The University of Virginia
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TEACHERS FOR A NEW ERA and THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Original proposal submitted Fall 2002 (since modified)
Contact Victor Luftig, Director of the University’s “Teachers for a New Era” programs
(VL4N@virginia.edu) with questions, suggestions, or comments.
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
Our emphasis on community and developing a mutually reinforcing set of initiatives that engage
the University and the schools as full partners has shaped the presentation of this proposal.
Section One: A Community Dedicated to Teacher Education
 Mentoring. We view mentoring as an activity in which sharing knowledge and building
community are inseparable.
 Partnerships for Preservice Education. This section is devoted to enhancing the
development of content knowledge and pedagogy through collaboration among the Curry
School, Arts & Sciences, and the school divisions.
 Induction Activities. We propose a residency model of induction designed to preserve a
young teacher’s connection to a community of professionals, while building strong
collaborative relationships with partner school divisions.
 Disseminating Best Practices. Our goal is not simply to encourage other universities to
follow our example, but to solicit best practices from other institutions and build a
coalition of stakeholders that will help shape our activities in the early years of the
initiative.
Section Two: Coordination and Assessment.
 Management and Guidance. This section provides an overview of New Era oversight as
it will be structured at UVA, including details about our governing and advisory
structures, as well as our preliminary plans for fundraising and program sustainability.
 Assessment. The effectiveness of the program as a whole and its individual constituents
will be subject to continual evidence-based review. Such review will provide guidance
for refocusing and redirecting our efforts.
Table of Contents
The University of Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
A COMMUNITY FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHER EDUCATION
Our immediate goal for Teachers for a New Era is to perfect a model teacher education program
that attracts some of our most promising young men and women and transforms them into superb
teachers, capable of eliciting the highest possible achievement from their students over the
course of their career. If we are to sustain this effort, however, we must also create an academic
and professional community united in the belief that training outstanding teachers is critical to
the future of our nation and dedicated to educating teachers of this high caliber. To effect
meaningful change in the culture of teaching, this community must engage scholars throughout
the University and their colleagues in K–12 systems and classrooms. Forging such a community
at a Research I University —and nurturing future teachers within it—is our ultimate purpose.
By focusing on community, we are in effect, through action and example, fostering a cultural
change in the way the teaching profession is regarded, among faculty and administrators, among
all our students (not just those who enter the profession), and among the citizens of the districts
in which our students teach. This community will span schools at the University, strengthen the
connection between the University and K-12 school systems, and grow over time to include our
graduates, an ever increasing circle of school divisions, professional organizations, and state
departments of education.
We have already at the University of Virginia a number of the elements needed to create a
community devoted to educating outstanding teachers as well as many of the tools needed to
educate our students appropriately. Despite the strengths we bring to this undertaking, we lack a
powerful unifying framework to coordinate these efforts, to overcome cultural and institutional
barriers, and to sustain our work. Initiatives launched as part of the Teachers for a New Era
program will provide this framework.
Thus we see the Teachers for a New Era program as both an end in itself—a series of initiatives
that will improve teacher effectiveness—and as the means to create a community capable of
sustaining and nourishing these efforts.
Ultimately, we hope to extend this emphasis on teacher preparation beyond the Curry School of
Education and the College of Arts & Sciences to other schools at the University. To help ensure
that teacher preparation becomes a core value at the University, we have created a position in the
Provost’s office to coordinate and monitor this effort.
We will also make teacher preparation an important fundraising goal as we enter our new
fundraising cycle. We believe that a number of initiatives launched as part of Teachers for a New
Era, such as the Emerging Teachers Program and the Teachers-in-Residence program, will prove
to be attractive to private donors. We also intend to seek funding for at least one endowed chair
with a joint appointment in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Curry School whose focus
will be on teacher preparation within a particular discipline or range of disciplines.
Introduction
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SECTION 1: A COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO TEACHER EDUCATION
PART 1: MENTORING
We view mentoring as an activity in which sharing knowledge and building community are
inseparable. To be successful, mentoring must encompass close collaboration among Curry
School faculty, Arts & Sciences faculty, and mentor teachers, as well as proactive and regular
contact with students. Our goal is to motivate students, to help place the knowledge and skills
gained in more formal settings in their intellectual and professional contexts, and, ultimately, to
promote their identification with a community that prizes outstanding teaching.
Currently, students in the BA/MT program each have an advisor in their Arts & Sciences major
and another advisor from the Curry School. They also work with a clinical instructor from the
schools during their student teaching. Our goal is to reinvigorate these efforts and to establish
tight cooperation and communication among these mentors.
In our intensive model, all students will have the benefit of working with these three mentors
simultaneously throughout their preservice education. We believe that the close relationships
students establish with their mentor team members may extend through the induction period and
foster lifelong identification with an intellectual and professional community dedicated to
teaching.
The particular form that preservice mentoring assumes will vary from content area to content
area and will depend on a student’s decision to focus on elementary or secondary education.
Accordingly, we propose a deliberate and staged process for implementing joint mentoring.
This graduated approach will allow us to refine our model over time, to create long-term,
sustainable relationships between the two schools, and to help identify more accurately the
resources required to provide intensive advising and mentoring to all future teachers.
