Continuing Accreditation Report for the
Professional Standards Commission and the
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education
College of Education, The University of Georgia
2001
SECTION ONE: THE OVERVIEW
As the first state university in the country, chartered in 1785, the University of Georgia has a long and distinguished history in the development and dissemination of the state and national intellectual and cultural heritage. The university created a School of Education in 1908, expanding it into the College of Education in 1932. Always nationally ranked among peer Research I colleges of education, the college continues to set the pace in research, teaching and service projects of local, national and international interest.
The mission of the University of Georgia is encapsulated in its motto: "to teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things." The College of Education embeds its mission within that institution-wide commitment, pledging to "provide the highest level of leadership in furthering education and life long learning for all citizens. This mission must be pursued at local, state, and national levels, and it must permeate academic preparation programs, community collaborations and partnerships, and the domains of teaching, research, and service."
The College of Education today is comprised of four schools: Health and Human Performance, Leadership and Lifelong Learning, Professional Studies, and Teacher Education. The schools are detailed below. As a result of administrative changes instituted since August 1999, the college is administered by a dean and three associate deans. It is indicative of the college's emphasis on collaboration that two of the associate deans (the Associate Dean for Research Development and Outreach, and the Associate Dean for Educator Partnerships) share responsibility for areas of external relations. The Associate Dean for Academic Affairs deals with internal affairs except for research issues. The four schools within the college are led by school directors who meet regularly with the dean, associate deans, and dean's office staff members.
With 18 undergraduate majors, 35 master's degrees, 21 specialist degrees, 21 doctor of education degrees, and 16 doctor of philosophy degrees, the College of Education is among the most comprehensive in the nation. It is also one of the largest colleges of education in the nation. There are 226 faculty in the college; 212 are tenured or on a tenure track; fourteen are academic professionals or research and public service associates. Thirty-one faculty members are people of color, or 14% of the college faculty. In addition to the faculty, 340 graduate assistants and 118 staff serve a student body of over 2,900 undergraduates and over 2,000 graduate students. In Spring, 2000, the college awarded 436 undergraduate and 215 graduate degrees. Faculty, students and staff occupy offices and classrooms in seven facilities on the Athens campus.
Within its many degree programs, students can earn teaching and administrative certification in 37 fields, and endorsements in another ten fields, from the College of Education. University of Georgia students can also pursue teaching certification in five additional fields through cooperating programs in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and the School of Social Work. There are, then, a total of 42 certification fields that fall under the umbrella of the College of Education. Since the last PSC and NCATE visit, one certification field has been terminated, seventeen have been revised, and one has been added. See Table 1, appendix.
The college's graduate programs are ranked among the top tier in the country. For the sixth year running, US News & World Report placed the college among the nation's leaders, ranking it 26th out of 187 programs. Three graduate programs in the college were ranked among the top five in the nation (secondary teacher education, counseling, and vocational-technical education) and five programs were ranked among the top ten nationally (elementary teacher education and curriculum and instruction, in addition to the three above). Four other programs ranked between fifteenth and twenty-third (Educational Psychology, Special Education, Higher Education and Administration, and Administration and Supervision), bringing to nine the total number of College of Education programs ranked in the top twenty-five nationally by US News & World Report. Other publications and organizations rank some of those programs even higher. Contemporary Educational Psychology ranked the Department of Educational Psychology tenth in the nation; a web-based poll of higher education faculty in instructional technology ranked the Department of Instructional Technology first in the nation. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/pro/it.html, p. 257]
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/coenews/2000/USnews2000.htm]
As a part of Georgia's flagship state university, the college's primary service area is the state of Georgia. The college's undergraduate majors are drawn predominantly from within the state (nearly 86%) and, as throughout the university, rank among the best students in the state. The college's majors have a cumulative high school GPA of 3.62, only slightly below a university-wide high school GPA of 3.64, and total SAT scores of 1163 (university-wide, 1195); the college GPA of the senior class averages 3.03, and 3.81 for graduate students, across all college departments. The preponderance of the students are female (over 72%). Over 61% are between 18 and 24 years of age. Graduate students account for 43% of the student population in the college. See Institutional Research and Planning, "Average GPA by Class W/I Major," 11/02/00, PSC/NCATE room.*
[http://irhst40.irp.uga.edu/html/irp/irpk/student/freshmen/stats/index.html]
[http://irhst40.irp.uga.edu/html/irp/irpk/l3index/06.html]
*While the majority of the documentation for this reaccreditation visit is available on-line, a handful of documents are available only in hardcopy in the PSC/NCATE document rooms.
The university's statewide network of off-campus centers and its distance learning capacity carries the college's reach throughout the state. However, as befits a college with a national standing, its actual service area extends far beyond the state and the region. Through the faculty's myriad activities in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, faculty and institutional collaborations, study abroad opportunities, and the international scope of its graduate student population, the college also affects the nation and the world. The College of Education has no branch campuses. It does have a fixed off-campus site, the Gwinnett Center, operated in cooperation with the Gwinnett University System Center. No faculty members are housed away from the Athens campus.
In other words, the college carries on extensive activities beyond the boundaries of the Athens campus and the Gwinnett Center. Last year, its in-service credit program reached teachers in seventeen locations throughout the state and internationally. Ten percent of the college faculty participated in distance education initiatives in 1999. Seventeen school-university partnerships with districts in Atlanta and northeast Georgia are currently being formalized. In 1999-2000, over one dozen College of Education faculty worked directly with schools and teachers internationally to improve practice. The College of Education estimates that it reaches approximately 100,000 state, national and international outreach recipients annually.
