teaching requirement.

Heavy. Jeffrey Epstein Net Worth: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know   Jeffrey Epstein started his career as a mathematician and teacher, attending the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences before leaving without a degree to teach calculus and physics at the Dalton School.

Hechinger Report. Teaching global warming in a charged political climate   The science behind climate change is complicated and evolving, and most teachers aren’t prepared to teach it well. Many textbooks don’t touch the topic, according to science educators… A state agency [OK] funded by the oil and gas industry pumps money into teacher training and classroom materials, including books featuring a cartoon character called Petro Pete, with the goal of promoting fossil fuels. 

NEAToday. Report: Experienced Teachers Key to Students Beating the Odds   And California isn’t alone. An Arizona Republic investigation found that emergency teaching certifications in that state have increased 400 percent. Meanwhile, as Oklahoma schools opened this fall, state officials approved their 2,153rd emergency teaching certificate—up from 32 seven years ago.

NPR.  Broken Promises: Teachers Sue U.S. Over Student Loans That Weren’t Forgiven

Washington Post.
1) Financier in sex abuse case went from math whiz to titan. He taught calculus and physics at the prestigious Dalton School, a prep school in Manhattan, from 1973 to 1975, despite not having a college degree. Attorney General William Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was headmaster at the time.
2) How student debt hinders teacher diversity   Authors of the study point to the Boston Teacher Residency as a model to replicate. The state program has a goal of ensuring that people of color constitute at least half of each graduating class. Graduates earn a teacher’s license and a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in a year. They receive a stipend, health benefits and a free education if they teach in Boston’s public schools for three years.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE. Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 2

  • Preview of the Annual 2019 NYSATE/NYACTE Fall Conference
  • Nominations for NYSATE & NYACTE AWARDS
  • Residency Mentoring Workshop in NYC August 5-6

USA Today. Here’s where it’s best (and worst) to be a teacher   With a cost of living adjusted average teacher pay of $72,643 a year, New York public school teachers are paid better than teachers in every state except for Massachusetts. 

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. NYC and union officials hail move toward pay parity for pre-K teachers but some worry over educators left out of deal   Under the agreement, certified teachers with masters and bachelors degrees would see their pay increase every October through 2021. By that date, certified teachers with a master’s degree would make at least $69,000, and certified teachers with a bachelor’s degree would earn about $61,000 — a jump of almost $21,000 and more than $17,000, respectively. 

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing ArtsImportant Announcement from Superintendent Vivian Orlen  Ms. Yeou-Jey Vasconcelos has been appointed Interim Acting Principal for LaGuardia. Ms. Vasconcelos comes to you from Talent Unlimited High School on the East Side, where she served as principal for four years… She is passionate about the arts, holding a … Master’s in Music and Music Education from [Teachers College] Columbia University.

Teachers College.
1) Graduate Gallery 2019: Mercedes Lysaker (M.A., Music & Music Education) teaches music with strings attached   While at Teachers College, Lysaker discovered in herself a desire to “be a serious string pedagogue” – to invent “a pedagogy that really embraces everything a child is and brings into the lesson,” she said. “I think it’s my responsibility to teach everybody, exactly as they are.”
2) Teaching Residents @ Teachers College. July 2019 | Summer Edition Newsletter

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of July 1 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Center for Global Development30 New Findings in Global Education: RISE Conference 2019

  • In rural Ghana, personal and professional challenges in the lives of new teachers are associated with lower learning and reduced socioemotional development among their students
  • In middle schools in Pakistan, in-class technology together with teacher training (to help them integrate the technology effectively) increased both effort and test scores among students

Education HQ Australia. Practical experience is crucial for improving teachers’ confidence in their classroom and student management   The changing landscape of Australian society, thus classrooms, means that it might be time to review the training provided to pre-service and in-service teachers and to ensure they are prepared with what they need to know and do to meet the increasingly diverse challenges they encounter.

Education International. “The Fast Track for Newly Arrived Teachers in Sweden: the union’s perspective”   The Swedish government took the initiative of creating the so called “fast-track” into the teaching career since a relatively large group of immigrants had a background in teaching.

Forbes. Number Of Teachers Quitting The Classroom After Just One Year Hits All-Time High   Almost one in six teachers (15.3%) who qualified in 2017 left the state school sector in England within a year, according to data published by the Department for Education today…Teaching training courses have also repeatedly failed to hit their targets, with particular shortages in STEM subjects.

 

UNITED STATES
Associated Press. Official: Oklahoma emergency teacher licenses up 54% in 2018-19   State-issued nonaccredited teaching certificates allow people without a state teaching license to teach in a classroom for two years while they complete training. The vast majority of nonaccredited teachers have degrees and work experience in other professions. 

Association of Teacher Educators. 2020 Annual Meeting.  Atlantic City, NJ Feb.15-20  Call for Proposals extended to July 15

Chronicle of Higher EducationDemand for Campus Child Care Is Growing. Choosing How to Provide It Can Be Fraught.   In California, a teacher at a for-profit center is required to have only half the early-childhood-education credits required of full teachers at nonprofit centers, and assistant teachers at for-profit centers aren’t required to have any.

Education Week. Forty Percent of Elementary School Teachers’ Work Could Be Automated By 2030, McKinsey Global Institute Predicts   It’s also important that today’s educators understand how the ways in which work is gendered could affect the futures their female students face. Women may be particularly well served by receiving the training to participate in flexible and remote work arrangements that involve telecommuting, the report suggests.

Richmond Times-Dispatch. Virginia launches teaching degrees at colleges in effort to curtail teacher shortage   The state is launching 53 new teacher preparation programs and 25 new degrees, by Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week, that will let people become teachers after getting an education degree in four years.

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE). edTPA Team Transition News  Dr. Andrea Whittaker has decided to step away from her role as the National Director of edTPA…

UChicago Consortium on School ResearchArts Education And Social-Emotional Learning Outcomes Among K–12 Students: Developing A Theory Of Action   This does not mean that being intentional about leveraging social-emotional components is easy. To the contrary, doing intentional social-emotional work can be quite difficult at times and is not necessarily a skill that is taught in teacher-training programs.

