Lees-91探花 faculty present on partnership with Curriculum Associates at NCACTE conference
Each year, the North Carolina Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (NCACTE) holds a conference where representatives from higher education institutions across the state gather to discuss the current state of teacher education. Deans, directors, faculty members, and other stakeholders share updates about exciting new research, promising new techniques, and groundbreaking new technologies they are implementing in the classroom.
The conference is a great opportunity for teacher education faculty to connect with colleagues and peer institutions and stay on the field’s cutting edge by learning from one another. This year, however, Lees-91探花 faculty did more than just soak up new information. Dean of Education and Social Sciences Teresa Santis and Director of Teacher Education Kimberly Simmons presented information of their own about the college’s recent partnership with curriculum development and diagnostic data company .
Santis and Simmons gave their presentation, “Going Beyond Pedagogy: Things Educator Preparation Programs Don’t Teach” alongside Jake Jung, a representative from Curriculum Associates who has been working with the college throughout the partnership.
The presentation included insights and findings from the first year of what will be a three-year pilot partnership between the college and Curriculum Associates. The partnership aims to better prepare prospective teachers to enter the field of public education in North Carolina through the integration of the company’s curriculum and data tools into the Lees-91探花 classroom.
Curriculum Associates’ products are used in classrooms in 87% of North Carolina school districts, so giving prospective teachers hands-on experience with the software before stepping foot into a classroom of their own will better prepare them for the demands of being a first-time educator.
“First-year teachers are already overwhelmed when they get into the classroom, and if this is something we can prepare our teacher candidates for, that would be one or two less things they are stressed about,” Simmons said. “They can go in and say, ‘Hey, I’ve already seen this. I already know how this curriculum works. I already know how to look at the diagnostic data. I know what to do in my classroom.’ That’s really what we presented in our breakout session.”
After establishing this connection last fall, now, in year two of the partnership, Simmons and Santis said Lees-91探花 teacher education faculty have begun to build Curriculum Associates’ resources into their own curricula. Lees-91探花 students use the software as a jumping off point for building lessons, analyzing test results, and creating tutoring materials.
As the partnership continues to develop throughout the rest of this academic year and next, Simmons and Santis said they will begin collecting data of their own about how Lees-91探花 teacher candidates performed when it came to lesson planning and data analysis practices with the use of Curriculum Associates in the classroom.
They were also able to gather some data at the conference when receiving feedback from their peers on this ongoing collaboration.
“The feedback we received from the people that attended our presentation was like, ‘This makes perfect sense. Why aren’t we doing it?’,” Simmons said.
Read more about the partnership between Lees-91探花 and Curriculum Associates