During the 1999-2000 fiscal year, the college received more than $22.9 million in state support and $12.3 million in external funding for teaching, research and service programs. External funding came from such sources as the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Spencer Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, the National Science Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation, among others. The number of proposals submitted increased from 118 to 160 between 1998-1999 and 1999-2000. Of those 160 proposals, 133 were funded. Total external funding increased 47% in the most recent fiscal year.
In addition to winning major grants, the College of Education faculty continued to be recognized with significant and competitive honors. In the most recent academic year, college faculty received one Study in a Second Discipline Award, one Fulbright Award, two Lilly Fellow Awards, one Senior Teaching Fellow Award, and two Sara Moss Fellowships. Additionally, professional associations gave an Early Career Award (American Educational Research Association), a Scholar of the Year Award (Academy of Human Resource Development), and a Distinguished Service Award (the International Council of Special Educators) to members of the College of Education. Four faculty members have won the university's highest award for service, the Hill Award.
The college has continued to assure a strong faculty across all ranks and responsibilities. In the last five years it has recruited eminent mid-career and senior scholars and promising young scholars. At the same time, it has increased faculty diversity, increasing the proportion of minority faculty members to over 14%.
While the College of Education is in remarkably good health, it is at a crossroad. The university is in the process of approving its Strategic Plan for the next ten years. Although K-12 education is one theme in the plan, the expectation is that external funds will be substantially tied to that work. The college has experienced eroding state financial support in the last five years. Funding has remained virtually constant while operating costs have increased substantially. In the face of fixed operating resources, the college must continually upgrade electronic technology and it must respond to pressure to offer new programs or expand existing programs.
The Schools
The School of Teacher Education (STE) is composed of seven departments. US News & World Report ranks the schools' secondary education programs second best in the nation, and its elementary education program fifth best. Four of the college's five Special Professorships reside in STE, as do two independently supported projects aimed at school improvement, the long-standing Program for School Improvement and the Technology Training Center. STE was responsible for bringing in more than $2,425,000 in external funding to pursue teaching, research, and service activities. One funding source, the Eisenhower Higher Education program, provided funds for projects that affected over eight hundred K-12 teachers in the state of Georgia. Through the Dean's Forum, School of Teacher Education faculty collaborates with arts and sciences faculty in cross-disciplinary projects that support the Board of Regent's Principles and the state's P-16 Initiative, and a joint project between the two schools to map national content standards to college curriculum.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 369-70]
The School of Teacher Education faculty is the most diverse in the college with 22% from minority groups; 55% are female; its diversity is distributed across all ranks. STE's curriculum reflects the college's commitment to diversity in education. Multicultural education strands are infused across courses. Likewise, STE has implemented study abroad programs in England, Mexico, and Kenya, and plans to implement a program in Italy.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, p. 372].
The School of Leadership and Lifelong Learning (SLLL) is comprised of three departments and a research unit; two of the three departments are ranked in the top four among peer departments. The school has gained grants and contracts totaling just over $2.1 million dollars, including a U.S. Department of Education grant of nearly $916,000 shared between the schools of Leadership and Lifelong Learning and Teacher Education to co-develop a model program of excellence for pre-service teacher education based on contextual teaching and learning.
Nearly half of the faculty of the School of Leadership and Lifelong Learning participates in web-based and other distance-learning approaches as well as face-to-face delivery of instruction to offer doctoral programs at Fort Valley State University, one of Georgia's first historically black colleges, and to offer graduate programs or courses in four other locations in north Georgia. These activities have led to increased enrollment for the school, especially from under-represented groups -- 17% of the graduate students in Adult Education and Educational Leadership are African-American.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 5, 204-07]
[http://ncate.coe.uga.edu/coedocs.html]
The School of Professional Studies (SPS) has five departments offering both undergraduate and graduate courses. Four departments rank in the top twenty-five nationally, including first rank in the nation for the Department of Instructional Technology. SPS's Counseling Department brought in $1.72 million in new funding. Educational Psychology increased the diversity of its faculty and students in the last few years, surpassing university and national averages; 17% of the faculty and 22% of the students in the department are from minority groups.
The School of Professional Studies hired a nationally renowned expert in qualitative research methods in 1999 to organize, administer, and develop a program in qualitative research training at the University of Georgia and within the College of Education. The Department of Special Education's highly visible national and international distance learning projects reach more than seven hundred sites in the United States and are estimated to reach 85,000 professionals and parents. The Creative and Gifted program area within the Department of Educational Psychology is working to implement more on-line courses for teachers in the state. In addition to the educational community, SPS has developed links to the business community through the Instructional Technology Department's certificate program in Instructional Design and Technology in cooperation with the college's Department of Adult Education.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 5-6]
Five academic departments with a common focus on human movement and health science constitute the School of Health and Human Performance. With new degree programs in Sports Studies and Athletic Training, the school has increased undergraduate and graduate enrollments. In the 1999 it gained over $790,000 in external grants. Research in the schools is frequently conducted in collaboration with other units on campus, including Gerontology, Pharmacy, Veterinary Medicine, Music, the U.S. Forest Service, and the university's BioMedical Initiative.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, p. 6]
College Initiatives for Programmatic Improvement
Within the last decade, the college initiated a number of ambitious projects intended to improve the quality of certified professionals from its programs. First, seven years ago the College of Education adopted multicultural education as a central, college-wide initiative, and has become a leader on campus in addressing the university's commitment to cultural diversity. The Multicultural Education Initiative has enhanced the college's multicultural education mission and remains a vital component of the college. The initiative is described in Section 2.