University of North Carolina-CharlotteCato College of Education: UNCC Diversity Recruitment Video

Washington Post. Borrowing for college just got a little cheaper

 

NEW YORK STATE
New York Association of Colleges for Teacher EducationExcelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning— first fully online, open-access issue

NYSATE/NYACTE Annual Fall ConferenceOctober 17-19 Gideon Putnam Resort, Saratoga Springs

NYS Legislature; Education Bills Passed.
1) Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship. This bill opens New York’s Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship program to students who pursue graduate education degrees at private, not-for-profit colleges and universities.
2)  Graduate GPA Bill. After several years of advocacy, a bill to end the requirement that students pursuing graduate degrees in education fields have a minimum 3.0 undergraduate GPA finally passed both Chambers

NYS RegisterOpen Public Comment Period. Professional Development Plans and Other Related Requirements for School Districts and BOCES   (4) A teacher acting as a mentor to a new teacher in the classroom teaching service as part of a school district’s or BOCES’ mentoring program pursuant to section 100.2(dd) of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 30 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period. (5) a teacher acting as a mentor to a teacher candidate pursuant to section 52.21 of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 25 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period.   Data, views or arguments may be submitted by August 10 to: Petra Maxwell, NYS Education Department, 89 Washington Avenue, Office of Higher Education, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 486-3633, email: [email protected]

 

NEW YORK CITY
Bank Street College Prepared to Teach. Residency Mentoring Workshop August 5-6

Chalkbeat. What NYC’s departing instructional guru learned overseeing the nation’s largest school system Weinberg [TC MA, English Ed] oversaw curriculum, teacher development, college preparation efforts, and managed some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s biggest priorities, including making computer-science classes available to all students by 2025.

Teachers College.
1) Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers.In a three part series, TC community members ponder teaching’s challenges, reflect on how TC equips teachers to thrive, and offer ideas for restoring the stature teaching deserves.
2) Student and Alumni Profiles
Kimberely Durall (M.A. ’15)   “I majored in education to keep learning while inspiring kids with a background like mine. I didn’t want the limits the world places on students to follow them into my classroom.”

Billy Fong (M.A. ’11)   Fong, who received the 2018 Empire State Excellence in Teaching Award, credits Central Park East II’s leadership for supporting him, and TC mentors such as Celia Oyler for encouraging him to think creatively. 

Raven Hebert (MA ’06) “Teaching was what Hebert wanted to do, and variety was why. At TC, inspired by science education faculty member Jessica Riccio, she embraced her “inner happy nerd” and learned to gear instruction to different students’ needs.”

Lisa McDonald (Ph.D. Candidate)  “My being a teacher stems from this brown little girl who wanted someone to take the time to know me,” says McDonald, a TC Science Education doctoral student… McDonald next encountered a teacher of color at TC, where Professor of Science & Education Felicia Mensah has acquainted her with critical race theory — racism viewed as part of America’s systemic fabric. 

Rebeca Madrigal (M.A. ’98)   “I had to create a channel for my student — his experiences in Mexico,” she recalls. “It was Fidel’s first sign he had knowledge. And it opened my eyes to what being a teacher means.”

Emily Moxey (M.Ed. ’06) As a teenager, Moxey cared for a neighboring family’s two-year-old child who was deaf. In TC’s deaf education program, she learned to “fit the instruction to the child, not vice versa.”

Kevin Paiz-Ramirez (M.A. ’13)  Paiz-Ramirez immediately thought of his TC mentor, hip-hop science educator Christopher Emdin, who advocates knowing what kids face each day, whether it’s dodging gangs en route to school or dealing with gender discrimination.

Larrolyn Patterson Parms-Ford (M.A. ’19, Music & Music Education) Brings Her Voice to the Classroom    We expect black women to be musical artists. But where are the black female music teachers?”…She’s proud of the conversations that ensued, one of which concluded with a black female student expressing her desire to one day become a music teacher as well.

Eric Williamson (M.A. ’19) Williamson learned that empowering young people to create music they find relevant inspires their broader musical curiosity. At the Teachers College Community School in West Harlem, his students performed hip hop and rap as well as classical music and standards. 

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of June 24 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Education Week  Three Big Questions on Artificial Intelligence and Schools   Innova Schools in Lima, Peru are using IBM’s Watson to scan resumes for teacher hiring, he said. “They discovered that credentials on a resume can’t tell them how well a teacher will do in their environment,” he said. But they’ve trained Watson to spot those qualities.

New York Times.  [YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan]  A School With No Heat or Computers but Many College-Bound Students. Mostly Girls.   The fourth-grade math teacher, Ms. Joya, who is 28, did not begin school herself until the Taliban fell when she was 11; she could not read or write, and her only schooling had been sewing class. 

Quartz. Japan is trying really hard to persuade women to start having babies again   The government has said it needs to create 320,000 new public day care slots by 2021, which will mean hiring and training 77,000 more teachers. Filling these slots with highly-educated early childhood caregivers won’t be easy.

 

UNITED STATES
CBS News. Two-thirds of American employees regret their college degrees   At least one sector of employment bucked the trend: Teachers and other professionals in education, which isn’t typically a high-paying profession, were the second-least likely, after engineering grads, to have any regrets tied to their major, with 37% saying they had no regrets.

Chronicle of Higher Education.  What You Told Us About the Challenges of Training Grad Students to Teach   Training, he wrote, improves performance. But becoming a good teacher also requires “educational and professional formation” that improves the mind. Those two ideas, he said, might be combined into teacher preparation.

Clarion Ledger. Over 240 Jackson Public School District teachers’ licenses affected by policy  MDE allows non-certified teachers to apply for a temporary one-year license with renewal contingent upon meeting certain requirements. To renew the license for a second year, license holders have to show proof of enrollment in an alternate route program or that they’ve passed a content test called the Praxis.

Education Week.
1) A District Knew It Was Failing Some Students. How It’s Using Parents to Help   It also collaborated with the teacher’s union to include language in its most recent contract that will give some protections against layoffs for teachers who are graduates of the district’s local teacher-recruitment program, who tend to be from more diverse backgrounds.
2) Young Teachers May Be ‘Digital Natives’ But Need Support in Using Tech, Studies Find   One study, by Kristin Weber, a professor at Edinboro University in northwestern Pennsylvania, found that students set to teach elementary school were less confident that they knew how to use tech in the classroom when they finished their student teaching than before they began. 