We propose, initially, to create several three-person committees focusing on areas in which large
numbers of Curry students major. Department chairs in core subjects such as English, foreign
languages, history, mathematics, psychology, and laboratory science will each lead a committee
Other groups may focus on students majoring in elementary and special education. Each
committee will also have a relevant content specialist from Curry and a faculty member from
Arts & Sciences. The entire enterprise will be reviewed by the Expert Educators Group described
in Section 2.
Each committee will be allocated funds to develop a mentoring program, depending on the
number of students that fall within their purview and the intensity of the challenges they face.
They will be charged with developing and implementing an optimal, intensive model for
mentoring, which will be applied initially to a limited number of students. They will be required
to develop evidence of the effectiveness of their methods and, ultimately, to develop plans to
extend this type of mentoring to all education students in the major and to other majors.
Mentoring
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Students who do not participate in this trial program will continue to receive advising from Curry
School and Arts & Sciences faculty and will serve as a control group to help us assess the new
strategies. At end of year five, we intend that the advising of all students will reflect what we
have learned through this process, and that a high percentage of students will be receiving
intensive mentoring.
An advantage of this decentralized approach is that we will be able to develop models for
mentoring that closely track the needs of a particular field. We will also create a number of
models that can be used as starting points to expand intensive mentoring to subject areas not
included in the initial trial.
Another advantage of our approach to mentoring is that it will mesh well with other elements of
our proposal for Teachers for a New Era, while capitalizing on a number of tools already in place
at the University. It will, for instance, reinforce the synthetic approach advanced in our
interdisciplinary Common Course program and the new areas of focus in our BA/MT program.
Descriptions of these two efforts are found in part 2 of this section of the proposal.
Mentors will also have access to a suite of tools based on Curry’s telementoring research,
ongoing since 1984, involving online professional development support for preservice and
inservice teachers. The platform will support mentoring by giving members of the mentoring
team the ability to review examples of their students’ performance in the form of papers or
videos of classroom experiences. Data derived from each of these tools and from other
assessment vehicles designed by the Teaching Assessment Center will help us assess our
capacity to provide teacher education that is valued and valuable in terms of pupil learning.
We also believe that the collaboration required to design intensive mentoring programs and to
implement them will contribute to creating a sense of common purpose among University faculty
and our school division partners and to elevating the status of teacher education on Grounds
among faculty and students.
Mentoring
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SECTION 1: A COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO TEACHER EDUCATION
PART 2: PARTNERSHIPS FOR PRESERVICE EDUCATION
We will capitalize on Teachers for a New Era to strengthen the joint commitment of Curry and
Arts & Sciences to the BA/MT program, refine the existing requirements in light of new
mandates from federal and state initiatives as well as from the faculty and school divisions, and
enhance the preparation of teachers receiving the joint degrees. We will conduct a thorough
review of the goals and aligned courses that currently exist, eliminating education content not
verified by research, stripping away redundancies, and strengthening courses and content with
proven impact on teacher effectiveness.
At the same time, we will look for opportunities for faculty in both schools to collaborate closely
on courses presented in Arts & Sciences. The Curry School will serve as a partner in developing
the Common Courses and 300-level seminars emphasizing pedagogical content knowledge (see
part 2.3 of this section), and it will take an active role in exporting appropriate teaching models
to faculty at other schools in the University. This effort will entail team teaching of Arts &
Sciences courses taken by preservice teachers, the establishment of subject specific pedagogy
working groups that transcend colleges and schools, and jointly offered professional
development courses for teachers during their induction years.
2.1. REINVIGORATING THE BA/MT PROGRAM
As part of our effort to reinvigorate the BA/MT program, we will launch initiatives in a number
of areas:
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Developing an evidence-based focus within pedagogy courses. We will create a
preparatory sequence based on instructional assessment (including curriculum-based
assessment and curriculum-based measurement) that will provide a foundation for all
other teaching within our pedagogy and content pedagogy classes. Integral to this
preparation will be the expectation that BA/MT students incorporate assessment
procedures in all they teach and demonstrate that they make reasonable and rational
decisions based on the performance evidence of their students.
Educating of at-risk student populations. To help us better incorporate cultural
considerations in teaching and learning, we will establish a focus within our teacher
education program on at-risk student populations. This will include content realignment
to incorporate the knowledge and skills that teachers need to work with this challenge and
a careful analysis of the impact of field experiences on a teacher’s attitudes and
perspectives.
Bolstering professional development and lifelong learning. We will seek to change
the culture of teacher preparation by developing an environment early in the teacher’s
training that highlights professional development. Accordingly, we will emphasize
reflective goal-setting tasks. Students will be asked to establish professional goals early
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in their preparation. They will revisit these goals regularly as students and prepare a plan
for professional development for their induction years.
Fostering more synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to content knowledge. We will
work toward adjusting course requirements for elementary and secondary education
students to reflect Common Courses and other interdisciplinary programs developed
jointly between Curry and Arts & Sciences.
Intensifying focus on pedagogical content knowledge. We will extend the emphasis
established in our subject specific pedagogy classes by redesigning the current
culminating experience in the master’s program (EDIS 788: Field Project) to focus on the
integration of Arts & Sciences content with pedagogy from the Curry School.
