TEI Update: Winter 2008
New: All-School meeting information
The winter 2008 semester was a busy and planning-intensive one for the Teacher Education Initiative. We re-launched collective efforts to “map” the work of teaching and begin redesigning our curriculum, began to plan exciting new partnerships with several local schools and school districts, and started to make preparations for this summer’s Elementary Mathematics Laboratory Class (EML). All of our efforts this winter were enriched by our seminar series “Teaching Practice”, which brought four scholars from several different fields of professional education to the School to talk with us about how professional educators in their fields teach practice to novices. (If you were unable to attend these seminars and would like to view the DVD’s from them, please contact Francesca Forzani – fforzani@umich.edu). These presentations provided thought-provoking images of professional education that we hope will continue to inspire our work on the TEI.
Redesigning our curriculum for learning teaching is at the core of our work on the Initiative, and we are particularly excited about the progress we are making in this area. At our all-school meeting in December we announced the impending launch of “Teaching and Learning Teams” (TLT’s) and “Cross-Cutting Working Groups” (CCWG’s) that will take the next step in “mapping” the work of teaching in specific subject-areas and with attention to crucial cross-cutting issues in teaching (e.g. equity, language, and learning). A number of faculty members have agreed to lead these teams, and this larger group of leaders has been meeting routinely this spring to plan for several intensive working sessions that will take place in early June. Leaders of the TLT’s and CCWG’s have also been recruiting colleagues to join them in this next round of work to articulate the tasks and activities of teaching. These efforts are challenging, but we are optimistic that we will make significant progress this spring. As we do, we will be able to build instructional activities and assessments that are focused on our core learning goals for students.
We have also devoted a great deal of planning in the past few months to strengthening and expanding our relationships with local schools and school districts. In an effort to explore the affordances of several different kinds of schools for teaching and learning practice, we are building partnerships with schools in a range of local communities, including several with which we have not worked before. This fall we will be experimenting with teaching methods courses in both mathematics and literacy in several of these sites; stay tuned for updates about these initiatives.
All of these projects and many others associated with the TEI are time- and resource-intensive, and members of the TEI’s Steering Group have also been absorbed in fund-raising efforts this winter. With help from Mike Dubin and Kathryn Taylor on our own Development staff and from colleagues in the university’s central development office, we are surveying foundations and working closely with private donors to identify sources of funding for this large-scale change effort. Many stakeholders are engaged by what we are doing here, and we are hopeful that we will be able to create a substantial, stable funding base for the Initiative.
Finally, we recently launched a web-based research and report series. The TEI is eager to support and disseminate research and design efforts that will further our progress toward our goals; please read the description of this series by clicking here, and consider submitting your work.
As always, the Teacher Education Initiative needs help of all sorts. Please review our Request for Proposals and let us know if you are planning a project that will contribute to our collective work.