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy [David Steiner, Dir.]. Providence Public School District: A Review   ·Inadequate preparation and support for teaching and learning. Members were very clear that “individual teachers are heroic,” but that many are “cynical and worn down.” They acknowledged that the social context of Providence has changed, and that teachers are not prepared.

KQED. How Preschool Teachers Leverage Student Curiosity into Early STEM Exploration   At Educare New Orleans preschool teachers have been trained to teach STEM ideas through play. 

New York Times. Year-End Roundup, 2018-19: All Our Lesson Plans, All in One Place

Romper.  The Best Time To Teach Baby A Second Language Is Earlier Than You Think  When it comes to the best time to teach your baby a second language, Erika Levy, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Teachers College, Columbia University says, “The earlier the better! Even within the first 6 months of life, babies become keenly aware of the speech sounds in the languages that surround them.”

The74. The Mentor: One Year, Two Teachers and a Quest in the Bronx to Empower Educators and Students to Think for Themselves  Mentoring can’t fix everything, and it’s only one part of a comprehensive induction program to support new teachers, researchers argue. But as teacher walkouts across the country this past year show, teachers are feeling drained and demanding support.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Office of Higher EducationJune Newsletter
1) New York State teacher certification examinations (NYSTCE) safety nets expiring. Critical information for your candidates
2) Request for proposals for a speech-language and bilingual speech-language personnel development center

  

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. Stringer calls for paid teacher residencies — the latest piece of a burgeoning education platform as he eyes a run for mayor  On Monday, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a proposal that he hopes will significantly reduce that rate by funding year-long residencies, arguing that training teachers more like doctors could help save the city money, attract a more diverse teaching force, and fill shortages in hard-to-staff subjects and schools.  

New York City Comptroller. Teacher Residencies: Supporting the Next Generation of Teachers and Students. Another successful collaboration between the City and higher education can be seen at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC) is a robust teaching residency that prepares participants through a year-long, paid residency. As of 2017, the program reported retention rates of 94 percent among program graduates.

New York Post.
1) City teachers fleeing New York at an alarming rate: report   To better train teachers, Stringer is calling on the Education Department to adopt a “residency” program that would offer aspiring instructors a $30,000 stipend to work in a city school during their final year of graduate school.
2) Education nonprofit moves into historical Cunard Building   This is just what the city doctor ordered: More space for training teachers. The Relay Graduate School of Education is opening downtown this week in larger space at the historical Cunard Building at 25 Broadway.

New York Times. The Late Bloomer: Learning About the Birds and Bees in College: My Orthodox Jewish education skipped sex ed, and I didn’t have “The Talk” until I was 24.   The person who was supposed to be teaching us 10th grade science was untrained as an educator, teaching until he found a full-time job as a computer programmer.

Teachers College. Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers   In the following three-part special report, you’ll meet Teachers College alumni nationwide who are applying their creativity, resilience and TC preparation toward engaging students as citizens in the making. You’ll also meet TC faculty and alumni in school leadership positions with ideas for restoring a noble profession to the standing it deserves.

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of June 17 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
EdWeek. Teachers Around the World Say They’re Satisfied With Their Jobs   Most teachers around the world, including in the United States, said they felt well prepared to teach subject-area content and pedagogy. But fewer teachers felt prepared to teach in a multicultural or multilingual setting, or in a mixed-ability classroom…

OECD. Teaching and Learning International Survey 2018 Results. 72% of new teachers in the US felt they were well prepared in the pedagogy of the subjects they taught, slightly less than the TALIS avg of 76%….

UNESCO. Education as healing: Addressing the trauma of displacement through social and emotional learning   Far from taking over the role of specialized mental health professionals, teachers can be trained to recognize the signs of trauma and deploy teaching methods to help mitigate its effects on learning.

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE.  New Initiative To Advance Teacher and Principal Preparation Grounded in the Science of Learning   …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. 

EdWeek.
1) Arthur Levine, Known for Harsh Critiques of Teacher-Preparation Programs, to Step Down   Levine, who had spent a dozen years as the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, released four damning reports on schools of education across the country… But on the eve of his retirement as the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, he’s more focused on solutions. “I concluded anybody can throw bombs,” he said. “The question was, can you fix it? …
2) No, Mentoring a Student-Teacher Won’t Hurt Your Evaluation Score, Study Suggests   The report, which is part of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University’s working paper series and has yet to go through peer review, suggests that teachers who mentored student-teachers had significantly higher observation ratings and slightly improved achievement gains, but not always at a significant level.
3) Teaching in the U.S. Should Be More ‘Intellectually Attractive,’ Global Expert Says   Schleicher of the OECD said teachers want professional autonomy and opportunities to collaborate with their peers. “That’s my main takeaway: not to make teaching financially attractive, but more importantly, make it intellectually attractive,” Schleicher said. 

GetSelected. The edTPA Uncovered: Sample Submissions That Passed   We reached out to our candidates and asked for sample submissions, and thanks to five amazing teachers, we have samples…

HechingerReport. Can teachers live where they work?: In many parts of the country, the answer is, not till they start earning more   Over the course of 10 years under Harris’ plan, teachers would receive a raise of $13,500 on average, an increase of 23 percent. The plan also calls for investment of funds in the teaching profession. Half of these designated federal funds would go to teacher training programs at “minority-serving institutions,” including historically black colleges and Hispanic serving institutions…

National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD). Forward TogetherPolicy makers, teacher preparation leaders, district, network and school administrators, general educators, special educators and caregivers need to break the silos that are ultimately hindering student learning and development.

