WMU joins statewide teaching fellowship

By Kallie Leonard
Western Herald

Last week, Western Michigan University was chosen along with five other universities in Michigan to participate in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship, a new partnership created to help meet the goals of President Obama’s  “Educate to Innovate” campaign by training 240 new math and science teachers across the state.

Applications for this fellowship will first be available to students entering a graduate program in the summer of 2011. Students chosen for the fellowship will be given a $30,000 stipend and be placed in an intensive masters degree program in education in exchange for a three year commitment to teach in middle and high schools that are in need of math and science teachers.

“The Fellowship reaches out to individuals with undergraduate degrees in math or science fields and brings them to one of the six participating Michigan campuses for teaching preparation that’s based in the kind of schools where they’ll be working; the same way that physicians learn to practice medicine not just in classrooms but in hospitals,” said Beverly Sanford, vice president for communications at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation will receive a $16.7 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to make this statewide teaching program possible. Each participating university will receive $50,000 that they will have to match.

“Ultimately the goal is to improve education in the state of Michigan and students will become more passionate about science and math careers,” said Kathy Reincke, communications manager for the W.K Kellogg Foundation.

According to Reincke, around nine universities were considered for the WKKF-WW Michigan Teaching Fellowship and several factors were considered in the process of selecting the universities.

These factors include the university’s commitment to the goals of the Fellowship, the university’s capacity to build a math and science teacher preparation program that meets the foundation’s standards, and the university’s existing relationships with urban or rural school districts that are part of this program.

“WMU met these criteria very well, and its work with communities in the western part of the state will be critically important,” Sanford said.

According to Sanford, research has shown that the single most important factor in student achievement is having a good teacher consistently year after year, something that the fellowship hopes to make possible.

“National estimates suggest that as many as half of all K-12 teachers leave teaching within their first three years, and many of them say that they leave because they don’t feel prepared for the day-to-day realities of teaching or the experience of what it’s actually like to manage a classroom and work in a school environment,” Sanford said.

“This fellowship seeks to help advance math and science education not only by encouraging strong mathematicians and scientists to teach, but also by preparing them in a way that will really help them succeed in the classroom —not just for a year or two, but for a career.”

The WKKF-WW Michigan Teaching Fellowship is estimated to supply 90,000 students with high quality instruction in the subject areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) from fellows in the first three years of the program.

“We at Woodrow Wilson genuinely believe that this program will not only bring great new teachers into Michigan classrooms and help keep them there, but will also — through the work of WMU and the other partner institutions — give colleges and universities around the state, and across the country, new ways to think about their teacher preparation programs,” Sanford said.

Information about the $30,000 stipend, eligibility requirements, and an opportunity to sign up for updates are available at www.woodrow.org/michigan. Potential applicants can also send questions to wwteachingfellowships@woodrow.org.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Jan 13 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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