Writing the Next Professional Chapter
Twenty years ago, I helped lead the National Reading Panel and the development of its groundbreaking research on the best ways to teach young children to read. At the time, I didn’t appreciate that that opportunity would result in the career path that I’ve traveled for the past two decades. At the time, I just saw it a common sense public engagement initiative, that of course we needed to take all of the research and all of the cognitive science when it came to literacy and ensure that every elementary school classroom was using that best practice and every aspiring classroom teacher was prepared in the research.
My work with the NRP ultimately led me to Texas where I helped build a new type of graduate school of education focused on research-based instruction. It resulted in me collaborating with a wide range of organizations – including the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education to the American Federation of Teachers to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to the International Society for Technology in Education to the National Governors Association to the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative – on how best to move research into practice when it comes to preservice and in-service teacher education.
Ultimately, it is this desire to improve teacher education by applying scientifically based research that led me back to New Jersey to work for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation six years ago. For this son of two educators, working to both repair existing models of teacher education and building new, transformative approaches to teacher education was a dream come true. At Woodrow, I was able to work with six states and 31 universities to help transform their postbaccalaureate STEM teacher education programs. Even more inspiring, I was part of the team that helped build and launch the Woodrow Wilson Graduate School of Teaching and Learning, a new, mastery-based graduate school of education constructed in collaboration with MIT.
At each step along the way, I have learned a little more about cognitive science, teacher education, and how challenging the job of a classroom educator is. And at each of those steps, I continued to see how important it was that aspiring teachers receive a rigorous, comprehensive, liberal undergraduate education. Such a “broad” higher education was the only way to prepare teacher candidates to effectively address the complexity, diversity, and change they see each day in their classroom, whether in real life or in our current virtual learning environment.
If you’ve read this far, you are probably waiting for me to get to the point, so here goes. I’m thrilled to announce that I am the new executive director of Best in the World Teachers, a startup research and policy not-for-profit created to create a model to improve the way teachers are prepared. At the heart of BIW will be a series of “expert panels,” much like the NRP, that will examine the research on how best to teach. That research will then be put into practice through pilot projects at colleges and universities throughout the United States, where teacher educators can determine the strongest methods for using the research to improve undergraduate teacher education programs and to improve teaching and learning in the classrooms led by those prepared by this new model.
BIW provides a tremendous opportunity to apply all of the principles that have been central to my education work over the past two decades. Research. Collaboration. Assessment and evaluation. Outcomes. Content mastery. Lifelong learning. I’m excited to be joining BIW at this moment, as we wrestle with issues such as traditional teaching versus virtual and the benefits of a content-based approach to a pedagogical one. One could say the challenges before BIW (and the education space in general) are insurmountable. Those are just the sort of projects that I love to tackle.
You likely also know that my professional passion in recent years has been improving how American history is taught and learned. For the past two years, I’ve led the Woodrow Wilson American History Initiative, a national effort that helped raise awareness of our collective shortcomings in history education while providing models for how we can make history more interesting and relevant for today’s learners. I believe in this work. I’m committed to this work. I’m long invested in this work.
As a result, later this year I will officially announce the launch of the Driving Force Institute for Public Engagement. Named for Teddy Roosevelt, one of my political and rhetorical heroes, DFI is building a series of short, provocative American history videos designed to make moments and people in history more interesting and relevant to today’s learners. Our goal is to help high school students take a bit of history they likely hadn’t learned in class, and use that as a launching point to explore other moments or figures they may not have heard of.
This summer, we will make a series of teen-focused initial videos available online. In the fall, each week we will deliver new student-intended video content along with related lesson plans and professional development content for social studies teachers. Our goal is to provide new student and teacher American history content from the start to the finish of the 2020-21 academic year. All content will be provided open source and available at no charge. And DFI is working with some terrific content and distribution partners to make this all happen.
As each chapter in my professional life has been written, I’ve felt incredibly fortunate for what I have learned and the people I have been fortunate enough to work with. As I begin to write the latest chapter, I look forward to connecting with and seeking the guidance of so msny. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it is that we can only succeed in education improvement if we collaborate and work together.