ProPublica. How Teach for America Evolved Into an Arm of the Charter School Movement  Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the Walton foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach for America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school…“There’s no question that Teach For America as it evolved became joined at the hip to a large degree with the national education reform movement. I suspect that some of this was coordinated in part with funders who are active in the Teach For America funding and the charter and reform activities,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at the Teachers College, Columbia University 

Teaching Works. 2019 Elementary Mathematics Laboratory [July 22-26]   TeachingWorks will host a variety of professional development opportunities for classroom teachers, teacher educators, teacher leaders… observe an elementary mathematics class taught by Deborah Loewenberg Ball…

TheNews&Observer.  NC teachers in danger of losing their jobs soon could get licensing help from lawmakers   Hundreds of North Carolina teachers are in danger of losing their jobs at the end of June unless they can pass a licensure exam or state lawmakers take action to let them stay in the classroom. 

U.S. District Court District of Rhode Island. Cook v. Raimondo, filed by [TC Prof] Michael Rebell

  1. There is no requirement in Rhode Island that social studies teachers have any knowledge or training in civics or in American government…
  2. A prime reason why democratic deliberation is not taught effectively in most schools in Rhode Island is that the vast majority of teachers in these schools have not been trained in civics in general, and, specifically, have received no training or inadequate training in how to facilitate meaningful conversations on controversial issues in a non-partisan manner and how to develop the skills needed for democratic deliberation in their students…
  3. most teachers in Rhode Island have had no training in teaching media literacy skills…

WAMU. Maryland’s New Education Formula Is Being Hailed As A Breakthrough. Is It Too Soon?   … a report citing seven recommendations. • Improving teacher education and pay… Sharon Lynn Kagan, co-director of the National Center for Children and Families at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says that Maryland’s blueprint for school reform has three things that should make it successful…

Washington Post.
1) Education as a meritocracy? Report finds it is still better to be born rich than smart in U.S.   Every individual should be aware of the range of possible career preparation options, including postsecondary degree and certificate programs, apprenticeships, employer- or military-provided training and workforce development programs.
2) Hey, kid! Get on the computer to do your homework. Now, get off!   Teacher complaints about the way they are trained to use technology may be right. The report said the NAEP results, particularly in math, showed the trend toward lower student performance “also holds regardless of the teacher’s background and preparation in technology-based instruction.”
3) She wrote her dissertation on unusual names instead of changing hers. Now you can call her Dr. Marijuana Pepsi.  Appropriately enough, her dissertation, “Black names in white classrooms: Teacher behaviors and student perceptions,” analyzed how black students with distinctive names are treated by educators in predominantly white settings, and how that treatment affects their academic performance.
4) To fight hate and stereotypes, students and parents turn to textbooks   Nasser trained Fairfax public school educators to teach history when she was an associate professor at George Mason University. She observed ill-informed educators resort to shallow stories and clichés…

Wisconsin State Journal (WSJ). Lawmakers look to expand eligibility for loan program to diversify teaching pool after drop in applications  The state’s Minority Teacher Loan Program offers loans to African American, Latino, American Indian and certain Southeast Asian populations to attend a Wisconsin college in pursuit of a teaching degree. They can have the loans completely forgiven after four years of teaching by meeting certain requirements.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED. State Education Department Identifies 562 Recognition Schools   ESSA strategies to foster equity include to: address disparities in training for teachers to help them be effective in the classroom; provide students more access to rigorous high school coursework;…

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat.
1) Phil Weinberg, 35-year veteran of NYC education department, to retire  [Teachers College, MA English Ed]. He currently oversees the offices of leadership; teacher development; curriculum, instruction and professional learning; policy and evaluation; and postsecondary readiness, officials said.
2) These 277 schools are NYC’s highest achieving under ESSA’s new accountability measures   Teachers College Community School and Columbia Secondary School, two of three schools recognized in NYCDOE District #5

Fortune. Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray: Why We’re Introducing Social-Emotional Learning in New York City Schools   Every teacher will have access to a strong curriculum for social-emotional learning, and the training they need to teach it in their classrooms.

Teachers College. Leading with Evidence in Schools: Data and Research Literacy [July 1-28]  This course is designed for current or aspiring teachers, school leaders, and district or state leaders globally who are looking to enhance and hone their skills and capacity around data and evidence use for improving instruction in their schools.

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of June 10 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Association Montessori Internationale (AMI).  Training of Trainers Programme 2019 [multiple venues and formats]

Pursuit/Univ. of Melbourne. What Does A Great Teacher Look Like?: Teachers with a strong belief in their own ability to ‘get the job done’ have the biggest impact on a student’s learning   Our previous research (which was launched by former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham last year) found that this practice of teaching should be considered separately from teacher quality, or the personal traits of teachers that contribute to effective teaching. These traits also have an independent impact on student, teacher and school outcomes.

The Centre for Education and International Development (CEID). Colloquium on Teacher Education in sub- Saharan Africa [25 June, Univ. of London]

Univ. of Chicago/Delhi. Reimagining Teacher Training in India Conference Report


UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). May Federal Update Webinar Recording

Association of Teacher Educators (ATE). Summer Induction Symposium For New Education Professors [July 27, Burlington, VT]

Central Michigan University. Teacher ed grows in many ways: Program adds students, expands support for current and future educators

Daily Herald. Career Pathways program helped Elk Grove senior thrive   Samantha Pelaez, a Harper College Promise Scholar, is excited for her future as a teacher, a career which she explored while taking part in District 214’s Career Pathways program.

EdWeek.
1) A Gap in Teacher Training: Working With Students Who Have Concussions   A growing number of children have experienced a brain injury—yet most teachers have never learned in preparation or professional development how to work with them.
2) Stop Trying to Standardize Your Students’ Language [commentary]  As educators, we’re especially attuned to the labeling and categorization of language. With honest intentions, we take up what we’re taught in our teacher preparation: that language can be standardized.
3) Want Teachers to Motivate Their Students? Teach Them How to Do It   A study released in May by the Mindset Scholars Network, a collaborative of researchers who study student motivation, found most teacher education programs nationwide do not include explicit training for teachers on the science of how to motivate students.

Honolulu Civil Beat. Students Thrived At This Maui School In Territorial Hawaii   A widely known “best practice” was the Columbia University Teachers College mission of “cultural understanding as an essential element of teaching and learning” in New York City — where Lower East Side immigrants spoke German, Italian and Yiddish.

