The Arkansas Association of Teacher Educators (ArATE) met for their annual conference the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville for two days in September.  This year’s conference explored the theme: “Creating a Global Community of Learners: Guiding the Future of Education” established by Jim Alouf, president of the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) and Professor at Sweetbrier College, VA, the luncheon guest speaker.

            College of Education faculty and their ArATE presentations included Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning (TL) and Angela Webster-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of Leadership Studies (LS): Enhancing Efficacy and Cultural Competence with Reflective Exercises; Jud Copeland, Assistant Professor, LS: The Resource Description and Access (RDA) Cataloging Code: A Brave New World of Information Retrieval for Teacher Educators; Angela Webster-Smith, Assistant Professor, LS and Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, TL: Using Defining Moments to Create A Global Community of Learners through Family and Culture; and Jud Copeland, Assistant Professor, LS: Copyright and Intellectual Property Issues in the Global Community Learning Environment.

Other COE faculty presentations included Donna Wake, Assistant Professor, TL: The Effects of Early, Intensive Field Experiences on the Growth of Secondary Pre-Service Teacher Candidates; Cheryl Wiedmaier, Associate Professor, TL, Marilyn Friga, Instructor, TL, and Brenda Linn, Instructor, TL: Digital Resources to Support the Common Core Standards; Donna Wake, Assistant Professor, TL, Lisa Daniels, Associate Professor, TL, and Gary Bunn, Assistant Professor, TL: Early Teacher Dispositions: Self-Efficacy in Entry MAT Pre-service Teacher Candidates; René Crow, Assistant Professor, Department of Early Childhood/Special Education (ECSE), Candice Barnes, Assistant Professor, ECSE: National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators: The Next Step; and Mary Ellen Oslick, Assistant Professor, ECSE: 2011 Notable Books for a Global Society and More: Advancing the Social Justice Forum.

UCA College of Education faculty serving on the ArATE Board of Directors include: Cheryl Wiedmaier, Nancy P. Gallavan, Past President and Editor of the ArATE Electronic Journal; Debbie Barnes, Past President, and Terry James, Past President.  For more information about ArATE, please go to http://candidate.coe.uca.edu/arate/ or contact Nancy P. Gallavan at ngallavan@uca.edu.

This fall the 2011 Mid-South Distance Learning Conference was held in Little Rock with College of Education faculty making presentations and learning new technologies.  Coordinated with the theme: Going the Distance: The Power of Collaboration, COE speakers and their presentations included Melinda Coleman, Oral Communications Teacher with the ADE Distance Learning Center and MAT graduate with Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning (TL): Eats, Shoots and Leaves: My Discoveries from Teaching Oral Communications Online; Haihong (Helen) Hu, Assistant Professor, Department of Leadership Studies (LS): Building Virtual Teams in Online Courses; and Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, TL: Engaging in Self Assessments that Reveal “What Matters” in Online Instruction. 

Eight faculty from the College of Education recently traveled to Savannah, GA, to attend the 58th annual meeting of the Southeastern Regional Association of Teacher Educators (SRATE), where approximately 200 teacher educators gathered to share research and practices.  SRATE is a regional collection of 15 states active in the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE).  This year’s conference theme, Research and Teaching: Realities, Innovations, and the Myth of “Waiting for Superman,” united the speakers.  UCA faculty and presentations at SRATE included Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning (TL) and Angela Webster-Smith, Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership Studies (LS): Guiding Candidates with Effective Reflective Exercises; Stephanie Huffman, Associate Professor, LS, and Wendy Rickman, Assistant Professor, LS: The Use of Social Networking Tools in the P12 Classroom; Mary Ellen Oslick, Assistant Professor, Department of Early Childhood/Special Education (ECSE): Notable Books for a Global Society and More: Advancing the Social Justice Focus; Nancy Gallavan (TL) and Angela Webster-Smith (LS): Reflecting on Defining Moments; Self Assessing Efficacy and Moral Development; Additionally, Cheryl Wiedmaier, Associate Professor, TL; Debbie Barnes, Assistant Dean; and Terry James, Professor and Chair LS, attended SRATE.  Debbie Barnes and Terry James are past presidents of SRATE; Nancy Gallavan is Vice President and will chair the 59th annual meeting of SRATE in Little Rock in 2012.  For more information, please go to http://www.srate.org/, http://candidate.coe.uca.edu/arate/, or contact Nancy P. Gallavan at ngallavan@uca.edu.

     Dr. Donna Wake and Dr. Michael Mills, Assistant Professors in the Department of Teaching and Learning, provided Common Core, Lexiles, and Close Reading Strategies for educators in the Conway Public Schools.  This professional development opportunity was coordinated through the Arkansas Great Bear Writing Project with curriculum developed by Drs. Wake and Mills and other teacher consultants associated with the Arkansas Great Bear Writing Project.  Two cohorts of teachers participated in the project.  One cohort of 40 high school science teachers met in the morning; a different group of 30 special education, foreign language, and vocational education teachers met in the afternoon.

