Teacher Education Initiative Request for Proposals 2007-2008
Fall 2007 marks the beginning of the third year of the Teacher Education Initiative (TEI). During the past two years, we have developed our goals for redesigning teacher education at the University of Michigan and a sense of the areas in which we need to work to reach those goals. The work involved requires the energy, creativity, and expertise of a broad range of faculty and staff members and graduate students from across the School of Education. To this end, we are excited to launch a Request for Proposals (RFP) in order to solicit leadership and ideas for a range of TEI-related tasks and projects, including short-term investigations, design experiments, and pilot research projects. A generous donor to the School of Education has provided us with funds to support this work. We intend to use these funds to aid in the development and execution of projects that will contribute to the work of the TEI and to the establishment of a comprehensive research agenda focused on teacher education.
The Request for Proposals (RFP) process has been designed to encourage a variety of approaches to learning about and improving teacher education, which include, but are not limited to, large and small scale versions of the following types of work: design experiments, pilot research projects, literature reviews, or strategic surveys of the field. Design experiments could include, for example, short segments of current courses devoted to piloting new instructional activities or assessments, new courses, or new settings for learning teaching. Our work in the current teacher education program and on the TEI also offers opportunities for important research. While we are eager to support pilot projects that might later become serious, long-term research efforts, literature reviews or surveys that are smaller in scale can also contribute to the TEI. We anticipate being able to learn in targeted ways from papers that could be used later at conferences or as preliminary examination pieces for doctoral students.
The funds available in the RFP are intended to catalyze short-term tasks and undertakings, and are not meant to serve as comprehensive funding for projects. Depending on the type and scope of a proposed project, funds from this RFP might be used to support one or more of the following:
- part-time undergraduate or doctoral student assistance with planning or project execution
- project documentation
- seed money for initial design work, writing larger grant proposals, or publication
- costs associated with creating materials, recruiting participants, or purchasing or developing equipment
Members of the TEI Steering Group can also assist project leaders in locating additional sources of funding.
The RFP has been designed not only to engage members of the School of Education community in working on new projects of strategic significance to the TEI, but to support our learning at an organizational level. Since it is essential that we find ways of disseminating and making public what we learn through work on supported proposals, we are developing electronic, print and interactive means of sharing our work, facilitating routine communication about the TEI, and nurturing the use of our experiences and conclusions within the School of Education and in the broader education community.
