Welcome to the third installment of the TERI Update. We hope to use this regular email communication as a way to keep all of us informed about works in progress, deliberations, decisions, and events related to the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative. This update is particularly long since three weeks have passed since the last update in January.

Spring / Summer Working Dates Set
Please hold the following dates on your calendar as TERI working dates. These are not over-night retreats and the location will be announced soon.

May 17 and 18
June 10 and 11

During these working dates, we will bring task groups, program area faculty and staff, and school partner representatives together to share progress, examine proposals from task groups, and work together on details of the partnerships. We understand that licensure program orientations are on the 18th and we will be working around that schedule, planning some large group updates and report outs along with some smaller working group and program area-specific time. Please let us know if you have ideas for what you would like to see designed for this time together.

Welcome Kathy Byrn as Partnership Coordinator
Kathy Byrn has been hired as the temporary partnership coordinator. We are very excited to have her expertise and passion!! The position description for the partnership coordinator has been posted and we plan to have a full time person in place this summer. If you are interested in this position posting, please contact Carole Gupton at cgupton@umn.edu

Partnership Meetings Set
Three meetings with partnership districts have been set. Kathy Byrn is coordinating these meetings and will be sending out additional information to program areas.

Meeting 1 - To define the range of Professional Development School (PDS) partnerships
The meeting will take place Tuesday, February 23, from 10am-12pm, and Forest Lake will host this first meeting in their District Board Room at 6100 N. 210th Street, 55025

Meeting 2 - To determine the criteria for selecting school sites
The second meeting will be Thursday, March 4, from 10am-12pm and Minneapolis will host at the Webster Complex, room 221 B, located at 425 5th St. NE, 55413.

Meeting 3 - To determine the criteria for selecting cooperating teachers
The third meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 10, from 11am-2pm (box lunches will be provided). This is a longer meeting and one where we think attendance of teachers will be vital. Details on the location will follow.

Program Area Support for TERI Curriculum Development
The Curriculum and Assessment Task Group has been working hard on developing an overarching teacher licensure structure with some new configurations for common content knowledge, core performance assessments, and flexibility for program areas. We should have the overall structural elements designed by the end of spring semester and opportunity for broader review and input at the May working session. We would like to give program areas opportunities to spend time during the summer 2010 to take up program-specific curriculum planning with support from the TERI grant. Each program area will have access to up to $5,000 of support for curriculum development activities (e.g., individual's time, new resources, group meetings, cross-program collaborations) contingent on work plan proposals that will be specific to the program area needs. Program areas can start to plan ahead now for time in the summer. Details about the work plan proposals to receive the funding will follow soon.

LSP Discusses Professional Development School Models
At the February 1 Licensed School Professional meeting, Julie Kalnin and Misty Sato led the group in a discussion about professional development school models. If you are interested in this discussion, please see the LSP meeting notes at http://intranet.cehd.umn.edu/lsp/calendar.html. The case study we read and the NCATE Standards for Professional Development Schools is posted on the TERI NING site.

CEHD Chairs Briefed on TERI
On February 11, Misty Sato from C&I, Peter Demerath from OLPD, and Margaret Kelly from PSTL briefed the CEHD Department Chairs and Dean about TERI progress based on the retreat and ongoing conversations about institutional issues that have been brought out in discussions (see below). The Chairs actively took up the discussion and pointed out that some of the same issues are coming in the 2020 Vision planning. Several of the Chairs will receive a copy of the book, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, at their request.

Questions Presented to the CEHD Department Chairs for Discussion

What are the implications of TERI for work across the departments in the college? What considerations can be made for the following points?

How should we recruit candidates?

On Feb. 5, more than 200 of Minnesota's top education leaders and policymakers met at the University of Minnesota to discuss how to develop, measure, and support teacher effectiveness and quality. The question is a timely one. Federal and state policy measures--Race to the Top and Q Comp, for example--tie education funding to teacher quality. Additionally, teacher effectiveness has been found to be the most important school-based variable affecting student achievement.

Hosted by the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development and moderated by Karen Seashore, the Robert H. Beck Professor of Ideas in Education, a panel of state and national experts shared perspectives from across the spectrum of the education industry. Panel members included Misty Sato, who holds the new Carmen Starkson Campbell Endowed Chair in Education; Bush Foundation President Peter Hutchinson; St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva, Teach for America President Matthew Kramer; and Garnet Franklin, education issues specialist for Education Minnesota.

Sato laid out the research on teacher quality and charged the audience to think of investing in teacher quality as an investment in children. She focused on the teaching profession as a cycle, from recruitment and preparation, early career support, and ongoing professional development. The ultimate goal, she said, is for the most effective, experienced teachers to become master teachers who can help those who are new to the profession.

She highlighted a number of teacher effectiveness initiatives nationwide, including two at the University's College of Education and Human Development. The Teacher Support Partnership--a collaboration between the college, the Minnesota Department of Education, Education Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities--has developed guidelines for supporting early career teachers. The college's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative (TERI) is building partnerships with the schools where graduates of the teacher preparation program will teach.

"TERI is as much about developing schools into places of professional support and learning as it is about redesigning teacher preparation at the U," Sato said.
As part of TERI, the college is also the lead institution among state teacher preparation programs working with the Minnesota Department of Education on a national pilot assessment for pre-service teachers.

The panel members followed with their perspectives on teacher quality, based in their individual positions and experiences in the education field. Bush Foundation President Peter Hutchinson reiterated the call for ongoing partnerships between Pre-K-12 schools and districts and colleges of education. The foundation has funded TERI with a $4.5 million grant--part of a $40 million investment in seven regional higher education partners over the next 10 years. The overall Bush initiative promotes ongoing collaboration between preparation programs, which track and guarantee their graduates' effectiveness, and school districts.

"This relationship in which the two sides are really working on one problem is absolutely essential," Hutchinson said, "and in many ways this is the most profound policy change we need to see. We need to actually integrate the work of the higher education system with the work of the K-12 system in order for this to work successfully."

Hutchinson and the other panel members also sounded the need for preparing teachers for the reality of the classrooms they face today, where students may face high poverty or speak a language other than English at home. Silva, Franklin and others also highlighted the need for an ongoing system-wide commitment to teacher professional development.

The panel then addressed a number of issues posed by Seashore related to attracting and retaining high quality teachers and specific policy recommendations to meet those challenges. Though some disagreed on controversial topics such as tenure and alternative teacher preparation, they all expressed their commitment and urgency towards solving the complex challenges of an educational system that does not work for all students. They also repeated the vitality of cooperation across higher education, pre-K-12 and state systems.

Sato warned against playing the blame game. "We have to bring together expertise in higher education, in districts, at the state level, and work on different parts of the system simultaneously with some leadership and coordination," she said. Sato called for policymakers to provide a way to coordinate pockets of quality work already underway in colleges and classrooms.

For information on the CEHD Policy Breakfast Series, see http://www.cehd.umn.edu/policy/