Standard VII:
Collaboration
Swarthmore College Education > State Review
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Collaboration of Education faculty with liberal arts faculty in departments outside of Education, public and private school educators in area schools, and Education faculty in other selective liberal arts colleges takes a variety of forms.
At a formal level, the Swarthmore College Teacher Education Committee, comprised of Education faculty, liberal arts faculty outside of Education and local area educators, provides an established structure for collaboration. At present, in addition to Education faculty, there are representatives from Biology, English, French, History, Mathematics, Psychology, and Sociology/Anthropology and three local educators: the Director of Secondary Curriculum in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, an Assistant Principal in the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District, and a middle school English teacher in the Upper Darby School District. The Teacher Education Committee discusses admissions requirements to the teacher education program; discusses and approves candidates for certification; discusses general policy issues and changes instate requirements; and discusses and helps to frame responses the State's General and Specific Standards for teacher certification. Members of the TEC meet to review student teachers' dossiers at the end of the each year, and often members of the TEC are chosen by students to do the required departmental observation during practice teaching. Members of the Teacher Education Committee also interview candidates for faculty positions in the Education Program.
All Education faculty members are involved in a variety of collaborative projects with area schools and educators, some of which are proposed by Swarthmore faculty and some of which are proposed by district educators. Most of the collaborative efforts are with the local school district, Wallingford-Swarthmore, and with the nearby Chester-Upland district. Education faculty have all worked on professional development programs and/or educational evaluation projects with teachers/and or administrators in the local school district. Professional development opportunities have taken place either on-site at the school or in special programs designed to bring educators to Swarthmore College. Educational faculty have served, or continue to serve on curriculum committees, site-based management teams and boards of local schools. Over the years they have also provided consultation and workshops in areas such as collaborative learning, supervision, multi-age classrooms, curriculum development and teaching methods in science, mathematics, conflict resolution, writing, reading and the use of portfolios and alternative assessment strategies. Since the last major review, for example, faculty in Education worked with Wallingford-Swarthmore English and Social Studies teachers interested in interdisciplinary teaching in a monthly seminar and also provided an in-service workshop for English and Social Studies teachers on this topic. Two faculty members have served on principal search committees in the Wallingford-Swarthmore district and one is currently working with the middle school self-study. An Education faculty member also serves on the district committee to Implement Act 48 in the local school district. In the Chester-Upland District, an Education faculty member has served as the Reading Excellence Act Qualitative Evaluator and has provided support to the reading programs in the district. The same Education faculty member has worked with a summer literacy program for children in a housing project in Chester in which Swarthmore students co-teach with resident adults. Classroom research conducted by Education faculty has also served to develop collaborative relationships with teachers, especially in the Wallingford-Swarthmore and Chester School Districts, outside of these two local districts, Education faculty have also served on committees and provided in-service workshops at the School in Rose Valley, and one faculty member has provided ongoing assessment workshops at the Education and Information Resource Center in Sewell, New Jersey.
Education faculty have also been central to the planning and implementation of one or two-day long education conferences and in-service opportunities held at the College to which local area teachers have been invited. A day-long inservice project on assessment, featuring Grant Wiggins, brought all of the middle and high school teachers in the Wallingford-Swarthmore district to the College, which sponsored Wiggin's visit. Another day long-conference on educational technology with Tom Snyder, an award winning, educational soft-ware developer, also brought teachers from several area schools to campus. This fall a two day education conference with a keynote address by Herbert Kohl and panel presentations by Swarthmore Education alumni, for which Act 48 credit was available, also brought teachers from several Philadelphia area schools to campus. (See materials on the conference in the Document Room and at www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Education/.) In addition, public lectures on a wide variety of education and education-related topics are regularly presented at Swarthmore. For one year, Swarthmore Education faculty also sponsored a book discussion group for faculty, school district personnel and parents in the local districts. We read books on topics of general interest, such as gender and education and ability tracking, and we have discussed restarting these book discussion groups again next year.
Course assignments and field placements also regularly connect Education faculty with local educators. In courses such as Teaching the Young Learner and Educational Psychology the faculty work closely with teachers in area schools to develop specific tutoring and other assignments which meet the needs of the particular classroom. In School and Society, the professor coordinates field research collaboratively decided upon by the undergraduates and the local school, after which the students report back their findings to the principal and teachers with whom they worked. In Urban Education, Special Education, Environmental Education and Educational Policy faculty members also arrange for internships, teaching assitanceships and observations which also provide contact with principals and teachers in participating schools. (For additional information, see Standard V, Field Experiences.)
