Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.
This week’s initiatives column will focus on the three action items of goal 4 (outreach, dissemination and partnerships), objective 1 (partnerships) in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.
This goal calls on the college to strengthen its leadership role as a change agent for education systems and societies locally and globally. We will widely share our research, programs, materials and interventions by means that are easily accessible by the public; adopt new strategies for outreach to individuals and communities; create more effective strategies to disseminate our work; and expand our partnerships.
The first objective commits us to engage collaboratively with families, community members, educators and policymakers within the state, nation and around the world. We will foster and develop mutual partnerships with families, schools and community organizations to address pressing social issues, including poverty, essential literacies, racism, inclusion, mental health and well-being, and climate change, among others.
The first action item calls on us to make essential literacies, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, and mental health and well-being the foci of the College of Education’s partnership work such that the college is seen as a leader within the state and nation as well as around the world in these areas.
There are six implementation tasks associated with this action item:
- Conduct a review of current partnerships, including the organizations, individuals and goals of the partnership.
- Conduct a needs assessment of the current infrastructure and supports to determine what is needed to sustain effective partnerships.
- Cultivate new collaborations with community members, nonprofit educational organizations and schools/districts, particularly those serving high-need populations, to provide mental and behavioral supports to students in need of such services.
- Enhance international collaboration with the world's leading institutions of higher education to expand the student experience, faculty development and the impact of research.
- Leverage technology both as a tool for connecting to these partners and as an innovative means to support their growth.
- Assess the impact of community-based participatory research to continuously improve partnership work.
The second action item calls on us to create new internal structures to facilitate connections with educator preparation program graduates and their employers to better support career transition; help ensure our programs are aligned with the needs of communities with educational disparities; and inform programmatic priorities.
There are three implementation tasks associated with this action item:
- Create a process that digitally records and stores graduates’ and employers’ information for ease of contact beyond the Graduate School and maps the placements of employment of our graduates.
- Capture the perceptions of graduates and non-completers on the strengths and weaknesses of our educator preparation programs to inform program improvement efforts.
- Capture principals’ and superintendents’ perceptions of the quality of our educator preparation programs to inform program improvement efforts.
The third action item calls on us to expand collaborations and develop synergistic relationships across Penn State units.
There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:
- Engage with commonwealth campuses to develop better articulations and leverage 2+2 options.
- Increase affiliate and dual appointments between departments, research units, outreach units and colleges.
- Increase cross-listed courses between departments and colleges.
- Encourage co-advising between departments and colleges.
I am happy to report that we are engaged in all of these areas and making progress in building these important relationships.
Coming up
The next Initiatives column will include a look at goal 4, objective 2.