Georgia State to help DeKalb County history teachers and students

Georgia State University will soon be helping DeKalb County public school teachers expand their American history knowledge, in an effort to increase student achievement in social studies.
DeKalb County Public Schools, with Georgia State as a partner, was recently awarded a “Teaching American History” grant from the federal government.

The grant, roughly $1 million over the next three years, will cover professional development expenses for American history teachers in elementary, middle and high schools. Educators hope to get an extension of the grant for a total of $1.6 million over five years.

Starting in the fall, Georgia State will offer DeKalb County teachers an opportunity to take two graduate level courses at Georgia State, one in history and one in education.

Teachers will earn graduate course credit at GSU, continuing education credit with their district and a stipend to help cover their tuition, books and supplies as well as travel to historical sites.
Nearly 30 DeKalb teachers will be eligible for the program each year, for a total of 90 over three years. The program is designed to ensure teachers develop the knowledge and skills necessary to teach traditional American history in an exciting and engaging way.

“Our hope is that they learn more historical content, particularly in the areas their students have demonstrated weakness, so not only the teachers learn more content, the students do too and perform better on the state history test,” said Chara Bohan, associate professor of middle-secondary education in GSU’s College of Education.

The courses at GSU will be challenging, graduate-level courses designed to meet the specific needs of Dekalb County teachers and students. They will emphasize educational pedagogy and the American history framework established by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The subject matter will extend over broad chronological periods in the nation’s history and also target specific areas where DeKalb County students need to improve, such as understanding economic and industrial history, said Michelle Brattain, associate chair of the GSU History Department.

“I think this program is very, very important both for GSU and for our community,” Brattain said. “The Teaching American History grant will now allow us to extend our commitment to middle and secondary education in Georgia to a new constituency and build collaborative relationships with Dekalb County and area teachers.”

Georgia State’s Department of Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology in the College of Education and the History Department in the College of Arts and Sciences collaborate to prepare both undergraduate and graduate students to be middle and secondary social studies teachers.

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GSU receives $900K grant to recruit, train science teachers

Georgia State University was recently awarded a nearly $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to increase the number of science teachers in metro Atlanta schools.
The grant, titled “Impacting Metro-Atlanta Science Teaching,” or I-MAST, will be used to recruit, prepare and support 36 high quality science educators over the next five years.

The program will offer scholarships to undergraduate majors studying content in the STEM fields, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Scholarships will also be available for graduates who hold a degree in the STEM areas and are interested in going into secondary science teaching careers.

Students will study in Georgia State’s Master of Arts in Teaching program in the College of Education, Department of Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology.
“Especially in Georgia, there is a tremendous need for science teachers,” said Anton Puvirajah, assistant professor of science education at GSU, who is directing the project with several colleagues. “Through this program, we hope to increase the number of highly trained science teachers.”

I-MAST is a collaboration between GSU’s College of Education and College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Georgia Institute of Technology and four public school districts in the Metro Atlanta area.

The first scholarship recipients are expected to enroll at GSU in fall 2010. Applicants will have at least a junior level status at their undergraduate study either at Georgia State’s College of Arts and Sciences or Georgia Tech, or have a minimum bachelor’s degree in a STEM area.

Undergraduate students who commit to pursue a secondary science teacher certification at Georgia State will receive a two-year scholarship totaling $24,000 to be used in their senior year of undergraduate studies and in their year of teacher certification studies. STEM graduates will receive a one-year scholarship of $12,000 to complete their teacher certification studies.

Scholarship recipients will be obligated to teach two years in a Metro Atlanta high need school district for every year of funding received.

A report by the University System of Georgia warns that by 2010 Georgia will need to produce 2,060 middle school and high school teachers of life sciences, chemistry, earth sciences and physics. However in the 2008 academic year, only 90 science teachers were prepared in Georgia, according to the Board of Regents statistics.

“The partnership between GSU and Georgia Tech is a great way to bring bright young scientists into the classroom,” said Jennifer Leavey, director of Undergraduate Academic Services in the Georgia Tech School of Biology. “Tech is a nationally-ranked leader in undergraduate science education, but has no route for certifying K-12 teachers. GSU has an excellent College of Education and is only a few blocks away.”

Scholarship applicants must have an overall GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, appropriate academic backgrounds in science content, three letters of recommendation and a 350 -500 word narrative statement about their desire to become a secondary science teacher in a high-need school.

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UGA graduate program expands to prepare teachers to work with secondary students with autism

An innovative University of Georgia graduate program in special education that has prepared scores of Georgia teachers to work with elementary-age students with autism over the last several years has received a new 4-year, $793,000 federal grant to train teachers to work with similarly challenged secondary-age students.

Autism is a complex developmental disability that is part of a group known as autism spectrum disorders. Today, 1 in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s a need for specialized training on how to structure the classroom, how to respond to these kids when they behave inappropriately and how to design instruction that will facilitate the learning of new skills,” said David Gast, a professor of special education, who co-founded the Collaborative Personnel Preparation in Autism program at UGA in 2003.

Gast will co-direct the new program called the Collaborative Adolescent Autism Teacher Training project, with Kevin Ayres, an assistant professor of special education. It will use much of the U.S. Department of Education grant to fund fellowships for up to a dozen graduate students a year to learn how to work with secondary-age students with ASD.

CAATT will work largely with teachers in three diverse school districts in rural, urban and suburban areas of Northeast Georgia.

“Our primary efforts will be in Gwinnett, Clarke and Madison counties as those are our partner districts. But if we were to get an applicant from Cobb (County) who may be a current teacher wanting to complete their M.Ed., they would be eligible,” said Ayres. “We are really recruiting statewide as well as out-of-state people. We feel we will be best able to supply Gwinnett, Clarke, and Madison with new teachers when we recruit folks fresh out of their undergrad programs who are not currently teaching anywhere. These are the folks then that we can work with to get into the partner systems.”

Gast and Deanna Luscre, who coordinated the ASD program for Gwinnett County Public Schools from 1996-2003, developed the COPPA program with a grant of $894,000 from the U.S. Department of the Education in 2003. The program received a second grant of $793,000 in 2007 for four more years.

The second grant allowed UGA to offer additional training in ASD to interested teachers in Clarke, Cobb and Forsyth county schools. Teachers from other school districts have also participated in one or more of the courses being offered.

“Comprehensive public school programs for students with autism must provide high quality, evidence-based intervention from birth to age 21 and to achieve this goal, schools need highly qualified teachers,” said Ayres.

“Preparation and specialization in teaching secondary-age students is distinct from that of elementary-age students and this expansion is significant because it provides for the development of three new courses and two new practica addressing the unique needs of adolescents related to transition planning, community-based instruction and academic content,” he said.

The new program will help put more qualified teachers into Georgia schools, which like other schools across the nation face increasing numbers of students with ASD. One Georgia school system reported eight classrooms for students with autism in 1994, today they have 180 classrooms serving those students, said Ayres.

ASD occurs in all racial, ethnic and social groups and is four times more likely to strike boys than girls. It is defined by significant impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of unusual behaviors and interests.

The number of children diagnosed with autism has grown about 17 percent a year across the country, and could reach 4 million in the next 10 years, according to Department of Education reports.

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