Meadows Center Conference Looks at 21st Century Teaching Skills - September 28, 2011

The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk recently hosted a “Preparing Preservice Teachers for 21st Century Teaching” conference for faculty in Texas colleges of education. The conference, which was held in Austin, was designed to help faculty better equip future teachers to address the Texas College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS). 

The University of Texas at Austin’s Meadows Center is one of four university partners in a College and Career Readiness Initiative Faculty Collaboratives program that was created in 2008 by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Each university partner in the Collaboratives is responsible for offering research-based, up-to-date professional development and teaching materials in math, science, English language arts/literacy and social studies to teacher educators at Texas universities.

The Meadows Center is responsible for disseminating the latest information and resources relevant to the English and language arts portion of the CCRS. Sites facilitating the other Collaboratives are:

• Texas State University/Mathematics Faculty Collaborative
• Texas A&M Corpus Christi/Science Faculty Collaborative
• The University of Texas at Arlington/Social Studies Faculty Collaborative

Distinguished keynote speakers at the Meadows Center’s language and literacy conference included:

• Dr. Cynthia Shananan, executive director of the national Council on Teacher Education, University of Illinois, Chicago
• Dr. Cathy Seeley, senior fellow at the Charles A. Dana Center, The University of Texas at Austin
• Dr. Sharon Vaughn, executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, College of Education, The University of Texas
• Dr. Dominic Chavez, senior director for external relations at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
• Dr. Raymund Paredes, commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

In addition to guest speakers, the conference featured eight breakout sessions, including presentations on how to create rigorous lessons integrating the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS) and College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS); literacy and learning through the arts; and moving from research to practice in language and literacy instruction.

The information that was presented to the 120 attendees was tailored to be of relevance to education faculty who specialize in English/LA as well as other content areas (sciences, math, social studies). The inter-disciplinary group gained insights into teaching literacy across disciplines, including the arts, and how best to support English Language Learners.

“When I taught in Georgia, I encountered under-prepared college students, ones who were doing well in high school but got to a university and found they didn’t know how to read chemistry, physics and calculus texts,” said Dr. Cynthia Shanahan. “They didn’t have the multiple skills they needed in order to do well, to achieve. This led me to spend a year examining exactly what experts – in multiple disciplines – do when they read.

“I found that math experts, physics experts and historians, for example, are so different. They have different ways of using language, different ways of moving through the world, thinking and reading – they each have their own culture. As students begin to confront the texts of multiple disciplines, especially in middle and high school, they need to have specific instruction that will facilitate their understanding of what it means to read about that subject. We have to teach them how to approach each area’s texts.”

Emphasizing the conference’s goal of readying students for success and careers in a 21st century economy, Dr. Cathy Seeley delivered a talk on what it means to facilitate the learning of useful skills rather than isolated facts and figures.

“We have a huge opportunity right now for our students to participate in the global environment, and the last thing I want is for the world parade to be going by and for our students to be standing on the sidelines, observing,” said Seeley. “Many of the jobs that our K-12 students will end up obtaining don’t even exist right now, so we cannot educate the students for every eventuality, everything that will happen in the future. We can’t know that.

“The best thing that we can do is to give the students strong, meaningful skills that they can take with them wherever they go – communication, evaluation, reasoning skills and creativity. These are transferable skills that always will be beneficial. We really, really must make it a priority to nurture innovation and creativity in our citizens of the future.”

To date, the Meadows Center’s English Language Arts Faculty Collaborative has hosted four seminars with a focus on disciplinary literacy, including “Cross-Disciplinary Literacy Leadership Team Training” and “Strategies for Integrating Cross-Disciplinary Standards.” The Collaborative also has hosted four seminars with a focus on teaching to improve writing, including “Instructional Tools for Paraphrasing and Summarizing” and “Meeting the Challenge for Success in College and Careers.”

The Language Arts Collaborative has facilitated and funded a significant body of work among university faculty as well. With the Collaborative’s support, book chapters on integrating the CCRS into teacher education courses have been written; sample lessons have been developed in which the CCRS are successfully incorporated; and two institutions of higher learning have hosted regional seminars to facilitate K-16 collaboration, to note only a few of the successful faculty projects.

The Meadows Center’s Collaborative is headed by Dr. Marty Hougen. She’s assisted by project team members Kristie Hotchkiss and Dr. Terri Kurz.

Collectively, the four Collaboratives have produced an impressive cache of instructional resources, including a collection of video excerpts and Powerpoint presentations from the various conferences and a set of detailed teacher preparation program analyses. More than 50 faculty-led projects have been awarded funding.

For more information about the Collaboratives, visit the Texas Faculty Collaboratives website.

Related Sites:

• The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk
• The Texas Faculty Collaboratives