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Gates Foundation Puts New Focus on Transforming Teacher Prep
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest some $34 million in cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs’ overall effectiveness.
The Seattle-based philanthropy announced the three-year grants Nov. 18. Gates awarded the funds to five consortia through a competitive process—a change from its former strategy of one-off grants to individual teaching programs.
The winners will use the funding to create “transformation centers” based on four driving principles: developing strong partnerships with school districts; giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills; using data for improvement and accountability; and ensuring that faculty and mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession.
The grantees include:
- TeacherSquared, a center that currently consists mainly of nontraditional preparation programs, including the campuses of the Relay Graduate School of Education; Urban Teachers, which operates programs in the District of Columbia and Baltimore; Boston-based Match Teacher Residency; and the teaching programs offered by the Yes Prep and Aspire charter-management organizations;
- Texas Tech University, which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center, or U.S. PREP, a consortium of six universities located in Southern states;
- The Massachusetts Department of Education, which will lead the Elevate Preparation, Impact Children (EPIC) center, an effort that will involve all 71 providers in that state; and
- The National Center for Teacher Residencies, which will expand its network of providers using a residency model of preparation that couples a full year of student teaching with slimmed-down coursework
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To give all students great educational opportunities, we need outstanding teachers in our classrooms. But we can’t forget that, when participating in teacher preparation programs and professional development, teachers are students themselves—and they also need the support of great educators to reach their potential. So what can we do to ensure that teacher educators—teachers of teachers—are prepared to provide that support? In the second brief of the Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers Learning Series, a working group of five teacher preparation experts—Sarah Beal of US PREP, Meagan Comb of EPIC, Kaycee Salmacia of TeacherSquared, Shari Dickstein-Staub of the National Center for Teacher Residencies and advisory member Nicole Garcia of TeachingWorks—attempt to answer this question. They frame their efforts around four goals: Develop a common set of teacher educator practices Develop a set of teacher educator data-gathering tools Design teacher educator-aligned professional development materials, resources and experiences Pilot and test teacher educator practice-aligned tools and resources in the field The brief both provides real, actionable strategies to help improve how we prepare teachers and showcases how strategic collaboration between educators can be transformative. We invite you to share it widely. Read Article Here
Texas Tech University’s College of Education has been awarded a grant worth $1,464,882 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the establishment of a data-management system, consisting of data capture and visualization, within the University School Partnerships for the Renewal of Education Preparation ( US PREP ) National Center. The data project will be a collaborative effort to provide teacher preparation programs within US PREP institutions the information needed to produce exemplary teachers who are ready, from day one, to teach effectively and to engage and inspire students to move to even higher levels of achievement. The work is being led by US PREP Executive Director Sarah Beal and Marcelo Schmidt, director of assessment and continuous improvement. Read Article Here
Accountability and rigor in teacher education have been the focus of recent policy initiatives. Thus, data use practices have become increasingly critical to informing program improvement. Educational researchers have established self-study as a research methodology to intentionally be used by teacher educators to improve their practice. The purpose of the self-study described in this article was to examine the data use practices of one teacher preparation program in an effort to facilitate improvement of the program’s capacity in using program data. The qualitative data gathered in this case study proved to be pivotal in the continuous improvement efforts of the teacher preparation program; thus, the usefulness and value of the findings within this case study have implications for how institutional self-study and qualitative data can support quantitative programmatic data in order to facilitate programmatic improvement initiatives.
To foster innovation amongst educator preparation programs and school district partners in the coalition, US PREP reserves funding every two years for pilot programming proposals that foster innovation in the field of teacher preparation. The topics for the Innovation Pilots are developed by the coalition members and their school district partners with the goal of proactively addressing unmet needs and future trends in teaching and learning. Jackson State University and Southeastern Louisiana University were the inaugural recipients of the first Innovation Pilot Grants, which focused on Social & Emotional Learning. In 2018, the coalition developed a new Innovation Pilot focused on Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT), which was spearheaded by Sam Houston State University. Sam Houston State has recently completed a webinar series to share their learning. The webinar material can be accessed here. The year 2020 presented opportunities to think differently. University-school partners joined together to best support their teacher candidates and PK-12 students in ways that they had not previously done before due to the pandemic. To capitalize on these innovations, the 2020 Innovation Pilot Proposal did not address a specific problem of practice developed by the coalition, rather, it allowed partners to derive a topic that would directly address challenges in their own contexts. The proposal required participants to provide: A description of an authentic problem occurring within the school-university teacher preparation partnership context that has an impact on disrupting inequities in PK-12 schools via teacher candidate readiness Evidence that the problem of practice is of importance to both school and university partners Evidence of the school-university partnership’s clarity about how the problem of practice impacts both teacher candidates and PK-12 students Justification for how your problem of practice relates to a larger audience–specifically other coalition universities Evidence that the problem of practice supports diversity, equity, and inclusivity goals set by the university provider and PK-12 schools Each of the four university-school partners that were awarded the US PREP Innovation Pilot Grants have problems of practice that are both unique to the field and replicable innovations if the outcomes of the pilot prove to be successful. See below for an overview of each of the innovations.