Offering more intensive student teaching. In cooperation with the school divisions, we
will offer fifth-year students the option of full-time student teaching during their last
semester. Students choosing this option will take responsibility for the lowest 20% of a
teacher’s students and help these students achieve at grade level by the end of the term.
Student teachers will measure student progress using standard assessment tools and will
gain experience in working with at-risk populations.
Reinforcing expertise in the use of technology. The University of Virginia is one of the
nation’s leaders in the use of technology in the classroom, in integrating technology into
the teacher education curriculum, and in developing new technologies that transform the
nature of academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities. We will place additional
emphasis on helping students assess the functionality of new technology in the spirit of
Teachers for a New Era requirements.
2.2 LATE-DECIDER PROGRAM
The BA/MT program begins in the student’s second year of undergraduate study, integrating
coursework from Arts & Sciences and Curry, complemented by extensive field experience in the
classroom through graduation in the fifth year. Students who enter the program in their third year
complete required courses during the summer term.
For the majority of students who have long considered teaching as a primary career option, this
schedule works well. Increasingly, however, more students seem to be coming late to the
decision of selecting a professional education career. These “late deciders” are interested in
meeting all requirements for both degrees without sacrificing their expected graduation date.
Many of these late deciders are passionate about their new career choice and do not want to
delay entry into the classroom. To accommodate these students we propose allowing students to
enter the program up until the start of their fourth year at the University. In addition we propose
instituting:
 A speedy and selective review of the student’s permission to enroll application to expedite
entrance into the program;
 An interview with one or more appropriate Curry and Arts and Sciences faculty in order to
determine the student’s readiness to meet degree and licensure requirements within the
allocated time and to establish appropriate advising;
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Increased scheduling flexibility for students by providing a list of appropriate substitutions
for certain course requirements (many of these courses are within the liberal arts general
studies block and are required neither for licensure nor for the BA degree);
A focused course sequence which eliminates the pre-professional courses (Introduction to
Teaching as a Profession) required for normal entry into the BA/MT program;
A mentoring group for late deciders to assist with advising questions, foster peer
relationships, and elevate the professional awareness of these students without mandating
additional course work.
2.3. PEDAGOGY ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
We believe that the College of Arts & Sciences can play a critical role in advancing teacher
education at the University. Although teaching and learning within the disciplines will remain
the cornerstone of a liberal arts education, the ability to synthesize information across traditional
disciplines has become essential for everyone, most certainly for K-12 teachers who must move
with authority across a rapidly expanding body of knowledge. Creating comprehensive
approaches to knowledge is a top priority for Arts & Sciences and Curry, and it is one that
meshes well with the goals of Teachers for a New Era.
Furthermore, we believe the best way the University can explicitly strengthen teacher education
is through supporting collaborative curriculum-based initiatives between Arts & Sciences and
Curry School to integrate general education and pedagogy, not just in courses intended for
teachers, but also in those aimed at a broader audience.
To this end, Arts & Sciences plans to introduce a range of courses—including Teachers for a
New Era Seminars, Common Courses, Counterpoint Seminars, and Emerging Teachers
Seminars—that explicitly link how we teach to what we teach. These courses will also serve as
recruitment tools and offer multiple pathways into teaching. Finally, they will help promote the
cultural change so essential to sustaining the integration of liberal arts education and teacher
education. These benefits will be evident at both practical and intellectual levels. Joint planning
for, and delivery of, courses will lead to closer ties among all participating groups and lead to
more effective teaching in both Arts & Sciences and Curry.
2.3.1 Teachers for a New Era Seminars
We will offer as many as five 100-level seminars on teaching to generate interest, promote
discussion and reflection, and to encourage critical examination of teaching. These seminars will
build on our successful experience with the University Seminar Program, designed to bring
together first-year students and senior faculty. Proposals for the Teachers for a New Era
seminars will be peer-reviewed and could be team-taught by faculty from the Curry School and
the College of Arts & Sciences.
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Team Taught
between A&S
and Curry?
Possibly
Teaching
Resource
Center
Involved?
No
Type of
Future
Teacher Best
Served
Elementary
and
Secondary
Elementary
and
Secondary
Outside the
Major
Course
Teachers for a
New Era
Seminars
Common
Courses
Level
100
Recruitment
Tool?
Yes
Students per
class
20
200
Yes
200
Yes: Lecture
and
Discussion
Section
Focused on
Pedagogy
Yes: Expertise
in new models
of team
teaching;
assessing
student
learning;
assessing
teaching
Counterpoint
Seminars
Emerging
Teachers
Seminars
300
Yes
100
Yes
Yes
Secondary
400
Yes
20
Yes: Seminar
No
Secondary
2.3.2. Common Courses
The College of Arts & Sciences will introduce a series of new interdisciplinary Common
Courses and encourage all students in Arts & Sciences, including BA/MT candidates, to take
them early in their career. The object of these courses, as they relate to the New Era initiative,
will be to integrate liberal arts education and teacher education more closely, to strengthen
preparation for elementary and secondary school teachers, to promote general education and
interdisciplinary understanding, and to serve as an exciting vehicle for attracting young people to
the teaching profession.