Faculty members in departments outside of Education have also been involved in providing professional development opportunities for teachers and students in area schools and in local school governance. For example, through a grant from the Howard Hughes Foundation faculty in Biology, Chemistry and Engineering have run summer research and curriculum development programs which involved both public school faculty and students doing research in their labs. On a more national level, the Math Forum, originally developed by a member of the College's Mathematics Department, with substantial support from an Education faculty member, has brought teachers from all over the country to campus for workshops and other professional development opportunities. This virtual community learning web-site also has engaged thousands of teachers in discussions of mathematics teaching and sharing of curricular ideas in an interactive format. Other liberal arts faculty members have worked directly with middle and high school students, sharing their expertise, for example, in poetry, history, or the arts. A member of the Music department has started the Chester Children's Choir which works with students from Chester's middle and high schools. Departmental faculty also frequently serve on district-wide curriculum review committees and search committees. Currently two Swarthmore faculty members, one in Art History and one in Economics, serve as members of the Wallingford-Swarthmore School Board, in which capacity they offer the school district linkages to other Swarthmore faculty and to the resources of the College. On several occasions, either through the auspices of the School Board Directors or the Education faculty, Wallingford-Swarthmore faculty and administrative personnel have used the facilities of the College for meetings or special events.
The research interests and professional activities of several faculty members in Education also connect them to practice in elementary and secondary schools. One faculty member's research program is focused on individual differences in students' abilities to work with and complete reading and mathematics tasks. She is a consultant to, and evaluator of, the Math Forum, a virtual resource center for math educators that until this past year was housed on the College campus. In this capacity she has been studying teachers (and their students) as they learn to work with and implement the use of technology in their classroom. A video paper, written by this professor and middle school teachers regarding their Math Forum work won the Eisenhower National Clearing House's Digital Dozen Award. She also has been selected to be part of a teacher-researcher team for an NCTM working conference on Practitioner Research in Mathematics Education. This faculty member frequently gives presentations at national and international conferences and publishes widely. She has recently edited an invited issue for The Educational Psychology Review on student interest, motivation and achievement and has also co-edited a volume on building virtual learning communities. One Education faculty member recently published a book on life and career histories of women principals, and in the course of her research spent a year and a half collecting ethnographic data in three local schools. She also has co-authored a successful book on case studies of adolescents that is used widely in college courses on Adolescence. One faculty member's research is in the area of literacy and the constitution of social identities, and her doctoral thesis, l998 won a Promising Researcher 2000 Award from the National Council of Teachers of English and was a Finalist for the Outstanding Dissertation award from the International Reading Association. She is also involved in doing qualitative research on reading in the Chester School District and has collaborated with Research for Action in Philadelphia on a literacy/numeracy project that contrasts home and school practices. The fourth Education faculty member does not do research related to elementary or secondary education practice in the United States but has studied the teaching of history and civics in Hungary during the democratic transition. She has also written about teacher education in liberal arts colleges and served as a member of a national commission, the Teacher Preparation Accountability and Evaluation Committee (TPAEC) under the auspices of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, that helped to develop guidelines for the implementation of Title II reporting requirements. Next year, while on sabbatical, she will do research on the reorganization of the Philadelphia School District in conjunction with Research for Action and the Philadelphia Education Fund.
Education faculty have provided orientation workshops for Cooperating Teachers and meet regularly with Cooperating teachers on a one to one basis during the terms in which they supervise student teachers, in order to develop the competence of individuals working with our certification students. For additional information about Cooperating Teacher training, see Standard VI, Student Teaching. The Education Program has also provided support for beginning teachers through district-wide induction programs, through group meetings of Swarthmore teacher education graduates who are teaching in the Philadelphia area, and through intensive mentoring of individual graduates, by phone, on the internet, and/or in person. Graduates in the area regularly return to campus to meet with Education faculty and to use the Educational Materials Center. Occasionally graduates teaching in other states do so as well.
Based on our convictions about the kind of developmental program that is best for training teachers, Swarthmore College does not plan to offer an alternative certification program. We are especially concerned that rigorous discipline-based study of Education, field work and reflection can not be responsibly accomplished in a program where individuals can begin to teach after a very short orientation course.