Second, complementing the college's efforts in multicultural education is its growing international visibility. Faculty and students engage in a variety of instructional, research and service activities that promote international interest and involvement by the college. These include faculty collaboration in research and outreach efforts with institutions in Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Botswana Columbia, Peru, Mexico, Germany, and the Republic of Georgia, and study abroad experiences for students. Last year, the college hosted 38 visiting scholars from countries including Australia, the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Egypt, Ghana, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Finland, Norway, Germany, England, and Denmark.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 92-107]
Third, the College of Education launched its Technology Initiative three years before the last PSC and NCATE visit. Still largely in gestation at the time of the last visit, its fruits are now becoming visible. The Technology Initiative is described more fully in Section 2. The college is currently considering a proposal to fully integrate educational technology into all certification programs. The results would move the college's candidates well beyond the expectations of current state mandates. [http://it.coe.uga.edu/~lrieber/teachtechproposal/]
Fourth, faculty members from across the college and throughout the university have established a major new initiative to improve student learning at all levels. With funding from the U.S. Office of Education, National School to Work Office, and the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, the college launched a project to improve teaching through contextual teaching and learning. The project focuses on helping participating teacher education majors to tie their teaching content to real world experiences in community, workplace, and school settings. The focus is on problem-solving, higher-order thinking skills, sensitivity to issues of communication, equity and diversity combined with teacher reflection on the application and relevance of subject matter to authentic life experiences of students. The project involves over two dozen faculty members and administrators from the College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/ctl]
Improving student learning is also a goal of a fifth College of Education initiative, the Northeast Georgia P-16 Initiative. This effort to ensure success for all students through shared university, school, and community responsibility and collaborative action, launched early in 1996, has elaborated a range of innovative projects to reach its goals. For instance, its co-reform commission, realizing the need to reform teacher education along with the public schools, is working on several fronts to transform teacher education and advanced teacher education preparation programs, including a major effort to build standards-based teacher education curricula (see below). Another group within the initiative sought ways to improve students' aspirations, expectations, and attitudes toward school. The initiative's Academic Standards Project is raising academic standards while easing the transition between education levels. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/outreach/]
Sixth, a primary undertaking within the Northeast Georgia P-16 Initiative is the Standards-Based Teacher Education Project (STEP). STEP originated in 1997 when the College of Education was designated as a pilot campus for a project to align teacher education curriculum with national subject-matter standards in partnership with arts and sciences faculty and P-12 educators. The Council for Basic Education and American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education funded the project. In February 2000, the Georgia Board of Regents awarded the STEP program a grant from its Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement Plan to continue and expand its work. The goals of the STEP initiative are: to ensure that prospective teachers learn content and pedagogy in their courses related to standards identified for core curriculum areas, and to assess the effectiveness of the preparation programs in preparing teachers to teach to the standards in school settings and bring grades 7-12 students to high levels of achievement. See STEP Report to the Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement Plan, p. 1, available in hard copy, PSC/NCATE room.
Seventh, convinced of the value and importance of the STEP effort, in 2000 the college developed a broader and more comprehensive initiative, the Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Project. This five-year project, with an initial grant of $6.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education, will bring the college into collaboration with Georgia state colleges at Valdosta and Albany, greatly enhancing the impact of the reform effort on candidate outcomes within all three teacher education programs. The STEP program will continue for two more years under this new initiative. All certification programs within the college will be involved in this undertaking. See GSTEP documents, in the PSC/NCATE room.
Eighth, as part of its response to the Board of Regents' Principles and Actions for the Preparation of Educators for the Schools (1998), the university, in collaboration with the College of Education, created an Advisory Council for Educator Preparation. Composed of the university's Vice President for Instruction, deans and associate deans from the colleges of education and arts and sciences, the Director of the School of Teacher Education, and appointed members from the university faculty, P-12 educators, and community members, this group advises programs that prepare educators at the university. Its work continues a tradition in the college of close collaborations between the university and local school systems. Extending that tradition, the dean recently charged all teacher education programs to develop and implement plans for formal partnerships with schools within two years. University faculty offers professional development to the public school faculty; public school educators and university faculty collaborate on school-based research; resources such as travel expenses are shared among all partners; and reform is seen as a two-way street, influencing the university as well as the local schools. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/coedocs.html]
Finally, to respond to the growing shortage of teachers within the state and nation, in 2000 the College of Education sought and won Board of Regents funding to design a teacher preparation program for career-change individuals. This Business-to-Teaching initiative is intended to attract mid-career candidates whose life experiences will contribute to their teaching, and focuses particularly on "high need" teaching fields. In its first year, the project developed, piloted, and revised technology-based alternative teacher certification courses in mathematics education, science education, occupational studies, special education, and English as a Second Language, all in collaboration with seven other institutions in Georgia. Over 100 candidates enrolled in the program in autumn, 2000. The project will expand into other content areas in the next two years. The three-year project is funded at $800,000 per year. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/biztoteach.html]
As part of its ongoing work of programmatic improvement and rededication to excellence in teacher preparation, the College of Education has just completed work on a ten-year strategic plan, and departments and programs have responded with plans of their own that complement and extend the objectives adopted by the college. The plan's emphasis on diversity issues and technology place it squarely within the current thrust of the college. [http://www.coe.uga.edu/dean/strategicplan/]
SECTION 2: THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The College of Education aspires to prepare exemplary reflective practitioners to serve a diverse, global community; it seeks to achieve that end through teaching, scholarship, outreach, and partnerships at local, national, and international levels.
Development of the Conceptual Framework: A Shared Vision
Until recently, the College of Education has had a tradition of strong individual departments. As a result, each department in the College of Education developed its own conceptual framework that was used to guide its work. However, in 1995, NCATE's Unit Accreditation Board cited the college for weakness in the Conceptual Framework, stating, "It is not clear that all programs have a model for curriculum design." Consequently, the college worked toward a conceptual framework that would serve as a guide for the entire unit. Faculty from all four schools constituted a committee that met beginning in 1999.
