The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $3 million “Investing in Innovation” grant to a partnership of educational organizations that will aid in two major educational initiatives: better preparing new teachers and bolstering math and science instruction.
The project will operate under the leadership of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and with the cooperation of faculty from Stanford University, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC). These organizations are responsible for the creation of edTPA, “a performance-based assessment tool to help determine if student teachers are ready for the classroom.” edTPA is “based on standards developed by the National Board to identify the most accomplished teachers among experienced educators” and therefore attempts to merge the best practices of experienced teachers with what is taught to and expected of new teachers.
The grant itself allows for the creation of “an online repository of classroom videos and accompanying written materials that illuminate how master teachers go about the job of challenging and stimulating students to learn.” The repository will be known as ATLAS, or Accomplished Teaching, Learning and Schools, and will be constructed through a project the National Board calls “Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence.” Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence will focus on teachers in seven local school districts in New York, Tennessee and Washington along with six universities in those three states. The five-year project will attempt to prove that ATLAS has improved beginning-teacher instruction in the areas of math and science for grades 3-6.
Eventually, ATLAS will include all 25 National Board certificate areas, “including thousands of cases addressing all areas of the curriculum and every developmental level of pre-K-12 education.”
Work on the grant will begin before the end of 2012 and will require NBPTS to raise $450,000 in matching funds. Furthermore, NBPTS will “disseminate findings from this project through research and policy briefs, presentations to their memberships, research monographs, postings on websites and social media” to “all of the nation’s schools, colleges and departments of education; state education agencies; and the National Board’s network of 100,000 accomplished teachers and policy partners.”
Linda Darling-Hammond, a co-principal investigator of the grant and the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education who helped develop edTPA, summed up the importance of the grant: “This is cutting-edge work at the nexus of the nation’s two most important educational challenges: promoting educator effectiveness and strengthening science and math teaching and learning. The integration of the National Board’s repository of master teacher certifications into teacher preparatory programs will be extraordinarily beneficial.”
For more information, please visit the following websites:
http://edtpa.aacte.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/National-Board-Press-Release.pdf
http://www.nbpts.org/about_us/news_media/press_releases?ID=933