Members of each cohort were mentored for three additional days by members of the consultant team; Drs. Mills and Wake leading the educators one day using the KWL approach in relationship to their knowledge of and affect toward the Common Core State Standards. 

Dr. Mills presented educators with the challenge of examining the Common Core State Standards for their specific area of content, i.e., Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects in grades 6-12 as found on the web site: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf). Dr. Mills also presented the Lexile Measure used to assess text complexity and he discussed ways to review and evaluate texts for appropriateness for their students.

Dr. Wake probed the particular challenges linked to expository text and she shared research behind the "reading to learn" paradigm associated with expository text.  Dr. Wake led teachers in an interactive activity to dissect selected text structures that help students in determining main ideas and defining key information found in various types of text.  This activity was followed by another interactive activity focusing on the particular text access features unique to expository text.  Dr. Wake also presented the concept of inquiry circles and the role of reader responsibility.  Teachers enacted inquiry circles in a demonstration lesson to model how this strategy would work in their classrooms.  Dr. Wake then led the teachers to discuss the role of writing in the content area. For more information related to any of these topics or strategies, please contact Dr. Donna Wake at dwake@uca.edu or Dr. Michael Mills at mmiles@uca.edu.

            Dr. Donna Wake, Assistant Professor; Dr. Jeff Whittingham, Associate Professor; and Dr. Jamie Alea, Director of Field Experiences, provided professional development for 80 non-traditional licensure teachers through the Arkansas Department of Education.  The workshop explored data analysis in the Teacher Work Sample (TWS) model.  Drs. Wake, Whittingham, and Alea guided the teachers with student learning research projects by highlighting the purposes and practicality of data for establishing goals, planning instruction, engaging collecting evidence, tracking progress, and reflecting on outcomes.   The roles of preassessment, formative assessments, and summative assessments in relationship to formal and informal data collection and analysis were linked to decision making to assist individual students, groups of students, and pedagogical efficacy.

     During the first week of November each year, more than 1,000 Arkansas classroom teachers and school administrators gather at The Peabody Hotel and the Arkansas Old State House for the Arkansas Curriculum Conference (ACC), and the College of Education faculty was there to help lead the way.  The theme of this year’s conference, Connecting the Common Core, was actively supported by the Arkansas Council for the Social Studies (ACSS); the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts (ACTELA); the Arkansas Council of Teachers of Mathematics (ACTM); the Arkansas Science Teachers Association (ASTA); the Arkansas Department of Education – English and Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science; the Arkansas Department of Higher Education; the University of Arkansas STEM Center for Mathematics and Science Education; and the University of Central Arkansas Outreach and Community Engagement, members of all eight organizations unite for two days in a format that allows educators to investigate practices they can integrate across the curriculum, instruction, and assessment in ever-changing educational contexts.

            UCA faculty attending and/or presenting at the 2011 ACC featured Terri Hebert, Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning (TL): Commonalities of Science and Literacy; Tammy Benson, Associate Professor and Chair TL: Creative Stories/Creative Kids: Reading, Writing, and Telling; Marilyn Friga, Instructor TL: Robot Lesson Planning Skills; Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, TL, and Marilyn Friga, Instructor, TL: Connecting Dr. Seuss and the Ten Themes of Social Studies; Jeff Whittingham, Associate Professor, TL: Booktalking 101: The Best Young Adult and Juvenile Books of 2011; and Gary Bunn, TL: Have Mouth, Can Teach: The Impact of Questioning.

     Continuing: Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, TL and Marilyn Friga, Instructor, TL: Geography Games that are Fun and Functional; Nancy P. Gallavan, Professor, TL and Angela Webster-Smith, Department of Leadership Studies (LS): Communicating Classroom Assessments Effectively and Transporting Parents into Partners; Steve Ward, Instructor, TL: How Many Ps are in Your Classroom Pod?; Donna Wake, Assistant Professor, TL, Jeff Whittingham, Associate Professor, TL, and Steve Ward, Instructor, TL: Reading in the Common Core; Michael Mills, Assistant Professor, TL: Diversity in Literacy: Making Common Core Work for Students; and Jeff Whittingham, Associate Professor, TL, with Donna Stephens, UCA: The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made: Arkansas Gazette and Central High School;

     Plus Michael Mills, Assistant Professor, TL: Emerging Opportunities in Common Core Literacy; and Donna Wake, Assistant Professor, TL and Michael Mills, Assistant Professor, TL: Teaching Expository Structures with Digital Storytelling.  Jeff Whittingham, Associate Professor, TL, served as President of the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts (ACTELA).  As President of ACTELA, Jeff helped arrange for children’s author Christopher Paul Curtis to speak at the ACC and to hold multiple presentations for hundreds of Conway Public School District students on the UCA campus on Wednesday, November 2, the day before the ACC.  Additionally the College of Education and UCA Academic Outreach sponsored information booths in the exhibit hall.  Look for us at ACC in 2012!