Project PRE

About Us

Project PRE is the collaborative partnership of the ISU College of Education, all of the ISU colleges in which pre-service teachers takes courses in, and the 20 Professional Development Schools (PDS) served by ISU.

Mission Statement

The mission of Project PRE is to:

1. Transform teacher education into an experiential learning, clinically-based program, supporting educator development from pre-service through induction and continued professional development.
2. Create rich school environments that support learning by all children and serve as exemplary clinical settings for the preparation and continued development of professional educators.

In order to meet the two main objectives of the Partnering to Reform Education Grant (Project PRE), proposal authors realized that the objectives could not be attained unless the grant was structured with an all-university and partnership enterprise approach. With that in mind, the “all-university” component of the collaboration consists of faculty from the professional colleges who sponsor teacher education programs. They are the Colleges of Arts and Science, Business, Health and Human Performance, and Technology. The “partnership enterprise” is represented by faculty from the Professional Development Schools partnership. The approach of commitment, collaboration, and communication is the cornerstone for the successful fulfillment of the goals and objectives of the Project PRE grant.

Objective 1

The redesign of a pre-service, clinically-based preparation program for teachers was the responsibility of Task Force I and Task Force II focusing on the elementary and secondary curriculums respectively. The members of these task forces began their collaboration during meetings in the Spring of 2004. Those meetings resulted in preliminary proposals that would assure the new preparation program would be built on a solid foundation of understanding of the content to be taught coupled with innovative, research-based, and best practice instructional strategies. The preliminary proposals are being reviewed, revised, and expanded in preparation for presentation to the relevant colleges and departments.

Objective 2

Objective two, school renewal, is being achieved through professional development activities for teachers in the schools, school principals, and faculty of the University. The professional development opportunities include faculty learning communities, content area summer workshops for teachers in the K-12 schools, and leadership skill building forums for the school principals. In addition, the grant provides support to the PDS partners by funding school authored proposals which provide continuous school improvement opportunities at each school.

Center of Pedagogy

In addition to the above two objectives, it is the intent of the Project to create an effective organizational infrastructure which would collaboratively build, implement, monitor, and assess quality teacher preparation programs. Composed of faculty members from all academic units on campus who have a teacher education program and alumni of the teacher education program who are practicing teachers, the committee met during the Fall of 2005 and were successful in creating a proposal for the Center (link to committee members). A detailed review has commenced and a pilot center structure and mission will be implemented in the near future.