By Michael Childs
UGA’s College of Education is beginning a three-year project that will attempt to bring together classroom and real-life work experiences in a way that could change how teachers are taught and what they’re taught to teach. The project could better prepare students for the challenges they are likely to face in the changing workplace of the 21st century.
The college will develop and pilot-test a new teacher-education model that will place prospective teachers not only in the context in which they will work--the classroom--but also in the context of where their students will work--community and workplace settings in business, industry and the professions.
“Teachers need to understand much more of the pedagogy. Teachers need to understand how it applies in life settings,” says Dean Russell Yeany. “We don’t just want to perpetuate academic learning--at some point it has to be applied to the workplace. We want to preserve the strengths of academic learning while adding real-life experience to their understanding.”
A long-term goal is to have a much more effective school-to-work transition for students--whether from high school, technical school or college, students are going into the workforce.
“Schooling should transition right into work and I think schooling has become so academic that it isn’t transitioning well into work,” says Yeany. “Now we’re going to have teachers who have perspective on that because of their own experiences, their own training.”
Funded for 18 months by an initial $864,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the Teacher Development Pre-Service Model of Excellence initiative is one of the college’s largest and most ambitious projects ever. Additional funding will depend on the project’s performance, as well as on the availability of funding and the agency’s priorities at the time of renewal.
“This is a big investment by the federal government to develop a model they hope will become available to other colleges,” says Yeany. “I think the College of Education at the University of Georgia is well-suited for this kind of project. First, because we already have a very good teacher-education program here. But, second, our faculty is continuing to look at ways to do things better. We’re not satisfied, ever, with the way we’re doing things or even the level at which we’re doing them.”
Submitted jointly by the School of Teacher Education and the School of Lifelong Learning, the project will involve 28 full-time faculty members and administrators from a dozen different departments. The project directors will be the two schools’ directors, Donald Schneider and Richard Lynch.
The project will build on other teacher-education initiatives and on collaborations with arts and sciences faculty to integrate academic and occupational education. Real-world experiences will include internships and the use of contextual teaching and learning strategies. The intent is to increase relevance, improving student motivation, achievement, involvement, learning transfer and school retention, according to Schneider.
The first students in the program will be 25 to 30 teacher-education students who, as freshmen and sophomores, have not yet begun the sequence of professional education courses. The first course will be offered in spring semester 1999.
A student orientation to area business and industry will include both on-site and virtual observation of manufacturing and business processes. Because faculty will also need to broaden their experience with work-based learning, project leaders will design a series of experiential professional-development activities for project team members and school partners early in the project.
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