The 200-level Common Courses will incorporate a range of literacy/numeracy skills, synthesize
“common” information from across several disciplines, and develop pedagogical content
knowledge for teachers through specially designed discussion sections. The pedagogical
instruction sections will be taught jointly by Arts & Sciences and Curry School faculty rather
than by teaching assistants, which we anticipate will raise the level of discussion in these
sections and enhance the status of the teaching profession in the eyes of our students.
Arts & Sciences is currently funding the development of two pilot courses for 2002-2003, one on
the ethics of war and the other on environmental decision-making, that will test the general form
of the Common Courses and lay the groundwork for their enhancement and expansion through
the Teachers for a New Era program. We will build on this base by creating a set of six
interdisciplinary Common Courses over the course of five years, designed specifically to address
the needs of future elementary and secondary school teachers for interdisciplinary perspectives
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as well as for pedagogical content knowledge. They will be organized around four critical fields:
the arts, the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. The first two Common Courses
will be developed in year one and offered in year two.
We believe that enrollment in a number of Common Courses will be especially useful for
students in elementary education, the majority of whom now pursue degrees in psychology.
Taking this multicourse sequence will give them the wide range of perspectives needed to
demonstrate their liberal arts mastery as well as the familiarity with key interdisciplinary issues
needed to move with authority from subject to subject. Common Courses will also be useful for
secondary education students, giving them the opportunity to study interdisciplinary issues
outside their content area and to think more broadly within it.
The Common Courses can also be seen as a powerful recruitment tool. Although students in the
BA/MT program will have priority access to the teacher education sections, other Arts &
Sciences students will be able to sign up for these as well. The general emphasis on, and
integration of, pedagogy into the content of the courses will raise awareness among students
about the challenges and rewards of teaching, and perhaps inspire some to become teachers. At
present, a number of Arts & Sciences students discover that they want to become teachers only
in their third or fourth years.
We will begin by inviting individual faculty and departments to submit proposals for the
Common Courses. We will then offer summer funding for faculty to design and participate in the
courses and will organize a summer workshop that will involve Curry faculty and school division
representatives in the planning process. We will draw on the expertise of the University’s
Teaching Resource Center to help faculty experiment with innovative approaches to team
teaching. We will also work with the Teaching Assessment Initiative (see part 3 of this section)
to establish measures of success for these courses in promoting teacher education.
We intend that the Common Courses will initially be offered as electives and that we will
evaluate the extent to which they achieve their goals before establishing them as requirements for
the BA/MT program. At the same time, we believe that these courses, taught by eminent faculty
from both schools, will be highly popular, and advisors will recommend them as ways for
students to explore the common themes among disciplines while also developing an awareness
of how pedagogy influences learning within those disciplines.
As mentioned above, the Common Courses will provide an important platform for our
assessment efforts. The assessment team will engage with the faculty as they develop the courses
to ensure that assessment instruments are incorporated in the course design. The assessment team
will also explore the feasibility of assessing all students, in addition to those in the pedagogy
sections, thus providing Arts & Sciences with important information about the effectiveness of
these courses and providing a basis for examining the effectiveness of other courses in Arts &
Sciences. In essence, the Common Courses have the potential to serve as a starting point for a
systematic pedagogical review of Arts & Sciences offerings.
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2.3.3. Counterpoint Seminars
Counterpoint Seminars, offered on the 300-level, are designed to encourage students to think
about issues of content and delivery in relation to, rather than in isolation from, one another.
These Counterpoint Seminars would be linked to popular 200-level survey courses and would
focus on the pedagogy associated with the course content. The class would be open to BA/MT
students who have already taken the survey course as well as graduate students in Arts &
Sciences. The class members would gain practical experience by providing teaching assistance to
the survey course. The Counterpoint Seminars will be led by an advanced graduate student, who
will work in coordination with the faculty member teaching the 200-level course.
2.3.4. Emerging Teachers Program
The Emerging Teachers Program (ETP) is modeled after the highly successful Emerging
Scholars Program, developed by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African
Studies at the University of Virginia. This program was designed to identify promising AfricanAmerican scholars and provide the support and encouragement for them to pursue academic
careers. Similarly, we believe that the presence of the ETP at the University will serve as an
inducement for students from underrepresented groups to enter the BA/MT program and may
inspire other students to enter the professional through alternative pathways.
The fundamental components of the program include an advanced seminar, jointly taught by
faculty from Curry and Arts & Sciences; internships and independent studies at one of the allied
research institutes in the program; and a one-week summer conference covering a range of
professional concerns for minority students and addressing key topics of interest for the teaching
profession. ETP will draw on the students in African-American Studies as well as other majors
The program will be competitive, and students must meet strict requirements for admission.
2.3.5. Other Initiatives
Arts & Sciences has applied for a National Science Foundation grant to support several math and
science positions dedicated to teaching courses for elementary education and special education
students. These faculty members would integrate findings from the Teachers for a New Era
program and participate in the assessment effort associated with it. In effect, the programs they
will offer will provide yet another opportunity for assessment. Acquiring these positions is a top
priority. If we do not receive this grant, we will seek funding from other sources.