The committee conducted an inductive analysis of the conceptual frameworks and mission statements governing departmental and programmatic work. It discovered a high degree of unanimity regarding basic goals and a good deal of commonality in the descriptive language employed by the various departmental documents, indicative of a shared, if heretofore unarticulated, vision cutting across the college. From that analysis, the committee identified five common themes. Those common themes and the descriptive language from the documents provided the basis for a conceptual framework statement for the college.
The initial draft of a conceptual framework was presented to all department and program heads to discuss with their respective faculty in departmental meetings. The framework was also distributed twice to every faculty member with a request for feedback. The first mailing included an extensive explanation of the process of creating the framework, its purposes, and its meaning; the follow-up mailing a month later was intended as a reminder of the committee's need for comments and criticisms to gain college-wide agreement. Through an iterative process of responses and refinements to the statement, continuing through the Spring semester and into the summer, the college faculty reached consensus on the conceptual framework as the college's shared vision in August, 2000.
The conceptual framework sets forth a vision of a particular sort of educator - exemplary, reflective, and prepared for service to diverse learners - and a commitment to the means of bringing the vision into reality - through teaching, scholarship, outreach and partnerships. The college's understanding of those elements and their grounding in scholarship follows.
Exemplary Practitioners
The teacher education faculty of the College of Education is convinced that exemplary practice rests on the dual foundation of a profound grounding in subject matter knowledge and a thorough knowledge of the complex art of teaching. The faculty understands exemplary teaching not as the display of measurable behaviors, but as the masterful performance of the multitude of teaching tasks with full fidelity to the subject matter, yet in the constant consciousness of the multiple demands of context, purpose, diversity, and professional ethics.
That teachers must have deep familiarity with the subject matter they are to teach seems axiomatic. However, two decades of research intended to identify essential teacher behaviors that contribute to learning-the process-product tradition of the 1960s and 1970s-led researchers away from careful study of the value of content knowledge. That particular research tradition, and the classroom practices it imagined, cast teachers as managers and facilitators of processes in which students mastered expert-made curriculum. Teachers' roles were essentially content-free; the research task was "to identify generic teacher behaviors that seemed to be effective. The identified 'effective' instructional behaviors tended to be connected with the management of classrooms rather than with content pedagogy" (Even & Tirosh, 1995, p. 2; see also Brophy & Good, 1986; Gage, 1978). Worse, the students implicitly hypothesized by that research were nearly uniform in culture, ability, propensity, and expectation.
Emerging conceptions of the role of the teacher in promoting learning restore content knowledge to a preeminent place and indicate that subject matter is more than knowledge of a subject's "facts." Shulman (1986b), summarizing a recent body of research, argues that teachers must "understand that something is so; the teacher must further understand why it is so" (p. 9). Such understandings are dependent entirely upon strong subject matter knowledge. Others have demonstrated that the quality of content knowledge powerfully influences teachers' instructional practices (Grossman, 1989; Shulman, 1986b; Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988; Lee, 1995). Yet many of the calls for school reform in the last two decades assert that beginning teachers often have inadequate content knowledge (Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, 1986; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; Vance & Schlechty, 1982). Subsequent investigations suggest that weak subject matter knowledge is a continuing problem (Even & Tirosh, 1995; Stoddart, Connell, Stofflett, & Peck, 1993), one that sometimes persists even when candidates are required to take additional content courses (Wenner, 1993).
A renewed appreciation of the centrality of subject matter knowledge and deeper appreciation of the ways children learn have led to research into the relationship between content knowledge, or subject-matter knowledge, and effective pedagogy. That research confirms that, "Without the essential base of subject matter knowledge, teachers are simply unable to produce effective instruction" (Lee, 1995, p. 424; Hashweh, 1987). Yet subject matter knowledge is the necessary but insufficient condition; effective instruction also requires pedagogical content knowledge, defined as knowledge of the ways teachers transform and represent, or re-present, their knowledge of subject matter in the images, metaphors, activities, and other modalities that learners can accommodate and incorporate (Shulman, 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Brophy, 1991; Grossman, Wilson & Shulman, 1989; Garnett & Tobin, 1988; Even & Tirosh, 1995).
Pedagogical content knowledge hinges on high quality subject matter or content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge is distinct from what Kennedy (1998) calls "recitational knowledge," or that sort of knowledge that provides "the ability to recite specific facts on demand, to recognize correct answers on multiple choice tests, to define terminology correctly, and so forth" (p. 253). Shulman (1986b) describes pedagogical content knowledge as primarily the ability to generate metaphors; the quality of the metaphors employed, in turn, depends upon the age and prior knowledge of the students -- effectiveness, in other words, is dependent upon the metaphor's "comprehensibility to the particular audience" (Kennedy, 1998, p. 257). Thus, understanding the nature of the subject matter, and the teacher's disposition toward the subject matter, are also important parts of the whole package of pedagogical content knowledge.
Without marginalizing content knowledge, research on effective practice is bringing to light an increasing range of understandings and knowledge, encompassed by many writers under the general rubric of teacher knowledge. In experienced, effective teachers, several sorts of complex and interactive knowledge can be identified, though researchers do not agree on the exact typology: content knowledge; knowledge about students; knowledge about context; beliefs about the subject matter; pedagogical content knowledge; and curricular knowledge (Grossman, 1990, 1995; Grossman, Wilson, & Shulman, 1989; Shulman, 1986b, 1987; Ball & Wilson, 1996).
