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>>Theresa Bierer: Here's Northern Arizona University's College of Education dean Dan
Kain, in the spotlight. >>Daniel Kain: President Obama has come forward
with some ideas about how education should change that have some impact on how we prepare
teachers. For example he's calling for high national standards, high quality teacher preparation
and innovation in schools. But what it means for us is to continue the idea of preparing
professionals who are ready to go out to start the schools with the skills that they need,
to be innovators, to be participants in that growth that occurs in the life of a professional.
And I think our people are well prepared to begin that, but it's further inspiration for
us to maintain that adaptive innovative perspective. The early childhood field in Arizona has grown
immensely in the last few years; probably the premiere point was the passage in November
of 2006 of the initiative come to be known as First Things First, a tax on tobacco products.
That's designed to provide the funding to inject all kinds of assistance in communities
across the state to make children healthy and ready to learn. This means a number of
things; it means that there are more people who are seeking higher education, professional
education. For example people who are working with head start now are seeking bachelor's
degree in early childhood, so we've expanded our early childhood offerings for those people.
But we also face the situation where we have joined in a collaboration with our sister
institutions to do a major evaluation of First Things First. This is a multi-year project
that involves studying thousands of children every year that will compete with some of
the biggest national studies that have been done in the field, so it's a very exciting
opportunity. One more area that I would like to mention in terms of early childhood is
that the inquiry, the exploration, the effort to create a child care center on our campus
continues. We've simply broadened that vision to include a center that provides professional
development for educators across the state, curriculum opportunities for curriculum development
and internships, and research opportunities. All built primarily around that starting point
of child care for the children of the community. Northern Arizona University has a deep commitment
to preparing leaders for Arizona's schools. We recognize while teachers have an enormous
impact on the achievement of students and what happens with their success, it's the
principal, it's the leader at the school level who sets that tone for the entire organization.
And we are committed to preparing leaders in our state through a variety of options
that will help them set that positive learning tone. We have a number of projects that are
worth mentioning, first of all we continue to operate very large principal and leadership
preparation programs in the urban areas of Arizona. So that there are opportunities for
people who are practicing educators to get master's degrees and most often it's actually
associated with their school or a nearby school, with some distance education opportunities
as well. That's an enormous outreach we have a couple of new opportunities for people in
non-urban areas, one is we've begun a grant program to prepare American Indian educators
to be leaders and Dr. Joe Martin who has taken on a role in the president's office as the
liaison for native American affairs, is the lead researchers and lead faculty member on
this project which is designed to prepare native American professional educators to
become leaders in their school. And we are also instituting a program, a rural leader
cohort this January, which will enable us to create a cohort of potential leaders from
some of the smaller areas of the state, people who really don't have the kinds of opportunities
that they do in Phoenix or Tucson or Flagstaff and bring them in an environment where they
can become solid leaders in their own home environments.