In a new approach to educating tomorrow’s teachers, officials in the School of Education plan to overhaul the school’s current teaching methodology to place a greater emphasis on training in the field.

Spearheaded by Deborah Ball, dean of the School of Education, the School of Education has launched a concept called the Teacher Education Initiative. According to Ball, this initiative will change the way the School of Education will familiarize teachers with the material they will be teaching.

The program aims to model teacher training after medical schools or nursing programs by increasing direct supervision and the hours logged in field training. Ball said she believes that, currently, there isn’t enough careful supervision applied to teacher training.

School of Education officials are hoping to unveil a completely new teacher training program next fall for their students. But first, they’re encouraging faculty members and researchers at the school to pilot the programs they’ve developed.

One such program, which has garnered recent national attention, involves a new way of preparing for student teaching–the period of time when an education student works alongside a teacher in a classroom. School of Education Prof. Elizabeth Moje and Robert Bain, an associate professor of history and social science education, collaborated to create a system where students would observe specific teachers who excel at certain aspects of teaching.

Both Moje and Bain began their project, which has been in the works for four years, with the goal of de-compartmentalizing the undergraduate education of their students.

They noticed a disconnect between their students’ classes in LSA and the work the students were doing in the School of Education.

“A major goal of our work,” Moje said, “was to try to defragment and bring coherence to teacher education and really the whole educational experience for pre-service teachers at the point when they enter the School of Education, actually even before.”

Pre-service teachers are education students who have yet to begin their student teaching term.

The major shift towards their goal of defragmentation came when Moje’s core literacy course, which explores reading and writing for all majors, was separated into concentration specific sections.

In addition to making the literacy course subject specific, officials are testing out another pilot program.

Much like medical students on rounds through a hospital, students in the social studies section of the School of Education rotate between classes at high schools to observe certain techniques that each teacher does well.

In their first semester in the School of Education, students participated in three rotations between Detroit Western High School and Novi High School and were exposed not only to the skills of the chosen teachers, but also to English as a second language classrooms and to the different socio-economic levels of the students in the classes.

This kind of movement for a pre-student teachers, or education students who have yet to start student teaching, is not the norm, as most students typically get to see one or two classrooms.

In their second semester in the School of Education, students experienced two rotations.

This jump “into the deep end” as Bain put it, has paid off. Several students who participated in the first wave of this program said they feel more confident in their first three weeks of student teaching in schools around metropolitan Detroit.

School of Education senior Ted Doukakos said this program has given him the tools to successfully interact with students.

“I’ve had all these opportunities to get all these different experiences in my pre-student teaching,” Doukakos said.