Finally, enthusiasm for high quality subject matter knowledge must be tempered by the fact that the best subject matter knowledge is often betrayed and undermined by teachers. Strauss, Ravid, Magen, & Berliner (1998), for example, found that the assumption that content knowledge "has priority over much of classroom teaching" (p. 592) will not stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, teachers' espoused mental model of children's minds and learning has much more influence than subject matter knowledge in determining instructional practices. Indeed, "the espoused MM [mental model] constrains and subordinates SMK [subject matter knowledge]. We argue that the espoused MM is the framework within which teachers make pedagogical decisions" (p. 592). Importantly, they do not claim that subject matter knowledge is unimportant: "... teachers' SMK is crucially important though it is subordinated to their espoused MM.... [However, having] more deeply organized SMK will not lead to teachers teaching that SMK in different ways" (Strauss, et al, 1998, p. 593, emphasis in original; see also, Pajares & Bengston, 1995). Similarly, Dunkin, Welch, Merritt, Phillips, & Craven (1998) found that teachers' knowledge of students and knowledge of context affects their substantive curricular decisions, "even to the extent of jeopardising the validity of concepts communicated" (p. 148; see also Swafford, Jones, & Thornton, 1997; Chen & Ennis, 1995).
Teacher knowledge, then, must be fortified with examinations of beliefs about the subject matter, reflections on pedagogical purposes, inquiry into the deepest interest of the child, and other professional and developmental tasks to achieve greatest integrity and authenticity in teaching. Yet there is a danger that the contemporary focus on teacher knowledge, from content knowledge through pedagogical knowledge, reduces teaching to a technical task. What is missed too often is the unavoidably moral and political dimensions of teaching, aspects of education too long brushed to the margins (Ball and Wilson, 1996; Liston & Zeichner, 1991; Delpit, 1995; Sockett, 1987; Tom, 1984; Goodlad, 1990; Fenstermacher, 1992)
In sum, then, profound grounding in subject matter is the indispensable condition for teacher training. Yet it is clear that teacher knowledge is far more than subject matter knowledge, and that teacher knowledge must include centrally, not peripherally, moral and political reflection. That leads, in turn, to the college's concern not simply with exemplary practitioners, but with exemplary reflective practitioners.
Reflective Practitioners
With the eclipse of the view of the teacher as classroom manager and curriculum facilitator, the rise of constructivist conceptions of teaching and learning, the elaboration of notions of teacher knowledge, and the emergence of an understanding of the myriad instructional decisions made moment by moment in classrooms, it became clear to teacher educators and researchers that the most effective instruction was enacted by teachers who took time to reflect on their subject matter, their classrooms, their students, their contexts, and their dreams. Schön (1983, 1987) made the case for self-reflection as central to clarifying one's understanding and making meaning from these understandings. He held that self-reflection is vital to learning and to enhancing professional performance. To change and grow as a professional, reflective thinking must become a taken-for-granted lens through which pre-service teachers conceptualize their practices and through which in-service teachers examine and reexamine their practices to make more informed decisions about students and learning. Brookfield (1995) asserted that reflection is critical to making better decisions and more informed judgments on practice, for it allows teachers to "stand outside their practice and see what they do in a wider perspective" (p. 16).
Reflection enlarges and enriches pedagogical content knowledge by providing a process of reviewing, reconstructing, reenacting, and critically analyzing one's own and her or his students' performance, and grounding exploration in evidence. It hones the process of transforming subject matter knowledge into the metaphors, examples, analogies, drills, and explanations that lie at the heart of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987). Indeed, Grimmett (1989) observes that it is through reflection on action that knowledge-teacher knowledge-is derived. Although some of the work in the field is aimed at in-service teachers (Osterman, 1990; Cruickshank, 1987; Handal & Lauvas, 1987), a rich literature has developed regarding the initiation of teacher candidates into the habits of critical reflection (Maas, 1991; Ross, 1989; Calderhead, 1989; Ferguson, 1989; Schön, 1987).
Much of the literature on reflective teaching understands the object of reflection as the improvement of the technical aspects of transforming subject matter knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge-finding better metaphors, trying more challenging exercises, eliminating redundant or inappropriate activities, becoming more aware of students who need more time and more explanation, and so on. A more critical literature seeks to extend reflection into moral and political dimensions of teachers' work, making teachers more aware of teaching as a moral and political endeavor (Smyth, 1992; Liston & Zeichner, 1987; Armaline & Hoover, 1989).
It is increasingly clear in contemporary schools that a crucial object of reflection, in both its technical and its moral and political dimensions, is diversity. In the thinking of the College of Education, issues of diversity are not simply adjunct to teacher knowledge and reflective practice, but a central problematic to be confronted in professional education.
Preparing Professionals to Work in Diverse, Global Communities
The college's commitment to preparing professionals to work in diverse, global communities is crucial, given the current demographics of the candidate pool of professional educators and the increasing diversity of communities at the local, state, and national levels. Despite recruitment efforts, the candidate population in the college preparing to become school professionals remains largely white and female. The spring, 2000, cohort of College of Education student-teachers were 92% white and 78% female. These demographics parallel the demographics of educational professionals nationwide at a time when the nation is becoming increasingly diverse. Nationally, 87% of teachers are white (Henke, et. al, 1997). Hollins (2000) reports that nationally European Americans comprise 73.5% of the college student population while racial minorities comprise 24%. In colleges, as in public P-12 schools, students are generally taught by European American faculty (Hollins, 2000). Nieto (1996) notes that despite efforts to recruit and retain people of color and working class candidates into the teaching profession, the majority of pre-service teachers are still from white, middle class backgrounds.
Given the stark contrast between P-12 student populations and the college student population that will become tomorrow's teachers, the college is committed to prepare candidates to work with diverse communities through multicultural education. Drawing on the work of Banks (1994), Grant, Sleeter (1991), Nieto (1996), Noel (2000), Spring (1996), and others, the college defines multicultural education broadly to include race, ethnicity, religion, linguistic diversity, social class, gender, abilities, and sexual orientation.
