Resources  Urban Framework

A Conceptual Map to Guide The Urban Educator Corps Partnership Initiative

Excerpted from a Paper by Kenneth R. Howey
October, 2001

 The Urban Educator Corps is implementing ambitious change strategy under the UEC Partnership Initiative, guided by twelve interrelated strategies as part of a comprehensive plan of action:

1. Developing more inclusive and powerful urban partnerships than have typified teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention efforts in the past.
2. Engaging university presidents in a central role in forging these stronger partnerships with major stakeholders in their cities to assure that there are competent and caring teachers in all classrooms.
3. Ensuring that teacher preparation draws on the rich resources across the university and is not limited to those resources located in schools or colleges of education.
4. Expanding avenues of access into teacher preparation programs which are characterized by high standards; instituting a variety of programs ranging from those targeted on paraprofessionals with a high school diploma or equivalent to mid-careerists who hold advanced degrees.
5. Instituting and supporting strong leadership teams at each GCU site to serve as the catalyst for local reforms in teacher recruitment, preparation and retention. (Membership on these teams reflects the expanded partnerships in the GCU universities including individuals from cooperating urban school districts, teachers unions, and a variety of community leaders. A key criterion for membership on these teams is that these individuals have access to resources and the ability to influence major programmatic changes.)
6. Designing and implementing distinctively urban teacher preparation program; programs that are specifically designed for teachers to be effective in urban schools and school communities. (Such school communities are commonly characterized by segregation, economic dislocation, educational inequalities and large numbers of students who are not succeeding academically. These distinctively urban teacher preparation programs will both draw heavily from the resources of urban school communities and be responsive as well to their needs.)
7. Designing and implementing a common virtual core curriculum across the 17 institutions. This will be a series of modules that address what all urban teachers should know and be able to do, whether teaching kindergarten or high school physics. These modules will supplement local urban teacher education initiatives in a flexible manner and in a distance delivery format which can accommodate learning any place at any time.
8. Ensuring that teacher preparation is continued in a programmatic manner into the critical formative first years of teaching so that teacher retention is strengthened by aligning strong induction programs both with the curriculum of urban preservice programs and the P-12 curriculum.
9. Focusing specifically on increasing the number of teachers where there are the greatest shortages of qualified teachers with an emphasis initially on preparing mathematics and science teachers.
10. Integrating modern communications technology throughout these interrelated reforms. There are two major aspects to this technology emphasis. First, GCU prepared teacher will be able to effectively employ technology so that youngsters constrained in their positive interactions with the larger world will have windows to the rich resources of the globe opened to them. Second, this technology will be central to sustaining the necessary communication and collaboration to make a network or coalition of 17 university partnerships function effectively across the distances which separate them.
11. Engaging the leadership teams in intensive cross-site visitations in a critical friends format. This is at one and the same time a means of formative assessment, a form of accountability and a method of going to scale by the adaptation of policies, practices, and materials from one site to the next
12. Providing direction for the collection of baseline data at each GCU partnership site and establishing benchmarks for assessing progress over time involved in overcoming these strategies.