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.