Working Together
March 19, 2007 - Leah Harris
When students walk into Sherelle McIntosh's kindergarten classroom she hopes they feel at home. The 22-year-old first-year teacher spent weeks preparing her classroom, but her experience stems from years of observing at Kimberly Elementary School as both a student teacher and an intern while a student at Georgia State's College of Education.
Kimberly Elementary is just one of 15 schools in a partnership with Georgia State's Professional Development Program, PDS2, which has a fourfold mission to prepare new teachers, develop veteran teachers, conduct inquiries directed at the improvement of practice, and increase student achievement.
"Just knowing the university is linked to the school is beneficial to the staff's development because they're constantly surveying us and finding out the areas that need improvement," McIntosh says. "Education is constantly changing and I'm always going to need training in order to provide the best education possible to my students."
Georgia State's College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences were awarded a $5.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education over five years for the PDS2 program. Each school has a partnership team that includes the school principal, an assistant administrator and a PDS2 school site coordinator.
In its second year, the program is one of many new programs at Georgia State that officials and school districts hope will help recruit, develop and retain high-quality teachers who will increase student academic success, according to Dee Taylor, project director of PDS2.
Georgia State, in partnership with the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) and the University System of Georgia Board of Regents recently received a $705,000 grant from the Wachovia Foundation to develop an induction project aimed to support teacher candidates and new teachers as they transition from teacher preparation through the first two years in the classroom.