Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music] We began as a teaching college, East Carolina Teaching College,
so we have a great reputation, tradition and history here.
There is probably nothing about East Carolina that is more ingrained or more fundamental
to the quality of this university than teacher preparation
and making a difference in education.
So, it's part of our fabric.
We couldn't get away from it if we wanted to.
We are very proud of that history and that tradition.
Now more recently, we've been nationally recognized for teaching quality.
The National Commission on Teaching in America's Future, The Carnegie Foundation,
Erskin Bowles in this state, many others have recognized the value of that.
We intend to maintain the quality and the leadership position we have there.
We are developing right now six strategic directions for the university
for the next ten years and teaching preparation
and education will certainly be one of those six.
So, this is in our history, it's in our fabric and it's
in our future and we are very good at it.
Think about now that you have done this, what would you may do to [inaudible 1:19]?
Chancellor Ballard: Preparing teachers today in my view is ten times more difficult
than it was a generation ago for lots of different reasons,
but the two biggest reasons are the global economy we have.
We are simply preparing kids and teachers for an entirely different world today than we were
when I got out of college or even just one generation ago.
It's a different subject matter.
It's a different enterprise.
Just take one substantive area like biology.
I was a biology major for two years in undergraduate school.
The books that I used then are relics.
They are antiques today.
They are not even relevant to teaching biology today.
To prepare a teacher to teach biology in high school today is a really difficult task
because the genomics, proteomics, the revolution, the substantive knowledge
of biology changes dramatically about every six months.
One of the impacts that that has is that teacher preparation is now across many disciplines
and it is the partnership between arts and sciences and education and music and other ways
of knowing that will make a difference to how well we prepare teachers in the future.
So, it's having an impact on how we work together on campus,
but it's also having an impact on how we work with others outside of campus.
The College of Education has started something called Wachovia Partnership East
and it is the model for inner institutional cooperation.
President Bolles and many others talk about that partnership almost every time
that teacher preparation comes up on the state agenda and we are national leaders
on how universities can work with community colleges and communities and businesses
to prepare tomorrow's teachers to meet this global economy that is so much more difficult
to get prepared for than it used to be.
Man 2: Now, what that will do is that's going to bend back all the colors of the spectrum.
Chancellor Ballard: The state clearly recognizes that teacher preparation is a crisis in this state.
I would go a step further and say it's the most important crisis facing our country today.
Erskin Bowles says it's the single most important thing that the University
of North Carolina system can do for our state and so we are taking it very seriously.
We have been the leading producer of teachers for some time and we intend to remain so.
But, having said that, that's probably not the most important way that we need
to think about teacher preparation.
Some states, but not this state view teaching preparation as just a factory model.
There's good money to be made in preparing more teachers.
But, if you just produce teachers in a factory model, the more the better,
we know that that's not going to be successful in the complexity of our public schools
and more importantly than that, those teachers are less likely to stay in the classrooms.
What we need is to find people who want to be in this profession for the next thirty years.
That's where master teachers are developed.
That's what will make the most difference.
That's how we can solve this crisis.
So, teacher preparation with quality and finding those people that will stay in the profession
and getting communities to value teachers
because there's no more important profession than teachers today.
Those kinds of things which require the partnerships that we're so good
at are the single best way to think
about preparing teachers that will stay in the classroom.
That's really the crisis that we are facing today.
It's not a numbers problem, it's the quality of how we are preparing them
and their willingness to stay in the classroom.
We will continue to be good at that.
We are already very good at it and it's our commitment to maintain...