Section 6
Professional Development and Support
The EMU College of Education provides support to post graduates through individual program faculty and through the office of Academic Services. It is an informal networking that is an outgrowth of a student's program of study and the mentor/mentee relationship established during the course of study and/or through the student teaching experience.
There is as yet no systematic support for graduates. The exit survey and the Master’s in Middle Level Portfolio as noted in Appendix C are a beginning for the collection of data.
However, at present there are instances in which the middle level advisor continues to mentor graduates for the Middle Level program.
1. The COE is using the writing of a text (Middle Grades Education: A Reference Handbook (ABCCLIO Press, as part of the Contemporary Issues in Education Series) as an avenue to offer continued professional experiences to thirteen outstanding Middle Level Master’s graduates. The graduates are writing from their culminating projects and have the distinct opportunity to experience writing for publication, to collaborate with their peers on a professional project, and to be engaged professionally on another level. Each author’s school and school board members have been notified of the exceptional accomplishment of this particular teacher, thereby nurturing the ties between the university and middle schools.
2. As the COE continues to require NMSA conference proposal submission during the cohort classes, this writing is carrying over into presentations which have been later accepted for NMSA and/or for the Michigan Education Association, and/or for the Michigan Association of Middle School Educators.
3. The COE has also embraced three Middle Level Master’s graduates as lecturers for the Department of Teacher Education. The graduates are teaching a variety of undergraduate methods classes in curriculum as well as special topic classes drawn from their culminating thesis/curriculum projects. These graduates have been well received by students due not only to their expertise, but to their middle level training and their effective current public school practice.
4. Another version of ongoing support comes in the fashion of pairing undergraduate student teachers with master’s graduates, both in the required pre-service observation field experience and even more importantly in the student teaching experience. This allows for a rich dialogue with both students about both the undergraduate methods and about the master’s in middle level program. Because EMU does not have a middle level undergraduate program, per se, all secondary methods students are required to do observation hours in the local middle school (East Middle School, spoken of elsewhere as our ‘professional development school’.) Frequently, this has resulted in secondary students requesting middle level student teaching assignments, and seeking middle level positions upon graduation.
5. As workshop requests come in from middle schools across the state, we continue to work with outstanding Middle Level Master’s graduates in helping them shape their culminating projects for workshop presentation. As well, graduated Master’s students are taught to become change agents in their schools and they frequently contact the Middle Level Advisor regarding the particulars of how to provide workshops, in-services, or team training. Many times this comes from their Final Curriculum Projects and it is simply a matter of helping them reshape and rethink their expertise for other populations (e.g. their team, their school, other schools).
More systematic and formal means of support beyond graduation are in the planning stage. In addition to the exit questionnaires, each year during the Master’s Portfolio Celebration, all Middle Level graduates will be invited back to campus to share their in -service work in a display and conferencing fashion. Our intent is not only to support the graduate students, to not only maintain the bonds of community carefully constructed during the Middle Level Cohort, but to encourage more undergraduate students to pursue the middle grades as a dynamic and viable option for in-service work.
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