Goals & Standards

• Prepare teachers for the specific challenges of urban education including providing high quality instruction for all students, addressing the causes of unequal access in our educational system, and creating classrooms and schools where previously unsuccessful students can succeed.
• Enable teachers who graduate from this program to facilitate students' understandings and capacity to construct knowledge and to assume new leadership roles within schools. Further, these teachers will have skills to participate in organizational diagnosis and change leadership activities.
• Demonstrate that teaching can be a life-long career with multiple stages and aspects of growth typical of adult development. The program will reflect this goal by designing an approach that starts novice teachers on a path toward National Board Certification.

The standards for the teacher education program are designed to prepare teachers for urban schools who:

• utilize an in-depth understanding of their subject matter to construct meaningful learning activities for all students.
• advocate skillfully for the achievement of all students by helping students at various developmental stages make meaning and apply their understanding to solve problems through the use of words, numbers and symbols, and technology.
• understand how different students learn and develop and use this understanding to construct appropriate, positive learning environments, cognitively based instructional experiences, curriculum, and informed assessments to achieve equity and democracy in their classrooms, schools and society.
• act as leaders and agents for organizational change in their classrooms, schools, and society. These teachers will understand the role of organizational dynamics and power relationships in their work.
• inquire about their own teaching and engage in ongoing professional growth by developing the capacity to learn about their own practice and use this understanding to improve learning, teaching, and school organization. Teachers will compile portfolios of their work and will demonstrate these performance standards in order to graduate from the program

• continually examine their own identities, biases, and social locations, seeking knowledge of students' cultures and communities, and pursuing a complex understanding of societal inequities as mediated through classism, heterosexism, racism, and other systems of advantage