CU Boulder School of Education Reauthorization Self-Study

• The Spanish licensure faculty advisor emails all Spanish majors at CU Boulder to recruit them to the Spanish licensure program. They participate in undergraduate recruitment activities held by the department.
• There is now a recently approved SPAN MA track, MA in Spanish for Teaching, which gives candidates a broad base in linguistics and literature along with world languages pedagogy.
• The faculty advisor has been an active member of the State Foreign Language teachers organization and a Board member of the Colorado Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She has participated in efforts for better vertical articulation between secondary and post-secondary institutions, including taking a major role in the creation of a College Hub page on the CCFLT website, for secondary language teachers and students to obtain information about post-secondary language programs in the state, including those offering teaching licensures.

• Music as a subject area is facing many of the same challenges currently present in all of teacher education. Convincing high schoolers to pursue a career in education can be a tough sell in the current climate with pressures on teachers from the pandemic, low pay, and low status perception by the public. In addition, music is often seen as an area more at risk for budget cuts, leading to a perception that jobs are less secure.
• To combat this, our faculty work to directly engage local music students and partner with their K-12 music teachers through clinics, workshops, and guest musical collaborations. We also invite high school students annually to participate in our Trying On Teaching Program, where they can work alongside CU music education students in a community outreach program.

• The Elementary Education program is working to develop a robust cohort of teachers prepared to teach in schools and communities with these significant shortages.
• In coordination with the BUENO Center for Multicultural Education, the EECD MA program partners with school districts to organize cohorts of in-service teachers to earn an MA and a recommendation to CDE for CLD or CLD and Special Education licensure endorsements. Many of these are among the districts with the highest percentage of bilingual learners; 49% of Adams 14’s students, for example, are bilingual learners. To facilitate teachers’ experiences, we often conduct the classes in their districts, with CU Boulder faculty traveling to the districts. 

The shortage challenges require a multifaceted approach and conversations between stakeholders on local, state, and national levels. The Teacher Shortages Across the Nation and Colorado Report (2017) emphasizes the need for dialogue across groups in the state:

The education of the students of Colorado is a collective responsibility and as a result, requires collective efforts and collaborative solutions. Parents, students, community members, business leaders, teachers, school administrators, school staff members, state elected officials, educational organizations, BOCES, and educator preparation leaders must strategically work together to address this urgent need and increase the recruitment and retention of educators (p.43).

As described in our School of Education context, our community is engaging with partners across the state to address the critical need for well-prepared educators who can support students in today’s classrooms. We are actively participating in conversations across the state and aim to be leaders when able to support this work. For example, in 2020, our Director of Teacher Education at CU Boulder along with colleagues at CU Denver and Metropolitan University launched the Denver Area Clinical Practice Collaborative (DACPC), a regional collaborative between local EPPs and school districts to navigate the ever-changing needs and challenges of COVID-19. Once the group was able to feel stable enough to look beyond the everyday emergencies of the pandemic, the collaborative wished to remain together and build on their collective efforts to more systematically address our state’s most pressing challenges. To guide this work, the DACPC leadership created a set of guiding questions to help our group define a set of priorities and topics for the upcoming year:

• What do PK-12 students and teachers need the most right now and how might we design clinical experiences to support them (prioritizing student teaching/residencies and then thinking about earlier field experiences)?

• What could these clinical experiences look like and what might each of us consider to support cooperating teachers and teacher candidates in this context?

• What potential barriers, constraints, and concerns do we have to keep in mind and problem-solve?

• How can we work as a regional community of districts and EPPs to develop these designs for both the fall as well as leverage this opportunity to establish ongoing clinical practice innovation longer-term?

With these questions in mind, the DACPC leadership facilitated a series of conversations and activities to identify topics that our community aims to address as a collective in the coming months and years. Some of these priorities overlap with other statewide goals, such as addressing shortage areas. DACPC membership has grown exponentially and CU Boulder looks forward to remaining an engaged partner and leader in these conversations. 

CU Boulder also continues to engage in other statewide efforts. For instance, we are serving as a member of the CDE/R12 Strengthening the Workforce Pipeline Working Groups. The group, composed of local “teams,” meets regularly to look at state-level data and develop recommendations for the state working groups to support a stronger workforce pipeline.