TODAY at Minnesota State Mankato is published in May, August and January and mailed to 90,000 alumni and friends. The mission of TODAY is to entertain, inform and connect readers to campus.
Winter 2008
Volume 9 Issue 2
On a fall afternoon in North Mankato, a cluster of adults is milling around the well-furnished library of Dakota Meadows Middle School. It's a press conference taking shape, and the bookshelves, artwork and computers are a fitting backdrop. The press is about to hear how Minnesota State University, Mankato's College of Education, led by Dr. Michael Miller, is the model for what needs to happen statewide in terms of keeping good teachers on the job.
In this small corner of the library, the orderly press conference moves along with high praise and strong words when the school's PA system blasts out the afternoon announcements. The adults are rendered inaudible as a junior high student explains that a pizza party is among the rewards for the group that sells the most magazines.
And as this small voice continues to boom throughout the school, the adults below can only smile and wait it out. It's a fitting moment: Say all you want, but the children take precedence.
So it is with Minnesota State Mankato's College of Education, where the basic notion of professors telling students how to teach has become old-school indeed. The College of Education, at its core, brings its expertise and research across the state and into surrounding school districts, with the not-so-modest goal of improving schools and their communities.
What the college does as a matter of mission is now recognized as the way things ought to be in education throughout Minnesota.
Fitting for an institution that began as a teacher's college, Minnesota State Mankato's College of Education is at the forefront of the University's efforts to serve the state through applied research - a term universities use to describe research that focuses more on real-world problems than on theoretical issues. The college has a number of centers that reach across the state-literacy, mentoring, engaged leadership and others - and make the University a recognized leader in a broad spectrum of educational issues, trends and developments.
This fall, when the public policy think-tank Minnesota 2020 took its look at public education in rural Minnesota and declared a crisis in terms of teacher recruitment and retention, it hailed what's happening at Minnesota State Mankato as a remedy.
The study was prompted by troubling numbers in the teaching profession. According to the study, greater Minnesota schools lose fifteen percent of teachers after their first year on the job. More than half leave their district after five years, many leaving teaching permanently. Pay disparity between metro and rural Minnesota is one of two issues cited in the report. The other is a lack of mentoring programs, which are shown to keep teachers enthused and up to speed on the changing and challenging nature of the modern classroom.
Thus, the reason for the press conference in Mankato, where the College of Education's Center for Mentoring and Induction was hailed as a model for what should be adopted statewide.
"Most current mentoring programs are nonexistent after the beginning of the school year," said John Fitzgerald, author of the study "Growing Gap: Minnesota's Teacher Recruitment and Retention Crises."
"The Department of Education should create a mentoring program that is effective throughout the school year," Fitzgerald said. "The program should follow the Mankato model, which has experienced teachers removed from the classroom to work with university undergraduates as well as new teachers."
The group has taken its report to lawmakers and Governor Tim Pawlenty, who earlier in the year used the group's economic development findings and shaped it into a $70 million proposal for rural economic development. The chairman of Minnesota 2020, former state legislator Matt Entenza, said he expects Minnesota State Mankato to serve as a key resource for lawmakers addressing the staffing issue.
"As legislators come to us - as they have with earlier reports - we're going to have them come to Minnesota State Mankato and talk to Dean Miller and talk to the districts in the region that are working," Entenza said.
"Minnesota State Mankato has a statewide reputation in education, particularly, for being forward-thinking, for looking for new models and for collaborating effectively with other school districts," Entenza said. "That's why we were so excited to see how well this model worked. And we're going to be going around the state promoting this and making sure that folks know what's happening here in Mankato...I think this mentoring program is going to get a lot of attention from both the executive and the legislative branch."
Mentoring is just one of the programs that take place within the College of Education's twenty-year-old Center for School-University Partnerships. CSUP was once taking place on the sidelines of the college, Miller says. Today, it's front and center.
The idea in developing partnerships with school districts was to get the University staff and students working together with area educators toward an everybody-wins outcome: Students who graduate with solid classroom experience, schools that benefit from the influx of ideas and assistance, and teachers who find new energy and motivation toward their jobs.
"We chose very intentionally to put partnership in the center of the college," Miller says. "If we're going to be meaningful and important in preparing teachers, counselors, principals and others, we need to be connected in a major way to what's going on. And there is so much change in schools, change in levels of accountability and the extent to which data and student performance really drives funding and success. And also change just in who the kids are."
The goals of the center are to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to make as smooth a transition as possible for the students once they leave their training and take jobs, and to provide ongoing professional development for educators. The center partners include the school districts of Faribault, Le Sueur-Henderson, Mankato, Owatonna, St. Peter, Sibley East and Waseca.