2.4. PARTNERING WITH SCHOOLS
One of the key objectives of this Teachers for a New Era proposal is to strengthen and broaden
the fundamental relationship between universities and school divisions, based on shared vision
and ownership in all collaborative efforts, the development of focused partnerships among all
stakeholders, and the creation of reciprocal relationships that result in an elevated status of
master teachers and improved quality of teacher preparation. In effect, this proposal gives partner
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school divisions the ability to shape University programs to improve preservice and induction
training and to gain student performance data designed to meet their needs.
We have created a Expert Educators Group, including ten teachers and principals from local
schools, to represent the school division in decision-making and to ensure that the needs of the
school divisions are felt decisively in all Teachers for a New Era programs. Among its initial
responsibilities will be to work with the University to realign existing relationships with school
divisions to make them more productive, develop a teacher-in-residence program, provide handson school experience for Arts & Sciences mentors, and jointly develop tools designed to measure
teacher effectiveness and student performance. As Teachers for a New Era evolves, the Expert
Educators Group will also play a critical role in creating and implementing our monitoring and
induction-year programs.
2.4.1. Teacher-in-Residence Program
An indication of the importance of school division participation in Teachers for a New Era is the
teacher-in-residence program. In the early years of the initiative, teachers-in-residence will be
drawn from mentor teachers at partner school divisions. They will be relieved of their local
responsibilities and be given faculty status at U.Va., where they will team-teach methods
courses, collaborate with faculty, work closely with the Committee on Teacher Education
(described in Section 2) to develop initiatives that better serve the schools, and engage in joint
research with University faculty.
There will be one teacher-in-residence funded under the Teachers for a New Era program each
year beginning in year 2, and this eminent teacher will serve a one-year term. We believe that
the Teacher-in-Residence program will prove attractive to donors, and we will seek to raise
funds from private sources for additional teachers-in-residence during years 4 and 5.
While we are aware of the advantages of attracting the very best candidates for our Teacher-inResidence program, it may prove useful for us to restrict ourselves to a pool of local candidates
during years 2 and 3. This would enable us to draw on the leadership of a local teacher-inresident as we establish our residency induction model. Once this has been accomplished, we
believe that drawing from a pool of nationwide applicants could be extremely beneficial.
2.4.2. Assessment
The school divisions will take an important role in designing measures for teacher effectiveness
and student performance by their participation in the Teaching Assessment Initiative (TAI).
Fellows involved with TAI from the schools will also help reconceptualize and teach EDLF 843
(Evaluation of Teaching) in the Curry School. The newly constituted course will support college
and university faculty and school administrators, both in training and in practice, to assess all
components of teachers' performances.
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SECTION 1: A COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO TEACHER EDUCATION
PART 3: INDUCTION ACTIVITIES
We have three primary goals for our induction programs: to provide relevant pedagogical,
content, and professional knowledge that novice teachers need to become successfully rooted in
their new careers, to instill in young teachers the mindset that lifelong learning and professional
development are the keys to a satisfying career, and to serve schools by increasing retention of
new teachers.
Delivering induction support to all our graduates during the first two years of a teacher’s career
is complicated by their geographic dispersal of our graduates. Approximately 60 percent of
Curry graduates remain in Virginia for their first teaching positions and just 10 percent work in
school divisions within a 50-mile radius of Charlottesville. Working closely with all these
students would be prohibitively expensive.
Accordingly, we have devised a two-part program for induction. The first element of our
induction program consists of a series of programs that will bring students back to the University
for summer graduate courses and weekend workshops. These programs will primarily be
designed for students who teach outside the Charlottesville area. We will also reach these
students for assessment purposes. The second part of our induction program consists of a
residency program, in which we provide induction services for new teachers in local school
divisions, regardless of whether or not they graduated from the University.
3.1. WEEKEND WORKSHOPS AND SUMMER GRADUATE SEMINARS
We will create a series of programs that bring graduates back to Charlottesville for weekend
workshops and summer graduate seminars during their induction years. These workshops and
seminars will be designed to sustain the young teachers’ connection to their faculty mentors and
to address pedagogical content knowledge issues raised during their initial years of teaching.
Because these seminars will also be open to experienced teachers from any school division, they
will be an occasion for our graduates to encounter role models who value lifelong learning and
provide an impetus to develop colleague support groups.
Weekend workshops will sustain the kinds of knowledge communicated in the Common
Courses. They will assemble groups of 40-100 teachers to work with faculty members and
mentor teachers. UVa's summer graduate seminars for teachers, under the auspices of the Center
for the Liberal Arts, have since 1984 provided intensive training in content, and occasional
reference to teaching strategies, in specific scholarly subjects ("The History of Civil Rights, "
"The Modern Novel," "Leadership in Geometry"); spaces in several of these seminars will be
designated for teachers participating in the induction program.
We will work with the Virginia Department of Education to ensure that graduates who attend
these programs receive credit for recertification. We will also offer incentives for novice teachers
Induction Activities
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to recruit colleagues from their school to attend these courses, thus maximizing the benefit of
these programs for a particular school or school division.
3.2. INDUCTION RESIDENCY PROGRAM
We will develop an extensive induction model based on residency programs used for physician
education. We will partner with one or more local school divisions to develop an induction
mentoring program for all new teachers, regardless of where they were educated. We will work
closely with our school division partners to develop induction strategies that meet their needs and
the needs of new teachers and their students.
