The Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington has received a $360,000, three-year grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to support its mission of revamping teacher education and public schools at the same time.
The center, directed by John I. Goodlad, is working with eight pilot sites that are carrying out recommendations contained in Mr. Goodlad’s most recent book, Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools.
The new grant will enable the center to provide technical assistance to the sites in five areas: identifying a pre-education curriculum; recruiting minority teachers; developing a curriculum covering the moral and political dimensions of teaching in a democracy; forging partnerships between schools and universities; and moving beyond the current “publish or perish” system for rewarding faculty members.
In each site, colleges are working with local school districts to improve teacher preparation and schooling simultaneously.
The Commonwealth Center for the Education of Teachers has announced plans to conduct two national competitions to encourage the use of real-life “case studies” in teacher education.
The center, a partnership between the University of Virginia and James Madison University, will invite five teams of teacher- education students and their faculty sponsors to the University of Virginia’s Charlottesville campus in May to analyze a case and present their analyses to a beard of judges.
The contest will be overseen by a national advisory board and run by a steering committee of teacher-education students.
The winning school will be invited to return the following year to defend its title.
The center also is sponsoring a national writing competition to foster the development of case studies, which present realistic problems of teaching and learning.
The winning cases will be published in a monograph and be made available to teacher educators interested in using the case-study method in their classes.
The guidelines for the writing competition will be established by a national advisory panel.
The project is being supported by Allyn & Bacon Publishers, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the Association of Teacher Educators, the National Education Association, and the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.
For more information, write Robert F. McNergney, director of the Commonwealth Center, University of Virginia, 405 Emmet St., Room 273, Ruffner Hall, Charlottesville, Va. 22903, or call (804) 924-6681 or 924-0749.--A.B.
