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Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
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Past Educational Opportunity Reports
ASU reforms elementary ed. content coursework
- 11-22-2011
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Blog by Stephen Sawchuk/Education Week
I recently filed quite a long story on the teacher education reforms under way at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. The bottom line here is that this story has implications far beyond ASU, because the questions the school's leaders are wrestling with are those that all schools of education are, increasingly, going to be under the gun to think about. Many of the changes at ASU are illuminating the core tensions today in teacher education: the role of theory vs. practice, research vs teaching, how to define and measure good teaching, among others. There were plenty of things in my notebook that I didn't have room to feature in the story, and one of them is the role of coursework. Especially in mathematics and probably for science, studies show that content-knowledge preparation makes a difference for K-12 student achievement. So, one part of ASU's $43 million federal Teacher Quality Partnership grant is to revamp the nature of lower-division courses to increase the amount of content knowledge prospective teachers have. (more...)
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