Because of proximity and the potential for system-wide partnerships with schools, we will be
able to provide a more intensive induction experience for novice teachers than we could if we
followed only our own students. Developing effective induction programs in partnership with
area school systems will help us model productive and mutually beneficial relationships between
universities and schools. Such a program will have the additional benefit of providing a control
group of non-U.Va. students for our assessment efforts and should serve as an incentive for
University faculty, many of whom have children in local schools, to participate in induction
activities.
We hope to engage other Research I institutions as we develop the induction program in hopes
that their involvement will increase the chances of disseminating the program. We believe that
this idea is one that could nurture large numbers of teachers during their first critical years in the
classroom while strengthening bonds between universities and the schools. It could emerge as a
national model for teacher induction, especially as awareness of this program spreads to other
universities through their graduates who are mentored in this program.
We will begin recruiting and planning with school division partners during the first year and will
launch a pilot residency induction program during year 2. We anticipate, as our induction
process develops, that support will be required in the participating school systems to expand the
model successfully. We anticipate applying for partner grants to support induction activities,
though providing details at this time as to how these funds will be used would be premature.
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SECTION 1: A COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO TEACHER EDUCATION
PART 4: DISSEMINATION
4.1 INTERNAL DISSEMINATION
Dissemination of learning about teacher effectiveness will be accomplished in conjunction with
the Teaching Resource Center (TRC). This well-established, highly regarded organization at the
University of Virginia has been instrumental during the last 12 years in enhancing the teaching
ability of faculty and teaching assistants across the University. It offers a wide variety of
workshops for teachers, consults with faculty members in course development, and sponsors
faculty fellows pursuing projects integrating teaching and technology, among other activities. In
this way, it serves as the driving force on Grounds in making excellence in teaching a core value
at the University. Partnership with the TRC will provide New Era projects with a critical
connection to university-wide conversations about pedagogy. These conversations can inform
New Era initiatives and also be informed by the New Era discoveries about effective teaching
and teacher preparation.
4.2 EXTERNAL DISSEMINATION
By soliciting best practices from other institutions and by building a coalition of stakeholders
that will be involved in shaping our initiative from the very start, we will increase the likelihood
that methods we pioneer will be adopted—and adopted well—by a variety of institutions.
We call this coalition our Reflective Partner Program. It will involve representatives from urban
universities, historically black colleges and universities, small private college, and other
Research I Universities. It will also include local school divisions and school divisions where we
have historically sent a high number of our graduates, as well as representatives of the
Department of Education in Virginia and other education departments in states with school
divisions employing a large number of graduates.
We will provide these partners with information on our program goals, solicit best practices,
share our design and decision-making process, and ask them to share their reflections with us. In
this way, we will make the ability to export programs part of their original design. We will forge
links with these institutions by meeting with them at U.Va. during years 2 and 3, by making
special sessions with them part of our two-day conference in year 3, and by hosting ad hoc
meetings at professional gatherings.
We will begin exporting elements of our program to interested Reflective Partners during the
third year of the grant. We will apply for partner support awards for these initiatives.
The second element of our external dissemination program will be our annual two-day
conference. This will be an opportunity to focus some of the best educational thinkers in the
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nation on our efforts, while fostering the sense of community that underlies this program. It will
be a celebration of the community we have assembled, bringing together students, faculty,
teachers, school division administrators, and representatives of state, national, and nonprofit
agencies. It will also be an occasion to extend and enrich that community.
The final element in our external dissemination program is our graduates. We will remain in
contact with them after the induction period ends, keeping them apprised of the latest
developments, encouraging them to serve as ambassadors for our initiatives, and drawing on
their experience and those of their colleagues to improve our efforts.
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SECTION 2: COORDINATION AND ASSESSMENT
PART 1: MANAGEMENT AND GUIDANCE
1.1 DIRECTOR—TEACHERS FOR A NEW ERA
Teachers for a New Era will be overseen on the University level, by an administrative position in
the Office of the Vice President and Provost, reporting to the provost. A newly created position,
director of Teachers for a New Era, is currently envisioned as a half-time appointment. The
director will be a highly regarded member of the academic faculty and will possess considerable
experience working with colleagues from Arts & Sciences, Curry, and administrators and
teachers in area school systems.
The director’s duties will include ensuring that all participants of the Teachers for a New Era
partnership play an appropriate role in program development.
1.2. EXPERT EDUCATORS GROUP
We have created a Expert Educators Group, including ten teachers and principals from local
schools, to represent the school division in decision-making and to ensure that the needs of the
school divisions are felt decisively in all Teachers for a New Era programs. The Expert
Educators Group will play a particularly important role in developing a residential model for
induction. (See Section 1, Part 2 for a more complete description of the group’s responsibilities.)
1.3. COMMITTEE ON TEACHER EDUCATION
A key element of our management plan is to ensure the highest levels of commitment and
cooperation on the part of the Curry School, the College of Arts & Sciences, and our partner
school districts. Accordingly, the Committee on Teacher Education will be led by the two deans
and the superintendent of a partner school district. Also serving on the committee will be the
Curry director of teacher education, a selection of faculty from Arts & Sciences and Curry, the
teachers-in-residence, a principal from a partner school division, and a member of a partner
school board. The director of Teachers for a New Era will be an ex-officio member of this
committee.
