Arthur Levine and MIT Start Online, Competency-Based Teacher Education Program!

Dear Commons Community,

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, headed by Arthur Levine, one of the most visible critics of teacher-education programs, is creating its own graduate school and research center in the field in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The new venture, the Woodrow Wilson Academy for Teaching and Learning, will offer master’s degrees entirely through a competency-based program. It will provide instruction largely through online teaching, and will conduct research on new approaches to teacher education and school leadership. It will also distribute its course modules as free “open source” materials to any colleges that want to use them in their own master’s programs or in professional-development courses that teachers take throughout their careers. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, has been known for his prior critiques of teacher-education programs, at one point calling the range of quality in graduate programs in school leadership “inadequate to appalling” and too often valued by their universities mostly as a “cash cow.”

For Mr. Levine, the new academy is a chance to put into practice much of what he has been advocating in his decade as a public critic, and to apply what the foundation has learned through its teaching-fellowship program, which has worked with state policy leaders and 28 schools of education during his eight-year tenure as president there.

“Anybody can throw bricks,” said Mr. Levine. Now he’ll focus on the question: “Can you change it?”

The teaching academy will start out small; 25 students will attend free in the first class, beginning in the fall of 2017. After that, the academy hopes to enroll about 200 students who will each pay about $15,000 for a degree earned by satisfying the required competencies set out in several modules. The program will focus at first on training teachers for mathematics, and the sciences, working directly with two MIT professors: Eric Klopfer, an expert in the use of computer games and simulations to understand science, and Vijay Kumar, MIT’s associate dean of digital learning.

To develop the competencies, the academy will work with Charlotte Danielson, whose Framework for Teaching rubrics are employed in many school districts around the country. (In some cases the rubrics are controversial because they aren’t grounded in curricula.) MIT will provide the STEM knowledge as well as expertise in technology and cognitive development.

In addition to the program for STEM educators, Mr. Levine said the academy would offer a master’s in school leadership, modeled on the M.B.A. in education leadership that the Wilson foundation has been promoting in three states. He said he envisioned the research side of the academy as the “Bell Labs of education.”

The academy for teaching and learning is backed by more than $7 million, including $2 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $3 million from the Amgen Foundation, and $2 million from the Wilson foundation. Mr. Levine said he hoped to eventually raise $30 million for the effort.”

Mr. Levine indeed has thrown a lot of bricks at teacher education. His new program will likely have appeal to students who would seek alternate routes to teacher certification. Also the clinical portion needs to be fleshed out particularly in terms of the supervision.

Tony

2 comments

  1. I am a retired educator in the State of Connecticut and I would like to send Dr. Levine an email or letter regarding his “Vision for Teacher Training”. I have been a high school teacher and administrator and would like to share some of my insights after 35 years in public education in Northwest Connecticut. Thank you.