Assistant Professor, James Foss, from the UMN Crookston Education Unit, was recently accepted into the Minnesota TeachingWorks Fellowship. The goal of the fellowship is to support UMN Crookston candidates’ growth with focus on equity and social justice through teaching.
Foss plans to work with a team of educators from universities throughout Minnesota, with support from University of Michigan, TeachingWorks members, on problems of practice. This will occur in three separate locations, two meetings in Minneapolis and series of workshops in Anaheim, Calif. There they are tasked to learn about certain techniques for coaching, discuss shared problems of practice, and collaborate on a unit of inquiry that will be accessed, and completed by December 2019. This will be integrated into the ed3010 course this fall.
The aims of the fellowship fit nicely with the course at UMN Crookston because of the emphasis on current trends in mathematics education to facilitating the learning of mathematics in a constructivist environment through the use of investigations, technology integration, and hands-on materials alongside a variety of assessment methods to measure students’ progress.
TeachingWorks is an organization at the University of Michigan led by Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball. Together with the McKnight Foundation, elementary and secondary mathematics and English language arts (ELA) methods course instructors from Minnesota teacher education programs will participate in a special fellowship in practice-based, justice-oriented teacher education. The purpose of the fellowship is to support participants in developing and improving their ability to use practice-based pedagogies of teacher education such as rehearsal, video analysis, and other simulations to create learning opportunities for teacher candidates that intertwine attention to high-leverage practices, challenging K-12 academic content, and equity. The goal is for all fellows to be able to design and implement these activities with increasing skill by the end of the fellowship, and to have developed some strategies for growing and sustaining practice-based teacher education on their campuses.
