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| National Faculty Teaching Project, The. The National Faculty. A program to strengthen the quality of instruction for all grades by encouraging professional growth among teachers and increasing their knowledge of their respective disciplines. To accomplish this, scholars from The National Faculty and other scholars from colleges and universities collaborate with local school teachers on site during the school year and on college campuses during the summer. |
Audience Approved by JDRP for all elementary and secondary schools.
Description The National Faculty's mission is to improve the teaching of the humanities, arts, and sciences in elementary and secondary schools through a process of staff development by which school teachers and college professors work together on the disciplines they teach. The National Faculty builds an internal school structure to permit the collaboration of teachers with national scholars and with scholars from nearby colleges and universities. Each project gives a school or district the chance to implement a systematic method for improving discipline-based instruction and to utilize the resources of the nation's only national faculty. This faculty --comprised of about 400 scholars and teachers from almost as many colleges and universities throughout the country --is a unique feature of the dissemination process.
Although each project is tailor-made for an individual school setting, a common pattern of activities is developed at each site. These activities include the identification of a core group of teachers that is fashioned into a collegial unit; development of a detailed project plan which is implemented over a period of time, ideally two or three years; a succession of two-day visits on site during the school year from college and university teachers who are members of The National Faculty; participation in summer institutes; sustained attention to the primary texts and concepts of specific disciplines; collaboration with faculty from local colleges; and an emphasis on local ownership of the project by the teachers, with plans for continuing and expanding its impact. By adding to teachers' academic resources in all subject areas, The National Faculty Teaching Project primarily addresses Goals 3, 4, 5 and 7 of the National Education Goals.
The process disseminated by The National Faculty has been selected using criteria developed over the last two decades. Through a process of trial and error, the following criteria have evolved: projects are conducted on site; a project team is formed; a project plan is developed based on an assessment of the school's academic needs; and a project usually lasts at least two years and includes a summer institute between the first and second years of implementation. A typical project framework involves a variety of interconnected components which must be developed and monitored for the duration of the project. These include: initial contact; planning phase; project activities; and monitoring and evaluation.
Evidence of Effectiveness National Faculty projects have been established in almost every educational setting, including rural, urban, suburban, rich and poor, and for members of nearly every ethnic group. Because of the flexibility of the process and the extensive membership of The National Faculty, there is no limit to the number of projects which can be developed. The major accomplishment of the process has been its beneficial effect on teachers, resulting in multiple changes: in teachers' attitudes about teaching; in their understanding of the subjects they teach; in their professional relations with their colleagues; and in the institutional arrangements within which they work. At the heart of this renewal process is a change in what teachers expect of intellectual inquiry and professional esteem, which leads to more effective teaching. These results have been documented in qualitative evaluation studies conducted by the University of Illinois and the University of Colorado.
Costs Project costs are recurring, and vary greatly according to determined needs. A project may begin with several months of planning for as little as $10,000, which can lead to the development of a project of any size. A small project in a school district including 3 or 4 schools may cost $200,000 over two years. A larger project involving many schools may cost $600,000 over three years, with similarly distributed cost categories.
Funding: National Endowment for the Humanities.
PEP No. 87-19 (5/15/87)
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[Responding to Individual Differences in Education (Project RIDE)]