Multicultural education has been woven through discussions in the professional education literature since the 1960s. Yet multicultural education means quite different things to different people. On one end of the continuum, educators follow the "tacos on Tuesday" approach, celebrating the foods and customs of ethnically different groups with little exploration of the historical and sociopolitical contexts of those target groups. At the other end of the continuum, educators view multicultural education as anti-racist, anti-sexist education that critiques both individual and institutional forms of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and that works toward social transformation (Bennett deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999).
Through its Multicultural Educational Initiative, described below, as well as many other faculty and departmental efforts, the college aims to prepare professionals who have a solid knowledge of the historical, sociological, anthropological and educational literature focused on schooling for diverse families and communities. The size of the College of Education, as well as the diversity of faculty perspectives across the departments, encourages multiple approaches to multicultural education in professional education programs. Some of the courses and experiences offered to candidates are intended to achieve a human relations perspective on diversity; others take a single group approach as in courses that focus on women or on African Americans. Still others take a more global and critical social reconstructionist approach to understanding diversity and promoting social justice issues. Although candidates are able to take many courses centered on diverse learners, the curriculum is designed so that issues of diversity are also infused throughout courses and programs across the college. The faculty expect professional education candidates to demonstrate not only a knowledge base in issues related to diversity, but the skills and dispositions that enable them to create appropriate learning environments in which all children will thrive and where parents and communities are a vital part of the project. Bennett deMarrais & LeCompte (1999) argue that a multicultural emphasis only achieves legitimacy when it ceases to be exotic and becomes part and parcel of everyday life in every subject. The college strives to reach that goal.
Achieving the College's Aspirations
The Conceptual Framework speaks not only of the aspirations of the College of Education, but also of the means by which it seeks to achieve its end. Its means are those traditional to Research 1 institutions - teaching and scholarship - but the college adds to them two other means not often found in research universities, outreach and partnerships at local, national, and international levels.
The College of Education at the University of Georgia takes great pride in the teaching abilities of its faculty. In 1999, eleven faculty members received awards for teaching excellence, ranging from two recipients of Lilly Teaching Fellowships to a Fulbright Teaching and Research award. The college provides support for the improvement of faculty teaching, including monetary support for enhancing the technological proficiency of faculty teaching.
The faculty is also distinguished for the quality and quantity of its research. In the last year, eighteen faculty members won awards from national organizations for scholarship, including two Fellows of the Institute for Behavioral Research, one fellow of the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education, and the designation of one colleague as one of "the 50 most productive and influential" scholars of educational administration by a task force within AERA Div. A. In that same year, the faculty authored 38 books, over 130 chapters to edited books, nearly 300 articles in refereed journals, and well over 900 other publications and papers presented before scholarly audiences nationally and internationally. Nine education-related journals are edited by college faculty. As noted earlier, the faculty has been highly successful in winning external support for its work.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 135-465]
Of growing importance to the College of Education, however, are its outreach and partnership efforts. While collaboration has not been a defining element in teaching and scholarship in the past, it must now become a professional norm. The faculty has begun crossing boundaries between groups within the college and across the campus, while the college has been engaged in building bridges to public schools, other institutions of higher education, business, community groups, and others. So important has the issue of outreach and partnerships become to the college that it sought and hired a dean with a commitment to such goals, and has reorganized its administrative structure around outreach and partnerships. The Office for Public Service and Outreach currently oversees more than 300 partnerships in the state and throughout the world.[http://www.coe.uga.edu/outreach/]
Professional Commitments and Dispositions
The College of Education is firmly committed to all aspects of exemplary teacher education. It offers the best and most current knowledge to its candidates, while actively pursuing new knowledge and promoting its application in its own teaching and in public schools. It seeks expanded means of assuring itself and its constituents of its success in nurturing exemplary, reflective practitioners.
The college believes that the work of educational professionals does not equate to a set of measurable competencies or behaviors. Their work is, rather, an intellectual and inevitably moral work requiring a thorough integration of complex, contextually actuated skills and particular habits of the heart and habits of the mind. Embedded in the college's conceptual framework, and revealed in the knowledge base undergirding that framework, are a number of attitudes, dispositions, and orientations that the faculty values in its candidates and seeks to enhance in them and in itself.
Among the habits of the mind that the college seeks to foster are an abiding respect for intellectual effort, ideas, disciplinary knowledge, and professionalism. Through its insistence upon excellence in subject matter, the faculty seeks in its candidates not merely mastery of facts, but far more importantly it seeks growth in a deep appreciation for the structures of and the modes of thinking fundamental to the disciplines. It is aware that a full grounding in the disciplines teaches the norms of inquiry, the modes of respectful, rigorous inquiry and critique, the informed skepticism, and the respect for divergent ideas that are essential to academic disciplines, and more crucially are fundamental to the discipline of committed citizenship.
The college promotes attitudes of broad professionalism, not as careerist self-interest but as habits of continual self-evaluation and enhanced performance, along with habits of continual evaluation of educational institution and their practices, in the interests of children and the society's highest ideals. It anticipates candidates who have developed habits of examining school practices and educational ideas, and formulating new practices and ideas in light of a grounded knowledge of learning, childhood, and society.
The college is similarly convinced that teaching, counseling, leadership, and other work in schools constitutes a moral craft as much as an intellectual craft. It values and seeks to nurture educational professionals who understand the political character of education and what that means for ethical professionalism. The college recognizes that deeply contested questions about the purposes and beneficiaries of education condition the work of educational professionals, and it promotes attentiveness to ends and means. It encourages careful and on-going consideration of ethical perspectives on classroom practices, curricular choices, pedagogical modalities, and institutional culture and organization. It presses for educational professionals who value difference and promote equity. A professional ethic requires a consciousness of the value orientations within educational practices. The college expects its candidates to value democratic forms of association and to support the conditions essential to them.
