Project Activities Overview
Project activities in the Renaissance Partnership Project are directly related to the six objectives designed to achieve the project goal. By clicking on each of the six activity topics below or in the right column, you can learn more about the development progress in each area, the materials available and contact persons at each site.
Data Management Systems
All sites are in the process of developing data management systems to regularly collect, analyze and report on teacher candidate performance, including the follow-up performance of first year graduates. Candidate performance includes the teacher’s ability to impact P-12 student learning.
Teacher Work Sample
All sites are committed to developing the capacity to use teacher work samples as primary strategy to focus teacher candidates’ development on their ability to facilitate P-12 student learning. The Renaissance model for teacher work samples identifies seven key teaching processes which are described in a performance prompt, performance indicators and scoring rubric that can be downloaded from this web site. Progress at each site with respect to teacher work sample implementation is provided in the Project News section of the web site.
Team Mentoring
This strategy combines the need of teacher candidates for an augmented support system as they learn to design, implement and evaluate units of instruction and the need for more collaboration between teacher education, the arts and sciences, and schools in preparing teachers. Team mentoring is a developmental effort in the project to recruit, train and implement field mentoring teams consisting of teacher educators, arts and science faculty and school practitioners to provide intense collaborative support to teacher candidates and new teachers. Both the successes and challenges of this strategy are reflected in the web site information in this area.
Business Partnerships
Efforts to initiate and develop partnerships with business to support teacher preparation in this project follows a national trend for business and industry to express more interest and concern for the education of America’s work force. Also, the benefits of public schools/business partnerships over the past ten years support the potential for extending business partnerships with teacher preparation programs. However, since there are no national models for business partnerships with teacher education this strategy is developmental and a work in progress for this project.
Networking
Connecting people, ideas, information and materials has been a primary support strategy for this project. With ten institutions in nine states, a major vehicle for communicating and sharing information has and will continue to be the internet and this web site. Again, this strategy has been developmental as project leaders work together to establish more user-friendly ways to build and operate electronic and people networks.
Research and Dissemination
Another very important support strategy from the inception of this project is to gather and use data to guide development. In the second year of this project, five studies are in progress that represent what project site leaders believed we needed to know about impact on teacher candidates, faculty and school practitioners, preparation programs, team mentoring and measurement of impact on student learning. Five research projects are described which are in progress. The reports from these studies will guide Year 3 development.