The Committee on Teacher Education will play a critical role in building connections between
Teachers for a New Era and the real-world of schools and schooling. The Committee on Teacher
Education will report to the Coordinating Council, which will be chaired by the vice president
and provost. Representatives of the Committee on Teacher Education will provide the
Coordinating Council with quarterly reports.
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The committee will begin its work with a two-day retreat that will include leaders from Arts &
Sciences, the Curry School, and the school divisions who will participate in Teachers for a New
Era programs. The goal of this retreat is to promote a shared vision and a shared body of
information needed to produce coherent implementation plans. These implementation plans will
be presented and approved by the committee at a second two-day retreat held three months later.
1.4. COORDINATING COUNCIL
The Coordinating Council, chaired by the vice president and provost, will have ultimate
responsibility for ensuring that Virginia’s Teachers for a New Era initiative adheres to or exceeds
the specifications of this proposal. It will meet quarterly and will be composed of educators,
managers, and other experts on the state and national level. Accordingly, it will include top
executives from the Virginia Department of Education, the Virginia State Board of Education,
the U.S. Department of Education, a professional association representing teachers, a national
community-based organization dedicated to student performance, and a major U.S. corporation
that devotes resources to education. Ex-officio members will include representatives of the
University Development Office, the University’s Office of Government Affairs, and the three
leaders of the Committee on Teacher Education.
The Coordinating Council will also be charged with working with state agencies, the legislature,
and accreditation groups to promote the kinds of fundamental change required for the success of
the program and to identify sources for supplementary funding.
1.5. SUSTAINABILITY AND FUNDRAISING
As part of Teachers for a New Era, the University has committed to making teacher preparation a
core value. The director for the New Era initiative will coordinate and monitor this effort, and we
hope to extend this emphasis on teacher preparation in future years beyond the Curry School of
Education and the College of Arts & Sciences to other schools at the University.
The University is entering a new fundraising cycle and discussions are underway about how to
most effectively make teacher preparation an important campaign goal. We have assembled a
team of senior development officers from University Development, Arts & Sciences, and Curry,
that is working closely with the Provost’s Office to develop effective fundraising strategies and
to ensure that teacher education is a priority for future fundraising.
We believe that a number of initiatives launched as part of Teachers for a New Era, such as the
Emerging Teachers Program and the Teachers-in-Residence program, will prove to be attractive
to private donors. We intend to seek funding for at least one endowed chair with a joint
appointment in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Curry School whose focus will be on
teacher preparation within a particular discipline or range of disciplines. We also intend to seek
funding for student fellowships which would provide support for future teachers in their final
years of college study, through their first two years as teachers, guaranteeing support to bring
them back to the University each summer to work with faculty mentors from Arts & Sciences
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and Curry. The president, provost, and the deans of Arts & Sciences and Curry are committed to
raising funds to sustain innovative, successful projects beyond the initial funding period of the
New Era initiative.
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SECTION 2: COORDINATION AND ASSESSMENT
PART 2: ASSESSMENT
The Teaching Assessment Initiative (TAI) created as part of Teachers for a New Era will lead
local efforts to conceptualize integrative assessments of our programs, carry them out, and report
the results. Faculty, staff, and students participating in TAI will construct new measures of
pedagogical content knowledge and use a variety of other measures to build online profiles
(electronic portfolios) of teacher education students. They will conduct evaluation studies linking
our students’ characteristics, their teaching performance, and pupil learning in different contexts.
TAI will hold seminars, sponsor research and development, produce manuscripts, and work with
the Carnegie Foundation’s Delta Team to coordinate research across geographical sites. They
will also interface with the Virginia State Education Department on the creation of its new
Database Committee for Teacher Education.
TAI will include faculty from Curry, Arts & Sciences, and from the public schools. We will
institute a fellows program to engage multiple partners in designing, conducting, analyzing,
interpreting, and reporting results. We will also ensure the participation of Arts & Sciences and
Curry through the formation of a “research pool” of students. To conduct research on human
subjects, our Institutional Review Board will require that we build in options for our students.
These options must stretch across students’ programs and over their time at the University. If we
expect students to use the results of assessment to inform their teaching, then we will have to
model the same kind of behavior to strengthen our teacher education programs.
The induction phase will offer unique opportunities to investigate connections between teaching
and learning and to inform our practice. The beginning teachers in the induction program will
use strategies they have learned in our program with their own pupils, thus performing for the
first time in settings for which they are totally responsible. Because we will work with the local
schools to offer induction support to all new teachers, not just those from the University of
Virginia, we will be able to compare teachers under similar conditions but with quite different
backgrounds of preparation.
2.1. RESEARCH FUNDAMENTALS
The map that will guide our work was first envisioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a set
of variables that describe the world of research on teacher education, teaching, and learning as
these factors are embedded in community contexts. Over the years, researchers have added
detail and background to the map, but the basic structure remains intact.
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Figure 1 depicts four variables that will be used to describe our integrated model for teaching
assessment. These include teacher characteristics, teaching performance, pupil learning, and
context variables.
