Curriculum
The redesign of our teacher education curriculum is a central component of the TEI’s work. Our decisions about what student teachers need to learn in order to become competent beginners will drive nearly everything else we do, from the kinds of learning activities and performance assessments we design to the relationships we create or strengthen with schools and practicing teachers. While our current curriculum has many strengths, we aim to improve it by structuring it more definitively around the core practices of teaching.
We launched our efforts around curriculum redesign in September 2006 with the formation of the Curriculum Group. This group spent the ’07-’08 year working to designate the core domains of teachers’ work, and to delineate the practices that are part of work in those domains. To date, we have focused on mapping those domains and practices in which all teachers work, across subject-matters and grade levels. During summer 2007, a sub-set of the Curriculum Group worked to expand this map further. We are considering different ways to share this map with the broader School of Education community and with practicing teachers so that it can be refined and elaborated. In the coming year, we will begin to delineate the specific practices that constitute teaching for each discipline and grade level. Our aim is to begin piloting attempts to teach our students to do specific elements of the work of teaching – such as leading a whole-class discussion, for example – as soon as possible. After a period of experimenting and revising, we will turn our efforts to using this map of teaching as a foundation for the sequencing of coursework and fieldwork across the program. For more information about work on curriculum, please contact Deborah Ball (dball@umich.edu).
One area of the curriculum where we are already piloting new ways of preparing our students to teach is in our course ED 392: Education in a Multicultural Society. Please click here to read more about our work on this project.
TEI Ethics Project
With support from the Ethics and Public Life Center at the University of Michigan, we are launching a project to articulate a set of ethical "imperatives" for teachers that will run consistently throughout our redesigned program, and to create instructional activities that will help our students internalize and learn to act on those imperatives. Members of a working group will take primary responsibility for this project. Please Click here to read the charge to this group (charge_ethics_working_group.pdf), and email Francesca Forzani with comments, questions, or requests to become involved.