The faculty hopes to replace the image of educational professionals as technicians delivering prescribed content to passive consumers with the more potent notion of educational professionals as committed intellectuals skillfully engaging learners in the expansion of their ethical, cultural and intellectual universes. Actualizing that hope pivots on encouraging habits of thought, reflection, connection-making, understanding, and moral concern that are not required of technicians.
Commitment to Diversity
Increasingly, the popular and professional press is calling for educational institutions to acknowledge the nation's changing demographics, and to respond by helping to create a society characterized by mutual respect and a sense of community. The College of Education has achieved distinction in its anticipation of and response to these calls. Beginning in the early 1990s, the college adopted its Multicultural Mission Statement and launched its Multicultural Education Initiative.
The college's commitment to diversity is not limited to curriculum for the consumption of candidates. The multicultural education mission statement specifies that the college's instruction, research, service and administration all share a role in fulfilling the goals of diversity in the college. Multicultural education is regarded as a process that facilitates the development of educational policies and practices within the university and in the public schools that recognize, accept and affirm differences and similarities among people and challenge inequities that exist in society in general, and in educational settings, in particular. The college is committed to making itself more diverse, to developing programs and practices that nurture in candidates, staff and faculty the knowledge and actions necessary to lead productive lives in the context of pluralism, and to effectively educating and counseling students from various cultural and social backgrounds.
[http://www.uga.edu/~mctf/]
Curriculum. Between 1996 and 1998, the college encouraged all departments to create Cultural Diversity Action Plans to diversify their curricula. To support these departmental efforts, the college provided consultation and training on curriculum transformation. The college also instituted an annual multicultural education conference whose first meetings were devoted to curriculum development. Finally, each department received funding to bring in discipline-specific consultants to work directly with faculty on curricular changes.
In 1997, the University of Georgia instituted a Cultural Diversity Requirement for all undergraduate students. Alone among all the colleges in the university, the College of Education extended that requirement to graduate students as well as undergraduates. The college's cultural diversity graduation requirement intentionally avoided stipulating whether the requirement should be met through coursework or specific experiences. The intent was to identify a broad set of learning outcomes and to rely on the individual departments to make the best programmatic judgement about how those outcomes could be achieved. While the university has experienced delays in implementing the cultural diversity requirements in the various colleges, the College of Education, working from a high degree of faculty consensus, has continued to move toward full implementation. Departmental plans are now in the final stages of approval by the College of Education Curriculum Committee, and are beginning to be implemented within departments.
Recruitment and Retention. The college administration's commitment to increasing the number of minority faculty has led to six years of consistent increases in the number of faculty of color hired in the college. As noted previously, minority faculty now account for over 14% of the total college faculty, compared with a university-wide minority presence of 11%. Further, nearly half of the minority faculty are tenured and hold the rank of full or associate professor.
The college has also worked aggressively to retain faculty of color. The vitality of the college's multicultural education initiative, along with the administration's support for the initiative, is a positive influence on the retention of faculty of color. Additionally, the college supports a faculty administrator charged with supporting junior faculty members in their work toward tenure and promotion. As a result, every faculty member of color that has applied for promotion and tenure in the past five years has been successful, a point of pride in the college, and a record that also contributes to minority faculty retention
The college's efforts to recruit candidates of color have not been as fruitful as desired, especially at the undergraduate level. Minority undergraduate education majors constitute 10% of the student body, compared to 12% for the university as a whole. The college seeks venues for undergraduate minority student recruitment, such as participation in Georgia Preview Days, a university-wide effort to promote campus visits and orientations for students and parents of color. The dilemma currently faced by the college, shared with most other institutions, derives from the chilling effect of the recent Hopwood case that declared the University of Texas' affirmative action efforts unconstitutional.
[http://irhst40.irp.uga.edu/html/irp/irpk/student/Sirs/profile/l3/06.html]
However, the college has been successful in recruiting minority graduate students. Through participation in the Graduate School's recruitment work, active representation on the Graduate Student Recruitment Committee, and attendance at recruitment fairs and related events, the college has increased its minority graduate population. Graduate students of color made up nearly 13% of all graduates in the college in the autumn of 1999, with African Americans composing almost 9%. International students account for 0.3% of the college's undergraduate population, and 6% of its graduate population. Further, the college is retaining and graduating graduate students of color. According to Black Issues in Higher Education, the college ranks fifth in the nation in the number of education doctorates awarded to African Americans.
[http://irhst40.irp.uga.edu/html/irp/irpk/student/Sirs/profile/l3/06.html]
Research and Scholarship. Since the initiation of the multicultural initiative, several specific programs have been put in place to promote research and scholarship into diversity issues and multicultural education. In 1995, the college began funding mini-grants to support school and departmental efforts. The resulting grant program has funded 47 proposals with a range of valuable, innovative results. Among the outcomes of these grants are all-day departmental trainings on diversity, conference presentations at state, national and international conferences, refereed journal articles, and development of instructional videos and teacher guides. [http://www.uga.edu/~mctf/]
The faculty's scholarship and the systemic efforts to institutionalize change across the college have garnered visibility and attracted attention. National presentations about the multicultural education initiative are well received. The task force responds to numerous inquiries each month from other institutions of higher education, as well as peers at UGA, regarding the initiative. The university's central administration touts the College of Education as a model of effective integration of diversity.
Faculty and Staff Development. Many multicultural education programs nationally focus primarily on changing student knowledge and perceptions. By contrast, the college realized early in the multicultural education initiative that faculty and staff also needed to reflect on and learn about diversity and multiculturalism. Therefore, professional development has comprised a substantial component of the multicultural education initiative. Perhaps most notable and enduring has been the annual Multicultural Education Conference sponsored by the College of Education each Spring, initiated in 1994. Nationally recognized scholars such as Carl Grant, Carlos Cortez, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Tracy Robinson, and Don Locke have participated, exposing the college to the diversity of work in the field of multicultural education.
