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Home: For Faculty, Staff and Students: Handbook

School of Education Handbook: Programmatic Initiatives

During the coming year, we will develop websites for these initiatives that explain their aims and activities, and ways to be involved, as well as provide information about their ongoing work. Links to these sites will be made available to the SOE community as soon as they are ready.

Higher and Postsecondary Education 50 th Anniversary Celebration and Study Year

During 2006-07, the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) was the first of its kind at a U.S. university and is the #1 ranked program in the country. We are marking this occasion with a special yearlong opportunity to consider issues in higher education practice, policy, and research. An interesting series of events is planned, including a three-part series of Distinguished Scholar lectures (all fall), an inaugural celebration (January 2007) that will involve a number of former University of Michigan leaders, a National Conference (March 2007), and an Alumni Celebration (end of May 2007). The year's events provide opportunities for all of us in the School to learn more about the field, and to consider our own programs of work and where we are headed, both as scholars and practitioners of higher education.See http://www.soe.umich.edu/cshpe/50th/index.html for information about events and opportunities to participate in our reflections and forward-thinking about higher education.

Coordinator: Marvin Peterson

Education Leadership Center

We are working with the Ross School of Business to design and establish an Education Leadership Center at the University of Michigan. The current work involves designing and piloting programs, soliciting input from potential participants, and raising funds to support the work. A key function of this Center will be to provide executive education aimed at improving instruction and student achievement. Participants would be leadership teams from a variety of K-12 districts and possibly, as it develops, also leaders from educational institutions such as community colleges or other institutions of higher education. Led by distinguished faculty from the University of Michigan and with the participation of experienced and successful executive leaders from the corporate world and education sectors, the Center will use proven approaches and also test innovations to help education leadership teams master successful strategies for continuous instructional improvement and, more important, develop the leadership capacity needed to implement these strategies system-wide. The Center will serve as a "hothouse" producing new ideas and practices with the potential to fundamentally transform education leadership programming at the University of Michigan and throughout the U.S. education community.

Coordinators: Kenneth Burnley, Roger Goddard, Brian Rowan

Social Justice Initiative

Now in its fourth year, the Social Justice Initiative has been sponsoring symposia and conversations about equity, access, diversity, and social justice. The primary goal of the initiative is to weave its themes and purposes throughout the fabric of the School of Education's programs, curriculum and pedagogies, recruitment efforts, and other school activities. Concerns for equity, diversity, and social justice must be made vital to the organizational practices and policies of the School, as well as to our plans for who we are as a community and who we want to become. The Social Justice Committee strives to help us accomplish these goals and tie our endeavors to the values of the University of Michigan more broadly, and to ensure that our policies and practices have the intended effects.

Coordinator: Percy Bates

Teacher Education Initiative

The Teacher Education Initiative (TEI) is a collection of coordinated projects underway aimed at re-inventing teacher education at the University of Michigan. The goal of this initiative is to build a first-rate program for preparing teachers in, from, and for practice, and to do so as a laboratory for studying and solving problems of the professional preparation of teachers. The aim of the Teacher Education Initiative is to prepare beginning teachers to participate in a profession of teaching that takes responsibility for helping all P-16 students develop the capacities needed for competent performance in complex intellectual domains, with particular attention to currently underserved populations. The TEI works across campus with the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, as well as with our cousin professional schools, many of which must tackle similar challenges in preparing skillful professionals. The TEI also works with local schools and school practitioners. Important to the TEI are the development of the doctoral and master's level programs in teacher education and the design of new approaches to research in and on teacher education. Although the TEI is about the improvement of teacher education in the School of Education at the University of Michigan, we ultimately aim to build knowledge and provide a body of evidence regarding the preparation of teachers that could inform teacher education broadly.

The following list of roles will grow this year and the structure of the planning effort will expand to include coordinators and people working on recruitment, faculty and instructor development, research, and fundraising, as well as a TEI Steering Group to help connect work across strands. These aspects of the work are not yet represented here, and the list below does not fully represent the organizational structure we are developing.

TEI Coordinator: Deborah Ball

TEI Project Manager: Francesca Forzani

Coordinator of Program Design and Development: Magdalene Lampert

Leader of Curriculum Group: Deborah Ball

Leaders of ED 392 Redesign: Carla O'Connor, David K. Cohen, Shari Saunders

Leader of Language and Literacy Education Redesign Project: Annemarie Palincsar

Leader of School, Designed, and Virtual Settings Development: Magdalene Lampert

Coordinator of Assessment: Pamela Moss

Leader of Secondary Program Disciplinary Literacy Integration and Assessment Project and Coordinator of Undergraduate Lower Division Initiative (see below): Elizabeth Moje

Leaders of Elementary Program Assessment Project in Math and Literacy: Pamela Moss, Timothy Boerst, Annemarie Palincsar, Deborah Ball

Organizers of Seminar Series: Gary Fenstermacher and Francesca Forzani

Undergraduate Lower Division Initiative

This initiative coordinates the strategic design of our efforts to engage in programmatic work with undergraduate students, both here at the University of Michigan and also with students at other institutions, including community colleges and high schools. Our purposes are threefold:

• to contribute to undergraduate students' overall liberal education and to inform their future roles as citizens and parents by providing opportunities to learn about the role of educational practices, tools, policies, and institutions in society;

• to cultivate new pathways and attract students to the School of Education programs, particularly teacher education;

• to develop new partnerships with the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and with other professional schools to foster interdisciplinary stances toward teaching and learning;

• to participate in and contribute to the development of undergraduate teaching and learning on this campus and beyond.

Coordinator: Elizabeth Moje