Learning Policy Institute. EdPrepLab Will Help Educators Develop the Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions to Support All Students in Learning Deeply   Learning Policy Institute and Bank Street Graduate School of Education announced the launch of Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab), an initiative to help educator preparation programs ensure that new teachers and leaders are able to provide k-12 students with education that helps them develop skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and being able to apply knowledge in a range of contexts.

NYTimes.
1) Inside the Elementary School Where Drug Addiction Sets the Curriculum
2) What Will Teacher Raises Buy Students? [OpEd by M. Kraft, Brown Univ.] Data collected by the ACT organization show that high school students most commonly cited low pay as a reason for not being interested in teaching… The second most commonly cited reason high school students gave for not being interested in becoming teachers is the job’s lack of career development opportunities.

The Week. America’s teacher shortage  Studies have found both that under-prepared teachers are more likely to leave the profession and that some alternative pathways into teaching can produce less effective educators, as compared to traditional teaching education programs.

Tulsa World. After years of debilitating teacher shortages, some districts are seeing progress in hiring, retention  A recent career fair attracted more than 180 prospective teachers. Most were hired by the district, Kerns said. She’s confident Broken Arrow will start the school year with all positions filled in every area except special education, which continues to be an area of need across the state.

UDDaily.  Training Delaware’s Teachers  …94% of undergraduates majoring in elementary teacher education (ETE) at the University of Delaware are employed as elementary, middle school or special education teachers after graduation. In addition to traditional classroom learning, ETE majors spend much of their degree program engaged in extensive field experiences in real-world educational settings—teaching, tutoring and mentoring in local schools and community centers.

 

NEW YORK STATE
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Hiring teachers of color is an investment in student success, group says   Educators for Excellence has since asked the State Education Department to double the funding for My Brother’s Keeper Teacher Opportunity Corps — a state grant program that partners with teacher preparation programs to recruit, train and support new teachers of color entering the profession – to $7 million.

NYSED.
1) Public comment period is open on proposed regulatory changes that would require teacher preparation programs in certain subject areas to dedicate at least 3 semester hours to language acquisition & literacy development of English language learners.Please email comments to [email protected]by June 21.
2) State Education Department Announces Second Class of My Brother’s Keeper Fellows   Also since 2016, NYSED … awarded grants to 16 colleges and universities to help them 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. 

 

NEW YORK CITY
Brooklyn Reporter. Campaign for Children holds City Hall rally for pre-K funding parity   Council Speaker Corey Johnson admitted during the rally, which was organized by Campaign for Children, that a DOE teacher with a Master’s degree who’s been in the system for eight years earns about $85,000 a year, while teachers with the same qualifications teaching at a CBO earn around $49,000 annually.

NYDailyNews. Manhattan memorial to recall forward-thinking Harlem-born educator Irving Hamer Jr.   Raised in central Harlem, the native New Yorker held a number of influential public education positions including deputy commissioner of the state Education Department and Manhattan representative to the city Board of Education… In the classroom, Hamer was a professor of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Florida International University Center for Urban Education and Innovation and the University of Memphis.

NYTimes. Velvel Pasternak, Preserver of Hasidic Music, Is Dead at 85   He studied at Juilliard and received a master’s degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University…Mr. Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves… 

Teachers College.
1) Confessions of an Active Learner: Amity Buxton (Ed.D.’62, M.A.’52) has supported teachers as learners   Buxton was hired to train student teachers in the combined district through a state-funded program administered by San Francisco State University. With racial tensions running high (including classroom takeovers by the Black Panthers), the challenges of equitably teaching and measuring student outcomes might have proven insurmountable had not Buxton stressed assessing each child’s work on an individual basis and encouraged teachers to act as designers of curriculum and agents of individualized instruction.
2) Teaching Residents at Teachers College. TR@TC June Newsletter

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of June 3 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Education WeekForty Percent of Elementary School Teachers’ Work Could Be Automated By 2030, McKinsey Global Institute Predicts   In the coming decade, McKinsey Global predicts, more than 40 percent of what these educators do during a current workday could be automated, resulting in the need to develop new skills and become more comfortable collaborating with algorithmic systems.

GaúchaZHEnsino domiciliar, escolas público-privadas, vouchers: conheça o modelo americano que seduz governo brasileiro Professor do Teachers College, da Universidade de Columbia, Jeffrey R. Henig defende que a melhoria da educação passa por mais investimentos, mas não só isso: os recursos precisam ser direcionados para atrair bons estudantes para a carreira do magistério, o que passa por melhores salários e por uma formação qualificada. [Eng: improving education requires more investment, but not only that: resources need to be directed to attract good students to the teaching profession, which means better salaries and qualified training.]

Gov.UKDrive to unleash potential of North East’s youngsters stepped-up  …Investing a further £12 million to boost early career training for new teachers and help improve the quality of teaching and raise standards in the region’s schools, ahead of roll-out in other regions.

International Society for Music Education (ISME). Call for submissions, 34th World Conference [Helsinki, Finland, August 2 to 7, 2020]

NYTimesTaking the Future of Manufacturing into High Schools   In Mexico, government education officials seem increasingly willing to have public schools teach robotics, said Roberto Saint Martin, a founder and the chief executive of RobotiX, a robotics education business, which started in 2006 in Mexico City… RobotiX sends its instructors to schools and also trains teachers — more than 1,600 have gone through its training.

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). Teacher Educators and Students Advocate for Educator Preparation at AACTE’s Washington Week in the Nation’s Capital  

Colorado Public RadioHow An Ex-Marine Charted A Path From Fallujah To A Colorado Classroom   But in all of that, there was nothing more difficult than facing down a classroom of 30 middle schoolers, hashing out a lesson on power and collaboration. Warthen is now training to be a high school social studies teacher. 

edTPA/AACTE.
1) SCALE will convene the annual Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) Conference March 26 – 28, 2020, in Austin, TX.
2) Updated edTPA Handbooks and Templates Now Available

Education Week. Districts Struggle to Hire Black Teachers. Is the Solution Hiring More Black Principals?   Educator preparation programs can also play a role in helping districts recruit, train, support and retain principals of color by developing closer relationships with districts that want to diversify their leadership workforce and creating partnerships between the two.

