Advanced Programs Committee

Minutes of meeting on 2/22/00

In attendance:  Carolyn Finch, Assoc. Dean; Chris Bocklage, FA; Lynn Rocklage, SPED (for Mike Beebe); Kaia Skaggs, TED; Sue Stickel, L&C; Jackie Tracy, L&C; Judy Williston, TED; Lech Wisniewski, SPED

There is a proposal for a new master’s degree in math education from the Math Dept.  Judy will continue to circulate it and get feedback.

Dr. Finch discussed the need to revisit the current conceptual frameworks and knowledge bases for advanced programs.  She handed out the NBPTS propositions, the NCATE description of a conceptual framework, and an excerpt from the NCATE/NBPTS New Vision for Master’s Education document which contained Shulman’s principles for how master’s programs can contribute to the professionalization of teaching.  She also created a graphic looking at EMU’s theme statement and knowledge base and how it meshes with NBPTS, NCATE, and Shulman’s principles as a beginning look at where we are in each of the areas with the following results:

• Knowledge of students, knowledge of content, knowledge of pedagogy:  We’re probably fairly strong in this area.

• Skilled practice:  Seems to be missing in many existing knowledge bases.

• Reflective thought:  Not included in knowledge base but emphasized in the theme statement.

• Professional discourse, collaboration, learning from experience:  Not in knowledge base.

• Service to others:  This links to NCATE’s professional dispositions, not in knowledge base.

In sum, we appear to be strong in the knowledge of content and pedagogy area and lacking in skilled practice and performance, reflective decision making, professional discourse, and service to others.  Thus, we don’t seem to have everything in the existing conceptual frameworks that needs to be there.

There is a question of whether the elements in the visual are what we want and whether we can match pieces with the existing data we already have.  Do we want to base our conceptual framework on Shulman’s model?  It seems that not all the pieces are currently there.  We need to:

There are a few general concerns to be addressed, including incorporating the role of professional organizations that govern many of the advanced programs, dealing with NCATE vs non-NCATE programs, and the role of NBPTS for non-teaching programs.  An additional concern is how to accommodate field experiences with our population, the majority of whom are working full-time in the field.

Georgea Langer gave a short presentation on the 5-year grant with the Renaissance Group to familiarize the committee with those efforts at the undergraduate level.  The Renaissance Group is 10 institutions who wrote a grant to “develop systems to measure and improve teacher candidates’ ability to facilitate student learning.”  It relies heavily on the Teacher Work Sampling methodology developed by Western Oregon University.  The process will include a regular unit within student teaching with an enhanced contextual link and enhanced assessment of students in the student teacher’s class, including pre- and post-assessment in which the pre-assessment is used to modify instruction and post-assessment to judge results.  The data are disaggregated to look at who learned and who didn’t and to allow student teachers to make hypotheses as to why.  They are currently required to do assessment but not to use it to look in detail at student learning.

We would like to investigate combining with the Committee on Affiliated Programs (non-NCATE advanced programs).  That committee is currently not meeting.  Dr. Finch will try to find out who is involved in that committee, what the rationale and history is for the separate committees, and begin a discussion about the possibility of merging the two.  This may make sense since it’s not really clear that the function and/or responsibilities of the committees are actually separate except for the NCATE affiliation; and even so, they probably have more similarities than dissimilarities even taking into account the various different professional organizations involved.  It may reduce the number of committee positions a given department has to fill, increase the sense of all programs having a voice, and reduce duplication of effort by combining the two committees into a single Advanced Programs committee responsible for all advanced degrees in the College and other NCATE-accredited master’s programs.

The next meeting of the Advanced Programs committee will be on March 28, 2000.

Respectfully submitted,

Kaia Skaggs, Secretary