Grant prepares teachers for success

The IU School of Education is about to get a major overhaul in the form of a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. \nThe grant will go to fund an innovational program which will focus on preparing elementary teachers to succeed, and will monitor and evaluate their progress.\nThe five year program, called “Iterative Model Building: A Program for Training Quality Teachers and Measuring Teacher Quality,” shows that IU is a top school for teaching training and research, said Enrique Galindo, co-sponsor of the program and associate professor of mathematics education.\n“Getting this funding is recognition that we have a quality education program and recognition of the level of resources we can engage,” Galindo said. “It’s proof we can engage our faculty to improve our programs and their effectiveness.”\nThe program is unique because it will center on teachers who are still in school, hoping to arm them with the tools to better understand their students, said IU School of Education spokesman Chuck Carney.\n“You’d be hard-pressed to find a program that does more at the beginning level for a math or science teacher than this one is planning to do,” Carney said.\nThe project will follow elementary teachers through their pre-service, student-teaching and even into their first full-time job.\nThe program will use two new innovations as ways to prepare future teachers before they get into the classroom.\nThe first is a teaching experiment designed as one-on-one instructional time where teachers will be able to gauge the ability level of individual students.\nThe second will divide the future teachers into groups to give them experience in planning and receiving feedback on lesson plans.\nIdeally the two will work hand-in-hand to help the teachers determine students’ ability levels and plan their lessons accordingly. Students will also take methods courses to better understand how kids learn and develop their understanding.\n“Ultimately it’s helping teachers learn science and math skills better than teachers who have been through more traditional programs,” said Valarie Akerson, associate professor of science education and co-sponsor of the program, who said she realized how intimidating classes can be for some teachers.\n“If you’re new it can be pretty daunting, so elementary teachers tend to avoid math and science,” she said. \nOrganizers hope the new experience will give students confidence in the field and encourage them to stay in a profession with high turnover rates.\n“The teachers are going to know that what they’re doing is going to work because they used it in the classroom. So it’s a really exceptional program from that respect,” Carney said.\nGalindo, Akerson and Anderson Norton, mathematics education assistant professor, submitted the proposal earlier this year. In it they stated that their end goal was to improve elementary student learning.\nBecause the teachers will be followed into their careers, researchers will be able to determine the success of the program by looking for a difference in lesson plans, student development and classroom atmosphere.\n“As we introduce innovations, many times they are introduced with the feeling that ‘Oh, this is a good idea,’” Galindo said. “We’re trying to go beyond that and gather evidence that this in fact works, (since) we have these indicators that tell us that this works.”\nIf researchers see the type of results they expect, Galindo said he believes his module could be used in other schools to achieve the same purpose.\n“We’re hoping this module we produce can be used elsewhere because we will have evidence to attest to the effectiveness of our program,” he said.