Houston ChronicleTeacher turnover remains high in Texas public schools  Teachers who graduate from university undergraduate programs are most likely to stay, with 75 percent of teachers on the job after five years. However, undergraduate programs are graduating fewer future teachers. Alternative certification programs are picking up the slack. The programs, such as Teach For America, produced 12,029 teachers who entered the classroom last school year, nearly double the number of teachers who took the traditional university route. However, 34 percent of teachers from alternative certification programs left the job before they would have returned a fifth time.

Washington PostArlington school system signs agreement to improve support for English learners   The agreement specifies that Arlington schools must actively recruit teachers trained in teaching English as a second language for “relevant teaching positions” and directs the school system to provide annual training to principals and administrators who evaluate teachers of English learners.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Office of Higher EducationMay Newsletter.
1) Expiring CST Safety Nets
2) New Science CSTs
3) NYSED Definition of “University” 

NYSED Regents Meetings. Higher Education Committee.
1) Proposed Amendments to Sections 80-5.8 and 80-5.20 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Eligibility Requirements for the Endorsement Pathway for Certification as an Educator in the Classroom Teaching Service or in the Educat [Public comment period begins June 19]
2) Proposed Amendment to Sections 80-3.15 and 80-4.3 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Extension of the Application Deadline for the Statement of Continued Eligibility (SOCE) for Certain Teachers of Students with Disabilitie
3) Appointments to the State Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching

New York State Senate.
1) S05410 Relates to the cumulative grade point average admission requirement for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs.   S05410 Floor Votes: 06/04/2019 Vote Yea/Nay 143/3

2) S.05985Relates to the New York state masters-in-education teacher incentive scholarship program.

06/04/2019 COMMITTEE DISCHARGED AND COMMITTED TO RULES
06/04/2019 ORDERED TO THIRD READING CAL.1172
06/04/2019 PASSED SENATE
06/04/2019 DELIVERED TO ASSEMBLY
06/04/2019 Referred to ways and means


NEW YORK CITY
New York TimesIs This Gay, Sober, Poem-Writing City Council Leader the Mayor New Yorkers Want?   The early childhood teachers who work for community-based organizations and receive less pay are largely black and Latino women, according to a study from the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College at Columbia University, while the teachers at the Department of Education are largely white.

Teachers CollegeThe Sounds of Inclusion: Teachers College Community School’s music program benefits children and TC students, reflecting a broader approach to learning   Williamson, who decided to earn a teaching degree because of his work as Conductor and Director of School Outreach for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, says that TCCS helped look beyond his own training.

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of May 27 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Calgary Herald. New Education Act would open high schools to mature students as old as 21   Bieber said newly graduated or student teachers can be as young as 22. And Grade 10 students often date Grade 12 students, “but what happens when those Grade 12s are now 21? Things get really muddy, really fast.”

New York Times. Brexit Is Sending Students Packing, Straining Private Schools on Both Ends   …the Council of British International Schools, which plans to start training teachers in cities like Brussels… International teachers are usually hired in the spring, but until the schools are sure how many pupils are coming, they are reluctant to make job offers.

World Education News and Reviews. Education in Mexico   Teachers are trained at dedicated state-supervised teacher training colleges, the escuelas normales superiores. Teachers at all levels are required to hold a licentiatura-level qualification, which is called the Título Profesional de Educación Normal (Professional Title of Normal Education). 

 

UNITED STATES
Association of American Educators Foundation. AAEF LETTER ON TEACHER DIVERSITY
Dear Secretary DeVos, …We at the Association of American Educators Foundation and the seventy-five undersigned education organizations believe that this is a problem we can all work together to solve and that doing so rewards not only our students, but current and future educators as well. We believe that increasing teacher diversity elevates the teaching profession and improves the lives and outcomes of all students.

Association of Teacher Educators. Distinguished Research in Teacher Education Award. [Submission deadline July 1]

Chalkbeat.
1) I was a white teacher who couldn’t talk about race. A journey through successful U.S. high schools changed my thinking.  …my first year in a new role: director of a new teacher preparation program. The class meets every Thursday for three hours. In it, teachers-in-training talk about racism — their own and that which permeates our society and our schools. I teach the course with two enormously talented colleagues, both women of color… we seek to disrupt two problematic beliefs: the belief that woke white saviors can “enlighten” their racist peers, and the belief that people of color bear sole responsibility for helping others come to terms with patterns of racial oppression.
2) What should new teachers of color know when taking the job? Veterans offer some advice.   Amid a teacher shortage, recruiting an educator in Illinois has become increasingly difficult. Chicago is pulling out all the stops with a series of videos promoting a teaching residency program that offers tuition discounts for apprenticeships in high-need schools.

EdSource. The Key to Minority Student Achievement Might Be Teacher Training Quality   Specifically, districts with low numbers of teachers with “substandard credentials”—which the report authors defined as emergency permits, waivers and intern credentials—achieved better results for all students regardless of race.

Education Week.
1) How Can We Get More Highly Effective Teachers to Serve as Mentors?   Relatively few highly effective teachers take on roles as mentors to student-teachers, researchers say. One solution? Pay them more—a lot more.
2) Joe Biden’s Education Plan: Triple Title I to Boost Teacher Pay and Student Supports   His plan calls for increasing the number of teachers of color by working with historically black colleges and universities and supporting paraprofessionals in obtaining teaching certificates, but it does not outline specific programs to support this work.
3) Most Classroom Teachers Feel Unprepared to Support Students With Disabilities   Overall, the survey respondents indicated the problems begin in teacher preparation programs, well before education students lead a classroom: Many teachers reported they were not required to take courses in working with students with disabilities or found that the courses they did take left them unprepared to work with all students. The work also details how states’ policies for educator certification have set a “low bar” for preparing general educators to teach students with disabilities.
4) Overlooked: How Teacher Training Falls Short for English-Learners and Students With IEPs Administrators must prepare new teachers, even those who had preservice training, to work with English-learners or special education students, because they “have no idea what they don’t know,” Samson said. “They are going to walk into the classroom on that first day and be shell-shocked.”
5) When the PD Plate Is Overfull: Growing requirements for trainings on non-academic issues—everything from food allergies to sexual assault—have made it hard for schools and teachers to keep up   All agreed: The state’s statutory teacher-training requirements, while well-intentioned, could be streamlined. Connecticut administrators estimated it would take 90 hours to adequately train teachers on a list of state-required topics—everything from sexual abuse awareness and food allergies to identifying safety threats and adolescent risk-taking behaviors.

