TEI Priorities and Preferred Areas for Proposals
The Teacher Education Initiative Steering Group has established a set of priorities for the 2007-2008 academic year. While we welcome proposals for investigatory and design work related to any portion of our efforts, we are particularly eager to support projects that are aligned with these priorities. Below we list our priorities, summarize our efforts to-date around each priority, and briefly explain where we need help in relation to each priority. More information about the work of the TEI and our priorities are available on the TEI’s website (www.soe.umich.edu/tei) and from any member of the TEI Steering Group (Deborah Ball, Timothy Boerst, Francesca Forzani, Donald Freeman, and Pamela Moss).
1. Curriculum for Learning Teaching
Our primary goal in this domain is to build a curriculum for learning teaching that is structured around the core tasks of teaching. We aim to create a program that offers student teachers repeated opportunities to rehearse and practice the work of teaching, and to receive intensive coaching as they do. We also plan to create a system of staged assessments throughout our program that will provide feedback on students’ progress. We intend for our program to offer student teachers strong preparation to teach academic subject matter, and to meet the academic needs of all students in a broad range of school settings. For organizational purposes, we divide our work on curriculum into three categories: curriculum (determining what students need to learn), settings and activities (designing and situating the learning of teaching), and assessment.
2. Curriculum for Learning Teacher Education
One of the goals of the Teacher Education Initiative is to create opportunities for doctoral students to learn to work as teacher educators, and to support faculty members and cooperating teachers in improving their work as teacher educators. This is an area of the Initiative to which we have not yet devoted significant attention, but we are currently considering how to increase our efforts around this important goal. One area where we currently need help is in designing opportunities for practicing teachers who work or who would like to work with our student teachers to learn more about teacher education and to practice becoming more effective coaches and mentors. Proposals in this area might range from short evening or summer workshops for practicing teachers to masters-level courses or even new master’s degree programs designed especially for current teachers who wish to become teacher educators.
3. Recruitment
Recruitment is a priority for both the School in general and for the TEI. The interests, skills, and attributes of our students constitute instructional resources, and we need to recruit more and different applicants to our teacher education program for both instructional and revenue purposes. We are particularly interested in exploring innovative ways to recruit students to teaching, including, for example, pre-matriculation experiences for students who are considering teaching. During Fall 2007, for example, a segment of an undergraduate course in the Ford School of Public Policy devoted to issues in education policy attracted several students to apply to the teacher education program. We welcome proposals for similar experiments around pre-matriculation experiences, including new courses, workshops, and opportunities for volunteering or working in area schools or communities.
4. Research
Research is a fundamental component of the work of the TEI. Little knowledge exists about effective teacher education, and the design experiments that constitute the TEI need to be carefully documented and studied. We aim eventually to generate and disseminate systematic evidence of and about effective teacher education. During the next year we need to conduct small investigations of past and current work on teacher education that might inform our efforts, and to begin documenting and studying our current program and our new experiments. Proposals for work in this area could include, for example, plans to study current efforts to use methods courses more effectively to prepare students for teaching, or initial efforts to launch long-range studies of our graduates.
