As Race to the Top vendor education college offers professional development

 

Lipscomb University will play a key role in Tennessee’s Race to the Top in K-12 education as an approved Race to the Top vendor for professional development and leadership training for Tennessee’s school districts.

 

In March, Tennessee and Delaware were named as the only two recipients of federal education grants in President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top competitive grants program. Tennessee is slated to receive $500 million and some of that money will go to school districts to purchase professional development programs for their teachers.

 

The Lipscomb College of Education (COE) plans to help make every good teacher in Tennessee a great teacher by offering programs in conflict management, leadership development for instructional coaches and enrichment in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

 

 

The college has already held a customized, on-site academy for instructional coaches for Tennessee’s Sumner County school district in June. 

 

The academy held in Sumner County was designed to teach leadership skills to the districts’ instructional coaches, a major target of Race to the Top programs. Lipscomb’s COE worked in partnership with the school district to tailor-make a program that met their specific needs, something that many organizations do not take the time to do, said Candice McQueen, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Education.

 

“We can offer a variety of practical sessions by showing up on-site, rolling up our sleeves and really listening to what the teachers at that particular school need,” said McQueen. “We have research-based enhancement methods for each teacher’s daily needs. They are the same needs that our current Lipscomb education students face every day...needs that are addressed by our faculty out in schools every day.”

 

 

In addition in July two math and science teacher training workshops will be held on campus that are typical of the type of STEM professional development programs Lipscomb can customize and offer to school districts.

 

The SEE-Math (Student Engagement in Exploring-Math) Workshop and Preparing Physics and Physical Science Teachers, held this July and coordinated by the College of Arts & Science, have brought hundreds of math and science teachers to the Lipscomb campus to learn hands-on techniques and inquiry-based teaching methods for the past five years.

 

Sixty-four teachers from Metro Nashville and surrounding school districts are on campus July 12-23 doing all kinds of projects such as origami and stained glass to learn geometry, building rockets to learn how to embed engineering concepts into curriculum and playing with Ferris wheels made of building blocks to learn how to teach problem-solving.  

 

With the implementation of the Tennessee Diploma Project -- now requiring four years of math and four years of science for every student -- school districts need teachers with more depth and breadth of content knowledge to meet state and federal standards.

SEE Math and the physics workshop were developed by the Departments of Math and Physics specifically for high-school and middle school teachers in high-need school districts in Tennessee to take teachers to a higher level of content expertise.

 

Teachers get to take home all the SEE-Math materials and use them in their own classroom. In addition, Lipscomb mentors follow-up with the teachers throughout the school year to make sure the teaching methods are working.

 

The SEE-Math program has proven so effective that the state provided almost $1 million to continue it for three years and to study its overall effectiveness on student achievement.

 

 

The COE also has access to the faculty and academic programs of one of the finest conflict resolution centers in the nation, the Lipscomb University Institute for Conflict Management. Drawing on this resource, the COE can provide custom-designed professional development programs in conflict management skills, negotiation skills, collaborative leadership, effective problem solving, listening and persuasion.