Forbes. Joe Biden Struggles To Lift Heavy Education Baggage   The answer to Biden’s question is that you build the dignity and professionalization of teaching by not elevating shortcuts that diminish the profession (like Teach for America), by not implementing top-down reforms that dictate to teachers how to do their jobs, and by not pumping federal money and support into a parallel system of education premised on the notion that public schools are failing.

Inside Higher Ed. Biden Promises Fix to Public Service Loan Forgiveness   …promised in an education plan released Tuesday to “see to it” that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is “fixed, simplified and actually helps teachers.”… And he said he would boost the number of teachers of color enrolled in teacher training programs.

La Revista Jurídica de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Exit, Voice, And Charter Schools [by S. Abrams, TC National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education]    …in explaining the legendary excellence of the Finnish school system: outside of moving from one region or neighborhood to another, there is no exit in Finland…. This shared educational experience cannot be separated from the country’s heavy investment in high-quality teacher preparation, well-equipped schools, and generous teacher compensation.

National Education Policy Center.  Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2019 [co-author L. Huerta, TC faculty] Recommendations Arising from Section III: Policymakers should: • Define certification training and relevant teacher licensure requirements specific to teaching responsibilities in virtual schools, and require research-based professional development to promote effective online teaching models.

New York Times. How to End the Child-Care Crisis [OpEd by. S. Polakow-Suransky, Bank Street College of Education President]  Step 4 is public financing of teacher training. Unlike other professions, early care is not supported by a system of preparation and ongoing training. Early educators need a deep knowledge of child development and the chance to receive feedback and coaching as they learn.

Philadelphia Inquirer. OPINION:  Black teachers matter. How do we get more in the classroom? As Columbia professor and black educator Chris Emdin remarked, for many black students, returning to school after they leave is like returning to the scene of a crime that hurt them… What does resonate with those who hadn’t previously considered teaching is an opportunity: Become the teacher you wish you had and knew you needed.

Teaching Tolerance. What’s My Complicity? Talking White Fragility With Robin DiAngelo   I am a former professor of education. I’ve worked many years in large, teacher-training programs. I think teachers are critical, and I think, regardless of intentions, when you have an overwhelmingly white teaching force—we have a very racially homogenous teaching force—you inevitably have the reproduction and the dissemination of racism and white supremacy, just by virtue of the homogeneity.

USA Today. Solving the teacher shortage crisis: APSU and CMCSS team up on new program   … first class of aspiring professionals embarking on a free three-year residency and degree program to turn themselves into teachers, as part of a partnership between Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools and Austin Peay State University.

Washington Post. New report on virtual education: ‘It sure sounds good. As it turns out, it’s too good to be true.’   Finally, with regard to teacher quality, they note that “little progress has been made … on issues related to teacher quality in virtual contexts … [and] little attention has been given to the unique challenges related to ensuring an adequate supply of high-quality teachers in virtual schools.”

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED.
1) 2019 New York State My Brother’s Keeper Symposium [May 31, Albany]
2) Board of Regents Meeting for June 2019

NYS Senate.
1) S. 5410. Relates to the cumulative grade point average admission requirement for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs. 5/29/2019 Advanced to Third Reading
2) S. 5985. Relates to the New York state masters-in-education teacher incentive scholarship program. 5/30/2019 Reported and Committed to Finance.

Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching. May meeting agenda

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. I changed careers to teach at a Bronx school for students with severe disabilities. Here’s what I wish people knew about my students — and job.   When her son was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, she saw up close the struggles he endured and decided to change careers, going back to school to become a teacher. While pursuing a master’s degree, she taught at a Catholic school in the Bronx.

City University of New York. edTPA Support for CUNY Alumni   The edTPA support course will be offered from May 29th-June 20th at Medgar Evers College (MEC) on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6PM in the Library 2037 and The CUNY Graduate Center (GC) on Tuesdays and Thursday from 4:30-6:30PM.  

Queens Daily Eagle. New children’s art nonprofit wins $10,000 from QEDC   Cavadas and Lokken met at Teachers College, Columbia University while pursuing master’s degrees, and after teaching art in New York City, realized there was a potential to expand arts education around the city.

 

Categories
Teacher Education

Week of May 20 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBAL
Independent [UK]. Maths and physics teachers to be offered extra cash to stop them leaving profession   Nick Gibb, minister for school standards, said: “Teaching remains a popular career, but we want to make sure that we can continue to attract and keep the brightest and best graduates, particularly in subjects where specialist knowledge and expertise are vital to the future success of the economy.

National Online Teacher Training [UK].  a new approach to teacher training

Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE). HEA criticism of teacher training programmes  A review of teacher training programmes in Ireland has criticised the level of fees charged to students studying to become teachers, and says course changes introduced seven years ago have contributed to the current shortage of post-primary teachers.  

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher EducationNew AACTE Research-to-Practice Video Series on Special Education Now Available

Atlanta Journal ConstitutionMorehouse grads already making plans to pay good fortune forward   Ross Jordan entered Morehouse with half of his tuition paid. Then Robert F. Smith announced he was paying for the rest.. The kinesiology major was bound for Teachers College, Columbia University to earn a master’s degree in physical education saddled with $50,000 in undergraduate loans… After earning his master’s degree, Jordan, 22, plans to find ways to make kinesthetic learning more acceptable in a traditional classroom setting specifically for at-risk students.

Bernie SandersA Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education   Establish a dedicated fund to create and expand teacher-training programs at HBCUs, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and tribal colleges and universities to increase educator diversity…. Address the shortage in special education teacher recruitment, training opportunities, and pay for special education teachers.

