College + Curry + Local Schools = improved teacher education

For Victor Luftig, director of the University’s Teachers for a New Era program, the reason for involving the College of Arts & Sciences in teacher education is elementary.

“There is no better exemplar of the virtues of a liberal arts education than a schoolteacher,” he said.

“Take any fourth grade teacher in Virginia: the state standards say that that teacher has to be able to teach students how to compute mathematical probability, how to explain early American systems of ‘money, banking, saving and credit,’ how to contextualize the accomplishments of important 20th-century Virginians such as Woodrow Wilson and Arthur Ashe, how ‘to write rhymed, unrhymed and patterned poetry’ and how to use a barometer — all in one year.”

Teachers for a New Era, funded by a $5 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the Annenberg Foundation and the Ford Foundation, focuses on three ways to improve teacher education:

• Involving the entire University in teacher preparation, with a special role for Arts & Sciences in cooperation with the Curry School of Education;
• Developing better ways to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher preparation based on evidence of how children learn;
• Treating teaching as a “clinical practice profession,” much like medicine — and borrowing some of the approaches used in medicine to better prepare new teachers.

“This grant has helped call attention to something that Arts & Sciences really ought to be focusing on, something that we ought to make a high priority: the education of teachers,” said Dean Edward L. Ayers. “And it’s something we can do really well.”

Teaching, Luftig said, “isn’t just a question of assembling facts; teachers have to understand patterns and connections between these kinds of thinking, and a liberal arts education turns the academic disciplines into the best possible tools for assembling those links.” Luftig, associate professor of English, also directs U.Va.’s Center for the Liberal Arts, which has offered workshops and courses for K-12 teachers since 1984.

Plans also call for partnerships with the Charlottesville and Albemarle County school systems, including an Expert Educators Group of 10 teachers and principals. The experts group will advise and direct activities such as a Teacher-in-Residence program, which gives mentor teachers U.Va. faculty status, and an Induction Residency based on the kind of training new physicians receive.

“There’s some agreement, I’d say, that a doctor has to be able to say and do certain things in order to be really effective,” said Luftig. “We’re going to help make teachers’ skills similarly recognizable and respected.”