Launching a major national effort to dramatically improve teacher preparation and to help teaching and learning practices evolve for the 21st century, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation recently announced the establishment of a new graduate school, the Woodrow Wilson Academy for Teaching and Learning (WW Academy).
The WW Academy is designed to transform teacher education as well as school leadership policy and practice nationally by providing competency-based master’s degree programs in teaching and school leadership. In collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the WW Academy will also serve as an incubator and innovation lab, studying what works and why in preparing teachers and education leaders, and offering new ideas and models to meet the needs of 21st century schools.
In collaboration with MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation also intends the WW Academy to be the education equivalent of Bell Labs. Through controlled experiments on its own activities, the WW Academy will serve as a laboratory for exploring what works in teacher and school leadership education.
These experiments will be designed in collaboration with researchers in the new MIT PK12 Initiative, which launched recently with support from the WW Foundation. MIT Professor Eric Klopfer and Dr. Vijay Kumar, Associate Dean of Digital Learning at MIT, will lead the Initiative’s work to promote new technologies, develop curricula and conduct research related to educator preparation. The effort will focus on supporting teachers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for students from pre-Kindergarten through the senior year of high school.
For more information, please visit: http://woodrow.org/news/woodrow-academy/ and http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/06/16/ed-school-critic-mit-partner-to-launch.html
