First Monday

President Corrigan's ViewPoint

ViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publications offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu


December 6, 1999

San Francisco State has placed quality teaching at the center of its educational mission throughout its first hundred years. It is one of our distinguishing characteristics as an institution of higher education.

There is a corollary to this investment in teaching which is--or should be--fully as central to the university: the preparation of the next generation of teachers for our K-12 schools. Everything in our mission--to provide broad access and opportunity, to engage with our community in addressing its needs, to foster discovery and intellectual development, and to prepare students for effective citizenship and leadership--converges in this enterprise.

And this is not solely the responsibility of the College of Education. It takes a university--a whole university--to transform a student into a teacher capable of meeting the enormous demands of 21st century K-12 teaching. It requires our shared best efforts to send our teaching graduates into their own classrooms ready to help revive and reconstruct an elementary and secondary school system that is believed by many to be in a state of crisis. Our self-interest and our highest values as educators unite as we make the preparation of teachers a top, university-wide priority and responsibility at San Francisco State.

This is not an entirely new idea for us. We are already well on the way to the broad campus engagement I am describing through dozens of efforts radiating across this campus, from the College of Education, to Humanities, to Science and Engineering, and more. As Dean Jake Perea says, "We're no longer a teacher education program that functions in a vacuum; we're part of the entire campus. It's the strength of our campus as a whole that gives our students the strength they take out in the field." Yet we can do still more to raise visibility, increase collaboration, provide support, and develop new, creative approaches to teacher preparation and K-12 partnerships.

In doing so, we are taking up a new national challenge to higher education. It has become increasingly clear that the decades-old bifurcation that was originally intended to strengthen teacher preparation, by requiring sound grounding in an academic discipline before the student embarked on professional preparation, no longer works. This fall, at Education Secretary Riley's summit on teacher quality, presidents and chancellors from 40 states concluded that "it is time for higher education as a whole to accept the responsibility for teacher education that it abdicated to colleges of education earlier in this century É to bring the preparation of teachers back to the position it once held in American higher education--as a core mission function that involves all segments of the campus and has the active support of top university leaders."

A few weeks later, in "To Touch the Future: Transforming the Way Teachers Are Taught," the American Council on Education provided a vigorous action agenda for college and university presidents, charging us with nothing less than making our campuses a force to "transform the quality of teachers serving the nation's classrooms." Among the 10 key action items ACE proposes are linking liberal arts and education faculty, ensuring adequate technology preparation, supporting increased investment in research on teaching and learning, working with community colleges to recruit strong students into teaching, stengthening follow-through and mentoring of them, and working to improve conditions for K-12 teachers by speaking out strongly on policy issues. I would add to that attracting a more diverse population into teaching, preparing many more teachers (we will need 2.5 million new teachers nationally in the next decade), becoming a source of greater support to veteran teachers, and ignoring administrative boundaries to work on an equal--not top-down--basis with K-12 leadership and teachers, community colleges, and our UC, CSU, and private college colleagues.

Here on campus, our current efforts already touch on many of these points. To cite only a few examples: Our new, integrated Liberal Studies program enables students to earn both a Liberal Studies degree and a multiple-subject credential in four years instead of five, thanks to the planning of a network of faculty across the disciplines, working in concert. The next step is to develop "blended" courses, in which discipline content is fused with pedagogy. Faculty campus-wide have expressed interest in being a part of this work, Dean Perea says, "and we're deciding now how to do this. Team teach?"

Our spectacular MATE program, the work of elementary education faculty members Cecilia Wambach and Virginia Watkins, is creating a new model for elementary school teaching and teacher education, immersing teacher candidates in the life of an inner-city school, where they intern and take their education courses. MATE produces a diverse group of teachers who know--and are prepared to handle--the realities of inner-city urban schools, the very schools where the need is greatest.

We have created a new position, Coordinator of K-12 Educational Outreach, in the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, giving veteran secondary education professor (and past department chair) Mark Phillips the charge to create new ties with local school districts and other educational partners, and to help us develop--and find support for--innovative approaches which involve SFSU faculty with the schools and with teacher education in new ways. Mark recently canvassed the campus and found that dedicated and energetic SFSU faculty are already engaged in 50 current projects in the schools, 35 of which are led by faculty members outside of the College of Education. Whether or not they have thought of their work in these terms, these faculty are part of a teacher education effort, strengthening both learning and teaching in Bay Area schools.

Nationally, more than half of all K-12 students are taught by unqualified math and science teachers. One of our major responses to this problem--the Mathematics and Science Teacher Education Program (MASTEP), codirected by professors Kathleen O'Sullivan, secondary education, and Nan Carnal, biology--exemplifies the kind of joint effort of faculty across college lines that effective teacher education needs. Science and education faculty at SFSU, San Jose State, and four community colleges are working with several school districts, museums, and other institutions to attract targeted groups to teaching; provide workshops for both college faculty and K-12 teachers about what research tells us about the most effective approaches to teaching, including the use of new technologies; develop new curricula; and more. It is an incredibly ambitious-- and effective--program.

Our Elk Grove project, through which credential candidates intern onsite, while SFSU faculty journey to the school district to provide classes, is one of several alternative approaches to certification we have developed.

Finally, in an unprecedented partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State, Chancellor Berdahl and I have proposed a new kind of collaboration that would link school superintendents, higher education chancellors and presidents from both sides of the Bay in a cross-sector consortium to improve urban education. The Bay Area Urban Education Consortium has really started to come together this fall, and the response from all partners has been wholeheartedly enthusiastic. I will let you know much more about the Consortium in the coming months.

Impressive and creative as our current teacher education activities are, they represent work well started, not a goal reached. Once we embrace teacher education as an all-University priority, a major mission, other challenges arise, including resources, faculty incentives and rewards, and the creation of a climate in which innovation and calculated risk-taking will be encouraged.

I think that our next step should be to come together for a free-ranging discussion of what it will take to make teacher education a true campus-wide priority and how we might structure such an effort. Accordingly, in the spring Provost La Belle and I will convene a campus summit on teacher education. We are still considering how best to shape the summit, and we encourage you to give us your ideas.

If ever there was a university fitted by its history, its values, its diversity, and its creative, pioneering spirit to light the way for a new generation of K-12 teachers--particularly in our challenging urban schools--that university is San Francisco State.

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