The effects of the college's stand on diversity have reverberated into all corners of the unit. Educational Leadership's School Design and Planning Laboratory studies multicultural aspects of school design [http://www.coe.uga.edu/sdpl/sdpl.html]. The remarkable Sport Instruction Research Lab is leading the nation in investigations in instructional diversity and multicultural education in physical education. The college's P-16 initiative seeks to "close the gaps in access to post-secondary education between students from majority and minority groups and between students from high and low income groups" and to "focus the co-reform of schools and teacher education on practices that bring P-12 students from diverse groups to high levels of achievement¼."
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/sportlab/labinfo/labmission/cihist.html] [http://www.coe.uga.edu/outreach/]
Commitment to Technology
The college expressed its commitment to educational technology in 1993 through the College of Education Technology Initiative. The initiative found expression through the College Technology Committee that was charged to develop college-wide technology goals. The consensus was that technologies such as multimedia instruction, electronic presentations, distance learning, and electronic mail are changing teaching, learning and communication. Therefore, a process was initiated to prepare candidates, faculty and staff to receive systematic exposure to instructional technologies. The technology goals, announced in 1995, have guided the processes of strategic planning and resource allocation within the college and its schools, departments, and programs. The college has renewed its technology initiative as a way to demonstrate a collective dedication to the integration of technology into the teaching and learning process. The current technology initiative also serves as a response to the State of Georgia legislative requirement to prepare pre-service teachers to incorporate technology into the classroom.
To facilitate candidate mastery of technology, the college supports eight computer labs in three buildings with a total of 148 stations. The labs are available to candidates for up to seventy hours per week, depending on location. In addition, the university maintains a ninth lab in Aderhold for candidate use. Both Windows and Macintosh computing environments are available in the labs, and all feature projection systems for class use. The fifty classrooms within the college's own buildings are wired for internet access, and all but the smaller seminar rooms are equipped with overhead projectors, VCRs and monitors. The larger lecture halls throughout the campus are equipped with video projection devices, cordless microphones, CD and VCR capacity, and other mediation. The most recent movement regarding education technology is a proposal, just coming under discussion as this report is being written, that will create a truly college-wide plan to integrate technology into all teacher education programs. [http://it.coe.uga.edu/~lrieber/teachtechproposal/]
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/labs/]
To extend the faculty's own proficiency in educational technology, both to increase its effectiveness and to enhance its modeling of intelligent applications, the college instituted a mini-grant program to support faculty to integrate technology into curriculum and pedagogy. In 1999-2000, the college awarded $13,000 in mini-grants to its faculty for thirteen projects, seven of which were for InTech training (see below). In 2000-2001, the college will award $17,500 for 25 proposals.
To integrate the college's pre-service training with state-wide technology training, the college initiated a pilot program in 1999-2000 that gave 26 pre-service elementary education candidates the same technology integration professional development that state in-service teachers are receiving state-wide. This experience enhanced the pre-service teachers' job opportunities and eliminated the requirement that they receive this training after employment. Given the success of the pilot project, Elementary Education is seeking funding to extend the program in the near future.
The college is also improving technology use among in-service teachers. In collaboration with the State Department of Education, two Technology Training Centers, one at the College of Education and one at its satellite site at the Gwinnett Center, provide comprehensive curriculum, administrative and technology support training for educators. Last year, these centers provided technology-related instruction to 565 teachers and 2,741 other educators in Northeast Georgia. The program, INtegrating TECHnology in the Student-Centered Classroom (InTech), is intended to foster changes in teaching and learning in Georgia's classrooms. [http://ttc.coe.uga.edu/index.html]
[http://ttc.coe.uga.edu/intech-intro.html] [http://www.coe.uga.edu/annual_report/1999/, pp. 47-50]
Commitment to Candidate Proficiencies Aligned with Professional and State Standards
Since 1997, the college has taken leadership in aligning its teacher education programs with subject-matter standards as enunciated by national professional organizations, working in close collaboration with arts and sciences faculty and P-12 educators (see above, pp. 6-7, STEP). That initiative received further funding in 2000. Its goal of ensuring that prospective teachers gain the content and pedagogical skills related to national subject-matter standards is being addressed through a thorough process of curriculum alignment in four targeted curricular areas: English and language arts, science, mathematics, and social studies. See STEP documents, PSC/NCATE room.
The importance of that process of curriculum alignment led the college to move toward a more comprehensive systemic teacher education reform process while continuing its Standards-Based Teacher Education Project. The Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Project, with multi-million dollar funding, will bring two other Georgia universities into the process of curriculum alignment. Further, the college has begun an extensive process of identifying and evaluating all current candidate outcomes and current modes of candidate assessment, identifying further outcomes based on careful analysis of PSC, NCATE, and national standards, and creating authentic, performance based assessments for all outcomes. See Section 3 for more details. The exact alignment of the college's conceptual framework with state and national standards is illustrated in Unit Outcomes for Candidates (see Table 3, appendix). That table summarizes standards from the Georgia Board of Regents Quality Assurance Principle, National Board Standards, INTASC Standards, and NCATE 2000 standards. See individual programs for assessment matrices, data summaries and plans. See GSTEP documents, hard copies in PSC/NCATE room.
In summary, the College of Education has a record of a decade of committed, multifaceted work to increase its diversity and to prepare its candidates to work in a diverse, global society. Similarly, it has spent nearly a decade to become more technologically adept, with cutting-edge infrastructure, and with expanding opportunities for its candidates and its faculty to gain full proficiency in the use of educational technology and to become advocates for expanded technological capacities in the schools they will serve. Finally, the college has not merely given lip-service to standards-based teacher education, but has taken national leadership in the movement toward that goal.
SECTION 3: THE STANDARDS