Faculty invited to join Town Hall meeting on teacher preparation
- Date: Friday, Nov. 15
- Time: Noon-2:30 p.m.
- Location: Aderhold Hall Room G5
Faculty,
I invite you to join your colleagues in Town Hall meetings to discuss the future of our teacher education programs. We have been experiencing a significant decrease in the pipeline of students enrolling in our undergraduate and master’s degree programs in teacher education, so we need to consider innovative solutions to teacher recruitment and retention.
Concurrently, data from our graduates, in particular, and induction phase teachers, in general, suggest that they need additional support in areas such as social and emotional learning, classroom guidance, use of data for instructional planning, home-school connections, and assessment strategies.
There are also a number of external factors at work, including recent legislation regarding dyslexia, a request from the University System of Georgia that we get all of our programs back to 120 hours, and a recent focus on Pre-K through eighth grade mathematics education.
Woven together, these factors suggest a need for us to come together to thoughtfully consider how we want to shape our undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs for the future. The wealth of knowledge and expertise in the College suggests an approach to re-visioning our programs, where we carefully integrate expertise across units to design preparation programs that address our changing schools and communities.
In that spirit, I am writing to ask for your engagement in a Town Hall to begin this exploration. My hope is that this discussion will be foundational work to spur the formation of small working groups that will uptake this call to reconceptualizing teacher education. The College would incentivize the work of these groups.
I welcome your engagement in this work to help the College of Education refine our approaches to teacher education to ensure that our graduates are prepared for schools the way they are today and to be change agents for the schools of the future.
Sincerely,
Denise