It was a different world twenty years ago, Miller says, when the Owatonnas, Faribaults and other surrounding community schools were largely inhabited by blond-haired kids of Scandinavian stock. Even then, however, the College of Education developed the Center for School-University Partnerships in anticipation of growing needs and changing faces.
"We've created a number of centers and outreach projects where we have teachers coming from schools and participating in things at the college and faculty members going out and having responsibilities in the schools," Miller said. "We've got this shared culture, and when that happens, our faculty and our students are much more connected and on the mark in terms of what's going on, and the schools tend to start opening up..So we've got this really healthy, professional development-school kind of culture where we're problem-solving together and helping each other succeed."
One facet of professional development is the sponsorship and production of an array of conferences at the University, recent examples of which are:
The college has eight different professional development sequences, focused on areas such as the use of data to improve instruction, dealing with disabilities, poverty, cultural differences, and help for families to better connect with schools.
"It's professional development that we can offer to districts and they can purchase as districts," Miller said. "They're also formatted as courses that individual educators would take."
And that's a relatively new development, Miller said. Fifteen years ago, the traditional master's degree for a teacher became less and less attractive. Teachers were overwhelmed by the amount of professional development they needed to do, and time constraints meant less demand for traditional graduate school.
Today, teachers can take professional development programs at Minnesota State Mankato that can also be applied toward a master's.
"You don't have to do the professional development on one side and then, after that's over, look for a class to take to get a master's. So that's been our strategy and it's driven by our commitment to help kids and families through partnerships," Miller said. "We're really doing kind of amazing work right now."
In February, when the school district of Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City sought help, it brought in Minnesota State Mankato's College of Education's Center for Engaged Leadership. The district had been enduring a downward spiral in its finances, and University researchers Brian Boettcher, Ed.D, Dick Orcutt and Perry Wood, Ph.D., embarked on a formal study of the district's facilities and management and recommended a course of action. In August, an "action plan" resulting from those meetings was presented to the school board.
"I think what we wanted to do was say we're willing to share responsibility for how kids do, how families do and how communities do," Miller says. "If they are succeeding, we can feel great about what we're offering them. If they're not, we have to step up and really share resources, our own creativity and our own problem-solving skills."
School districts aren't the only ones seeking out the college's expertise. The Minnesota Legislature is increasingly recognizing Minnesota State Mankato as a valuable source for progressive studies and visionary faculty. Miller is frequently called upon to either testify at or provide college-generated research for legislative hearings.
"Every now and then we'll get the phone call to say it'd be really helpful if you could give me a one-page description of what's going on with new immigrant populations in the schools in south central Minnesota," Miller said. "So we'll put together a little bit of data on that and talk about what programs seem to be working and what are the characteristics of that. That kind of thing happens fairly frequently now, which it never did before.
"(We) have really tried to answer the question of what's the best strategy to work with this kind of kid and this kind of district," Miller said. "Because we have that information, and the research, it's really our responsibility to help legislators understand what should be going on in early education through high school...I think one of our primary messages is we're here, we're active, we know things. Let us know if you need help."
Sandy Hatlestad received her master's degree from the college in 1994 and is a fourth-grade teacher at Monroe Elementary in North Mankato. She's in her third year as a mentor, which takes her to classrooms to help both new and experienced teachers refine their work.
"Perhaps that teacher has a particular question about higher level questioning: the kinds of questions to ask and whether he or she's reaching the most students," Hatlestad said.
"What we can do is sit there while they're teaching and actually write down their questions, and afterward sit down and reflect with them about the kinds of questions they asked, and work with them at how they can implement some higher-level questions so they can raise their students' levels of thinking."
Mentorships take three years, and the college provides interns to take the places of the mentors during that period. Hatlestad said her experience as a mentor gives her a refreshed approach to the job. "I've learned so much," she said. "I can't wait to get back in the classroom.
This fall marked the college's launch of its applied doctorate program in Counseling and Student Personnel, and it's currently developing a doctorate in Educational Leadership. It has also established a new master's program in Early Childhood Special Education. In the mix, three new faculty positions have been added, and the emphasis on outreach is evident in recent hires, Miller said.
"We're not just hiring people to teach classes. We need to hire people the schools really want to have come," Miller said. "In a lot of places, higher education has not been the first group of people called upon when a school district gets in trouble. That's a problem. We should be the first call. And if we don't have the expertise, then what we should do is say we'll help you find the expertise. Because it matters to us, and we need to be continuously getting the expertise that schools need. That's really our job."
Joe Tougas is a writer and editor in North Mankato.
