Teacher Education Goes Into Virtual Schooling (TEGIVS)

Objectives

 

This project proposes to integrate a comprehensive VS curriculum into four diverse programs of preservice teacher education for the first time. The TEPs include a land grant university (Iowa State University, ISU), a large public southern university (University of Florida, UF), a highly selective eastern university (University of Virginia, UVA), and a liberal arts college (Graceland University, GU) with several Midwest campuses including a virtual campus.

The creation of an innovative and transferable model of curriculum for adoption by over 1,000 teachers' colleges across the US will be supported by collaborating virtual schools, consultants, as well as developing and growing communities of practice through activities of professional societies for teacher educators.

The context of VS provides significant challenges to teacher education. Virtual schools do not have physical premises to visit because courses, classrooms and their management have been adapted with technology specifically to disperse teachers and students for some or all of their time in VS.

The challenges to teacher education include how to expose examples of effective VS so that preservice teachers may study the whole educational process and how to provide guided observations and effective clinical mentoring skills in developing practice in real situations. Three complementary objectives are planned to address these problems:

1. VS Curriculum development and assessment in teacher education to map VS into appropriate places within four leading TEPs through adaptation of selected courses accompanied by assessment of competence against standards, and provide scientific-based evidence from multiple sources of the educational outcomes. Four diverse TEPs will incorporate VS with appropriate assessments for four levels of competences (VS1-4), namely: VS1: counselor; VS2: assistant; VS3: teacher; VS4: designer. This will be underpinned by strategic professional and organizational development.
2. Three tools to expose VS will be created, namely T1: a lab interface with archived cases; T2: a tool to tour and access VS activities; and T3: a tool to facilitate supervision and mentoring. Building on prior software, the tools will permit engagement with VS practices from multiple perspectives: K-12 student, counselor, VS teacher, VS designer, university supervisor. Live and archived cases of VS will be collected for use with these tools in collaboration with virtual schools such as Iowa Learning Online.
3. A national community of VS practice in teacher education will be developed to facilitate the adoption of VS into teacher education. Activities within our nationwide professional associations and workshops in 5 national conferences accompanied by resources that will be added to the national digital library of the Association for the Advancement Computing in Education (VS standards, tools, curriculum, and evaluation instruments). The project's innovative practice and community will facilitate incorporation of VS to over 1,000 TEPs across the US.