Chalkbeat.
1) Rural Colorado faces a teacher shortage. University of Colorado Denver has plans to help.   By making high-quality educator preparation programs available in rural communities and recruiting candidates from those communities, administrators hope they can make a real dent in the teacher shortage.
2) Teach for America-Memphis has a new leader for the first time in a decade. What will she do?   For the first time in nine years, Memphis’ largest alternative teacher training program will have a new leader in Nafeesha Mitchell.

Chronicle of Higher EducationWhy One Department Trains Its Graduate Students to Teach   The classics department requires graduate students to take a course that introduces them to educational research and encourages them to apply it to teaching in the discipline. The course, which Furman teaches, serves several purposes… Quite a few of its master’s students, he said, go on to teach Latin and related subjects at the high-school level.

Education WeekWhat’s Harder Than Learning? Unlearning: The biggest impediment to professional change might just be what you already know   Some teacher-preparation programs, for instance, let aspiring teachers practice classroom management and culturally responsive pedagogy with simulated students (who are either played by computer avatars or live actors). Those types of simulations can help change the behavior patterns of teachers, Dede said.

EdutopiaHow to Prepare Students to Learn by Teaching: Strategies for having older students teach younger ones, shared by a teacher at a high school career academy for future teachers.   I’m the lead teacher of a high school Academy of Education—the students in my class are learning about becoming educators themselves. These students have a unique opportunity: They get to work with the children at our on-campus preschool, so they have a chance to practice teaching without leaving the building.

Forbes8 Things Every School Must Do To Prepare For The 4th Industrial Revolution   5.    Alter educator training  American philosopher John Dewey said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”… Failure needs to be embraced as an essential step to learning. Additionally, teaching will be much more personalized, which will be supported by bringing in technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Inside Higher EducationMaking Sense of Metrics   4. The problem of education’s “black box.”This was an overriding theme of the conference specifically articulated by Corbin Campbell of Teachers College Columbia University. Given that learning happens inside individuals and often manifests itself in different ways inside those individuals, it is very difficult to measure what’s happening.

Hechinger Report.
1) How cities are convincing voters to pay higher taxes for public preschool: Seattle, Cincinnati and San Antonio are just three of a growing number of cities to develop high-quality public preschool programs paid for by new local taxes.   Seattle also earned a silver medal in the American Cities report for meeting all 10 standards indicative of high-quality preschools, such as teacher education level, class size, and teacher-student ratio.
2) Lessons from Boston: “no excuses” charter schools kept boosting student test scores after expansion   That led the authors to speculate that the standardization of hiring, training and teaching practices at these “no excuses” charter schools is driving the results. Much like at fast-food restaurants, there’s a lot that each charter school network does identically at every campus… New teachers didn’t write their lessons from scratch. In Boston, experienced teachers from the parent campuses spent a lot of time mentoring teachers in the expansion schools. During the hiring process, network leaders sought new teachers who believed in the school model before they started.

Learning Policy InstitutePreparing Teachers to Support Social and Emotional Learning: A Case Study of San Jose State University and Lakewood Elementary School   This two-part study offers information on how preservice and in-service teacher training can support good teaching practices and implement SEL in schools, while providing a picture of what SEL looks like when integrated into the school day.

Market WatchMore high-school students are using this hack to get a head-start on college — but the poorest students are being left behind  In many jurisdictions, in order for a high-school teacher to qualify to teach a college course, they need not only a master’s degree, but also a significant amount of master-level course work in the specific topic they’re teaching. For schools with limited budgets to pay teachers and challenging environments …that can be a tough find. 

National Center for Education StatisticsThe Condition of EducationIn 2015–16, some 90 percent of public school teachers held a regular or standard state teaching certificate or advanced professional certificate, 4 percent held a provisional or temporary certificate, 3 percent held a probationary certificate, 1 percent held no certification, and 1 percent held a waiver/emergency certificate. 

Washington Post.
1) If you don’t know what the historic Brown v. Board ruling is but know you should, watch this 6-minute video
2) Report: The effect chronic stress has on children at school — and why policymakers should care   Education reform efforts continue to focus mostly on how higher quality teaching can overcome social and economic challenges. Yet, these efforts have failed to make a meaningful difference in the achievement gap between black and white children. In part, this continued reform focus on in-class factors is the result of a failure to understand the pathways by which social and economic disadvantage contributes to depressed academic performance …

WJOLBill Suspending Teacher Basic Skills Test Heads To Governor   A bill suspending the use of a basic skills test for Illinois teacher licensing is headed to Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk. 

 

NEW YORK STATE
Commission on Independent College and Universities (CICU). (CICU) strongly supports expanding the masters-in-education teacher incentive scholarship program to students choosing to attend a private not-for-profit college or university (A.2404/ S.5985).  We urge you to coordinate with your campus’ government affairs office to send an email to or call Assembly and Senate Higher Education Committee members to request that they place this bill on the higher education committee agenda for a vote. 

My Brother’s KeeperChanging the Narrative  Teacher Opportunity Corps (TOC) II

New York State Education Department.Proposed Amendments to Sections 52.21 and 80-3.7 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Related to Requiring Study in Language Acquisition and Literacy Development of English Language Learners in Certain Teacher Preparation Programs and in th   The public comment notice was published in the April 24, 2019 NYS Register. Comments must be received by June 23, 2019 Send comments to: Petra Maxwell, NYS Education Department, Office of Higher Education, 89 Washington Avenue, Room 975 EBA, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 474-2238, email: [email protected]

New York State SenateS. 5410 May 21 vote: AYE/NAY 9/0Relates to the cumulative grade point average admission requirement for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs. 

Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching.  March meeting minutes.  April meeting minutes

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat.
1) New proposal would extend early childcare pipeline from birth to preschool for some NYC children   Stringer’s plan also builds in $25 million to pay for teacher training and education scholarships, which could help strengthen quality.
2) These 17 educators just won top honors from New York City    Through the Teacher Assistant Scholar Program, Ms. Tutelian is training the next generation of math teachers by empowering students to become teacher assistants.
3) To help more New York City teachers get comfortable teaching computer science, Cornell Tech offers a ‘safety net’   This residency model was developed by Cornell Tech to help teachers grow more comfortable delivering lessons in computer science, an increasingly in-demand subject for which, until recently, there was no formal state certification.