“For each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon.”
— poet Carl Sandburg.
Feb. 26 marks the centennial of Grand Canyon National Park and the sesquicentennial of John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Colorado River. Literally and figuratively, it’s Arizona’s biggest attraction. Naturally, it draws the attention of artists, faculty, and scientists from Arizona State University, the state’s biggest university.
iTeachELLs Project Director, Wendy Farr wrote an article for Edutopia outlining the challenge teachers are facing supporting dually classified learners in the classroom. To address the challenge, she proposes the instructional model called Problem-based Enhanced Language Learning (PBELL) developed by the iTeachELLs team at ASU.
EdBuild, a nonprofit studying education funding, recently published a report citing that nationwide and in Arizona, predominately white school districts get more money per student than non-white districts. The gap? A hefty $23 billion.
In Arizona, schools that serve mostly non-white students receive 46 percent fewer dollars than mostly white schools, creating a $7,613 difference per student according to the report. Many of the mostly white Arizona districts are small, rural districts while those with mostly non-white students are in larger, urban districts.
Late last month, 12 Herberger Young Scholars Academy students were recognized with prestigious awards from Cambridge Assessment International Education to acknowledge their outstanding performance in the Cambridge examination series. The Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education is the world’s most popular international curriculum for 14 to 16-year-olds. It’s internationally recognized by leading universities and employers.
iTeachELLs Project Director, Wendy Farr was recently featured in the Arizona Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (AZTESOL) Newsletter where she shares information on materials that can help teachers become more deeply involved in practice and awareness when working in classrooms with culturally and linguistically diverse learners.
Click here to view the newsletter.
Last August, the iTeachELLs Teacher Quality Partnership Project sponsored a visit from Kristen Hadeed, founder of Student Maid and author of the book “Permission to Screw Up.” Kristen gave a talk and facilitated a workshop on leadership, “Learning from Doing – Exploring the role of teachers as transformational leaders.” To capture the inspiring event, the iTeachELLs team assembled a story map which includes teacher resources, videos and participant responses.
ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College placed No. 16 among 392 institutions surveyed in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of America’s graduate schools of education. Among public universities, the college was ranked No. 7, ahead of the University of Virginia and the University of California-Berkeley. This year’s USNWR survey solidifies ASU’s ascent to the top tier of colleges of education since 2012, when it ranked No. 35 in the survey.
Floods, fires, earthquakes and hurricanes. An Arizona State University graduate program sending professionals into the teeth of disasters was ranked the top in the nation this week by U.S. News and World Report, ahead of George Mason University, Naval Postgraduate School and Columbia.
And the Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security did it just five years after it was created.
A $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education is funding a major collaboration to improve education. The Consortium for Open Active Pathways will use technology to increase the availability of college-level educational materials. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College is the lead unit in the consortium which partners ASU with three of America’s largest community college systems: the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Miami Dade College (Florida) and Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana).
Denis Alvarez knew that she wanted to become a teacher and that she wanted to go to ASU. What she didn’t know was how to pay for it … until a generous donation helped make her dreams come true.
“When I learned I had received a scholarship, and that a private donor had decided to fund the rest of my tuition, I started to cry,” Alvarez says. “I wouldn’t be here without the scholarship.”
Watch Denis’ video.