Each variable suggests questions that will guide assessment of teacher preparation at the
University of Virginia. By examining teacher characteristics, for example, we shall be able to
answer a number of questions. For instance, the answer to the question who chooses to teach
will be framed as a snapshot of the race, ethnicity, major and minor areas of study of all U.Va.
students preparing to teach in all programs, or as a series of images over time. Further, as we
develop program descriptions and measures of pedagogical content knowledge acquisition, we
shall also answer this question in terms of how our teachers have prepared themselves
intellectually for the tasks that lie before them.
Our model will allow us to ask and answer a series of critically important questions: how do
teachers perform, how does context influence teaching and most important of all, what and how
well do pupils learn. Our previous work on case-based teaching and assessment will serve as a
springboard for instrument construction.
Pupil learning is the acid test of teaching and teacher education. Short-term learning will be
measured in micro-teaching situations. Our outcomes will consist of curriculum-based measures
and pre- and post-testing on exercises of knowledge acquisition and application. We shall
measure long-term learning via standardized state and national tests and locally developed
assessments, as well as via curriculum-based assessments. For our graduates who teach early
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grades in Virginia, we will also be able to capitalize on data from the Virginia State Department's
Phonological Literacy Screening Project. We believe elementary and secondary schools can and
must educate for many outcomes, including pupil motivation and attitude. A child who leaves
school academically prepared but unmotivated to realize his or her potential is an indication of
the failure of teachers and teacher educators. We shall seek measures of these important student
attributes to use as indications of teacher effectiveness.
We shall also conduct both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of our teachers who are
trained in the BA/MT program and when possible, compare our teachers' performances with
those of teachers from other institutions of higher education and from other Carnegie sites. We
will create baseline studies based on classroom performance in classes conducted by our recent
graduates, and we will conduct pilot tests of instruments and seek feedback on content and
process of our assessment through testing and periodic focus groups. Literacy and numeracy
will be assessed via the Praxis series. We shall also collaborate with the Delta Team to exchange
instrumentation designed to evaluate teachers and teacher education and to share more general
information on assessment issues.
As part of this effort, we will build a profile that can be used to describe student entry-level
characteristics and progress over time. Every study will be governed by the dictates of our own
Institutional Review Board in order to protect the rights of those involved.
2.2. VALUE-ADDED ASSESSMENT
We shall teach our students how to use several assessment strategies with their pupils and
evaluate our students' abilities to do so. The assessment strategies include curriculum-based
measurement, teacher-made assessments, and standardized state and national tests.
Curriculum-based measurement (also referred to as curriculum-based assessment) allows
teachers to monitor accurately and relatively easily the progress of their pupils toward
educational goals, at least through the eighth grade. Our students will learn to use a CBM
approach that can be described briefly in five steps: (1) analyzing curriculum for the appropriate
"fit" with pupils' abilities; (2) preparing items from the curriculum to assess pupils' progress; (3)
probing pupils' knowledge and skills using the items in 2-5-minute assessments; (4) loading the
results into graphical displays for analysis; and (5) adapting teaching to capitalize on the results
of assessments.
Teacher-made tests, like CBM, can be useful devices for assessing pupils' progress from
kindergarten through twelfth grade. These may be either norm-referenced or criterionreferenced. A post-doctoral student assigned to the pedagogical strand of our work will teach
students to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of such tests by attending to the
utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy of their assessments. Students will learn how to
construct, use, and interpret criterion-referenced tests, norm-referenced tests, performance
assessments, and portfolio assessments. They will also learn some basic observational skills
associated with assessing pupil performance.
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Part of our plan, then, is to collect data on pupil performance by training our own students to do
so. This has the twofold advantage of, first, teaching our students about the methods and
importance of measuring their influence on pupils and, second, scaling up data collection in an
economical manner. For these data to be useful, or course, they have to be valid and reliable.
This means we will need to carefully monitor students' work and help them learn how to collect,
analyze, and interpret pupil data in reasonable ways.
Our students will also learn how administer and interpret national, state, and local standardized
tests. We do not yet know what national tests we will concentrate on, but certainly the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Stanford Achievement Test (Ninth Edition)
will be among them. At the state level, we will focus on Virginia's Standards of Learning
(SOLs). Students will understand the strengths and limitations of these tests. They will consider
"programs" of testing that include both standardized and teacher-made assessments. They will
also learn about the regulations that govern testing in local, state, and national contexts.
2.3 LITERACY AND NUMERACY ASSESSMENT
We will assess the literacy and numeracy of our students and several ways:
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Grades in College of Arts and Sciences competency and area requirements. These
include writing requirements (ENWR 105/106 or ENWR 110 and one additional 3-credit
course); 12 credits in natural science and mathematics (statistics counts as mathematics);
6 credits in social sciences; and 6 credits in humanities; 3 credits in history; 3 credits in
non-Western perspectives.
Praxis 1 and 2 (except in special education where only Praxis 1 is required).
Scores on the SAT.
Scores on the GRE (fourth-year students in five-year program take the GRE to advance to
graduate status).
We will assess literacy and numeracy of pupils using measures such as:
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Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs)
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Stanford Achievement Test (9th ed.)
Curriculum-Based Measurement and teacher-made assessments (norm-referenced and
criterion-referenced)
Reading tests
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