Happy Halloween

TQP Super Heroes!

Happy Halloween to each of you~

Here in our office we are celebrating both Halloween and our first successful Field Test with the TQP grant.

In the past few weeks 35 UNI Level 3 students were placed with 28 educators in our five rural partner districts: CAL, HLV, Midland, Springville, and West Fork. Nineteen of these students also stayed in the community with a staff or community member to further experience the life in a rural community.

Some of the highlights of this initial field test include:

•  district administrators praising the merits of the program
• UNI students participating in evening school activities with students
• elementary students wanting their new teachers to return
• home stay hosting families indicating that UNI students were well-mannered and gracious
• news reporters wanting to do stories about the new experience in the rural area
• married UNI students giving up family life for a week to truly experience the rural area as opposed to their life in Waterloo

There is much more information to gather from this field test but thanks to our Super Heroes we have the first round completed and ready for study to improve for the spring.

Leasha Henriksen: Field Placement Coordinator (recruited UNI students, matched them with cooperating teachers and coordinated home stay visits)
Leanne Lewis: coordinated all the travel arrangements, created the copies of consent forms, and in charge of storing and managing all financial and technical grant information
Daniel Mourlam: Technology Specialist (researched the appropriate equipment to record the lessons of our students, purchased the equipment, inventoried it and created manuals for the use of the recording and uploading tools)
Stacey Snyder: that's me . . . I surround myself with capable people and get out of their way! We actually work together well to get all pieces of the system to be in place to be able to gather data to inform the education profession.

Initiatives

This week the Governor's Office ushered out two initiatives.

The first, on Monday, October 3, consisted of a new plan for education transformation. You can read more about it here; or if you are on Twitter, check out the hashtag #IAedfuture for intriguing dialogue among educational leaders. This initiative seems so complex and so debatable on the merits of the plan.

The second came today, Friday, October 7. This was the Start Somewhere Walk initiative to make Iowa the Healthiest State. This initiative seems so simple and embraceable in its roots. Start somewhere and begin to get healthy. What a great message for our young learners.

Can the same be said for the blueprint? Is it a true original? Is the state of Iowa education as bleak as the measures used to describe it? Is the "solution" too prescriptive? Are we being allowed to grow through innovation, creativity and collaboration?

Let me know your thoughts~

In the meantime, here is a picture of some of our UNI TQP members after the walk today.

Have a glorious weekend!

One Year In The Life of TQP

It has been a year since I began my new position at UNI. As I reflect on what brought me here and the hopes of where we might take this program I am both bolstered and bewildered.

This takes some explanation. The opportunity to bring pK-12 and IHE to the same table is what brought me here in the first place. Some might say that would be "pie in the sky" thinking but what can I say? I am an optimistic idealist. So to that end, I can say we have made progress toward that. We have created partnerships between UNI faculty and staff and five rural, Iowa districts (CAL, HLV, Midland, Springville and West Fork). Having the chance to collaborate and talk about what each needs from one another may be a beginning of transforming teacher preparation at UNI.

I am also bewildered at the same prospect. Although our scale is small, if we get it right, there are implications for all Iowa districts and teacher prep programs. This is one aspect of the bewilderment. The other aspect is that of the newly-released (October 3) blueprint for educational transformation "One Unshakable Vision". Where is the opportunity to innovate? To create new connections without the evaluative ties of previous programs. Where is the student-centeredness that our youth so deserve? Much has been tweeted, chatted, and dialogued over the past few days and I feel the sense that more of us are not willing to sit and let it just happen to us.

Truly, the bolstering is stronger than the bewilderment. Here is a list of the UNI TQP Accomplishments in our first year:

• Hiring of staff (Program Manager, Project Coordinator, Technology Specialist, and Field Placement Coordinator)
• Completion of a research document outlining suggestions for transformative change
• Securing of 5 rural districts to serve with us as partners
• Recruitment of 12 UNI Faculty to have their Level 3 Methods students placed in the 5 partner districts
• Familiarization with the TPAC teacher performance assessment handbooks and development of a pre- student teaching document to use in the Fall 2011 Field Test
• Determination of how the video component of the field experience will be captured and uploaded
• Placement of 35 UNI Level 3 students in our 5 partner districts (ready for the field test to run October 17-November 4)

It has been an interesting year full of new people with which to interact, collaborate and grow. There have been moments when dealing with the ambiguity of the situation was nearly overwhelming. And yet now having come through those moments to see the opportunity to learn and create is truly powerful. Here is to year two!