Graduate Programs in Education

What are the most effective ways of promoting and facilitating the academic, personal, and social development of adolescents? To answer this question, the educator needs to understand the structures and processes of the adolescent’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth. Course plans, assignments, and classroom policies that are the most effective are those that are tailored to fit the developmental status of the student. This course explores multiple learning theories and adolescent brain development and applies them to classroom practice. We will also explore additional information about language acquisition, technology as a tool for learning, and student motivation. Finally, we will spend considerable time on the cognitively diverse learner, including students with exceptionalities. An important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings.

This course will build on previous courses to continue to develop both a theoretical understanding of equity issues in education as well as specific applications for candidates’ various educational settings and growth as professional educators. This course is rooted in the belief that our work as educators flows from our well-developed ideas of equity; as such, much of the course will focus on nurturing group and individual meaning-making of equity in education, which will be used to inform the practical work of examining opportunities for equity work within placements. In this course, we will also examine historical issues of diversity and equity in education, principles of equity and social justice, and how issues of equity affect learning. There will be flexibility in the course readings so that candidates have opportunities to choose texts that are most relevant to their work and passions. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on your practicum work will be a crucial part of this course, as well as in-depth discussions on the concepts and theories presented in the assigned readings.

In this class, we will learn together about strategies, tools and support mechanisms that will enable your students to confront their individual reading and learning issues. We will work to increase our individual understanding of literacy and reading in secondary schools, become familiar with issues associated with all reading levels and learn ways content area teachers can help students increase their content literacy skills. We will also focus on Historically Responsive Literacy to understand the implications of traditional literacy instruction on a diverse group of students, and strategies that can be used to foster an empowering environment of literacy. A crucial component of this class is introducing the basics for literacy instruction for adolescents. You will read chapters and articles that describe scientifically-based reading interventions. After reading about them, you will see examples modeled and have opportunities to try out some literacy interventions that are direct, explicit, and multi-sensory. During this course, you will have an opportunity to try out some reading interventions and receive feedback from a supervisor while working with high school students on campus for Earlham Summer. We will revisit these literacy interventions during Curriculum and Instruction II in the fall semester and you will be expected to use reading interventions routinely during your fall work sample and spring student teaching. We will also draw our attention to disciplinary literacy, specifically how to help students read in their content area. We will learn ways to increase students’ comprehension and use of written materials in content areas. We will also discover ways to help students develop inquiry, interpretation and analysis skills that can be used in all content areas. These skills will be aligned with Indiana Educator Standards as part of reading instruction (standard 7).

This course seeks to provide you with beginning knowledge of how to holistically build unit plans in order to best serve your students and their learning goals. We will have a particular lens of viewing curriculum through a historically responsive and culturally sustaining lens. The primary project in this course will be designing a unit plan and lesson plan in an interdisciplinary setting that challenges middle school students to complete a Project Based Learning unit that focuses on global awareness. This course will meet from 8:30-3:30 for one week during the Summer semester, with some exceptions for flexibility. An important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. We will primarily dig into the purpose and objectives of a curriculum. A central piece of this course will be practicing making lesson plans and unit plans in an interdisciplinary setting.

This course seeks to provide you with knowledge of how to holistically build unit plans in order to best serve your students and their learning goals. We will spend time discussing best practices in instruction, paying particular attention to engaging learning activities and how to meet the diverse needs based on the students you have in your classroom. This course invites you to think about the dynamic rather than static elements of curriculum. More precisely, consider the dynamics of student interaction with curriculum. We will have a particular lens of viewing curriculum through a historically responsive and culturally sustaining lens. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on the assignments and you use in your classroom will be discussed in this course, as it will be a time to process and share ideas about what works and what doesn’t in relation to your curriculum. Another important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. A central piece of this course will be practicing making lesson plans and unit plans, as well as designing a work sample that reflects central elements of curriculum and instruction.

No matter our goals, even the most worthwhile ones, if we do not assess them to find out what students have learned, then we will never know if we have reached those goals. We will spend time discussing best practices in assessment, paying particular attention to how and when to use formative and summative assessments. We will dig into best practices in designing assessments, as well as how to analyze assessment data for information on how to help teachers better teach and reteach concepts. We will also begin thinking about how to use data as an educational researcher, and start to identify needs in the classroom that can be addressed in an Action Research project. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on the assessments you use in your classroom will be discussed in this course, as it will be a time to process and share ideas about what works and what doesn’t in relation to your curriculum. Another important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. Topics will include how to formulate a variety of assessments designed to show student learning or performance, how to use assessments to further student learning, dealing with high stakes testing, and more. A central piece of this course will be practicing making formative and summative assessments.

An important part of becoming a middle or high school teacher is joining the specialized group of professional educators in your specific area of expertise. Although many values, goals, and methods of classroom instruction are common to all subject areas, each discipline has its own unique culture of teaching practice. The purpose of the course is to induct you into the culture of teaching in your subject area. Each middle or high school subject area, if powerfully taught, has the capacity to transform and empower students. Powerful teaching acknowledges that we learn both through the company we keep, and through a personal relationship with knowledge and truth. Each subject area can be thought of as a club, with its own conversation about knowledge base, culture, and ways of defining and addressing truth. Learning is the process of entering into increasingly deep levels of club membership. This course focuses on specific methods of teaching in your content area.

An important part of becoming a middle or high school teacher is joining the specialized group of professional educators in your specific area of expertise. Although many values, goals, and methods of classroom instruction are common to all subject areas, each discipline has its own unique culture of teaching practice. The purpose of the course is to induct you into the culture of teaching in your subject area. Each middle or high school subject area, if powerfully taught, has the capacity to transform and empower students. Powerful teaching acknowledges that we learn both through the company we keep, and through a personal relationship with knowledge and truth. Each subject area can be thought of as a club, with its own conversation about knowledge base, culture, and ways of defining and addressing truth. Learning is the process of entering into increasingly deep levels of club membership. This course focuses on specific methods of teaching in your content area.

An important part of becoming a middle or high school teacher is joining the specialized group of professional educators in your specific area of expertise. Although many values, goals, and methods of classroom instruction are common to all subject areas, each discipline has its own unique culture of teaching practice. The purpose of the course is to induct you into the culture of teaching in your subject area. Each middle or high school subject area, if powerfully taught, has the capacity to transform and empower students. Powerful teaching acknowledges that we learn both through the company we keep, and through a personal relationship with knowledge and truth. Each subject area can be thought of as a club, with its own conversation about knowledge base, culture, and ways of defining and addressing truth. Learning is the process of entering into increasingly deep levels of club membership. This course focuses on specific methods of teaching in your content area.

An important part of becoming a middle or high school teacher is joining the specialized group of professional educators in your specific area of expertise. Although many values, goals, and methods of classroom instruction are common to all subject areas, each discipline has its own unique culture of teaching practice. The purpose of the course is to induct you into the culture of teaching in your subject area. Each middle or high school subject area, if powerfully taught, has the capacity to transform and empower students. Powerful teaching acknowledges that we learn both through the company we keep, and through a personal relationship with knowledge and truth. Each subject area can be thought of as a club, with its own conversation about knowledge base, culture, and ways of defining and addressing truth. Learning is the process of entering into increasingly deep levels of club membership. This course focuses on specific methods of teaching in your content area.

M.A.T. candidates will work with high school students on campus for the Earlham Summer Program.

Part time student teaching.

Full time student teaching.

This course in the MAT sequence explores the importance of being a reflective teacher who is committed to cultivatingan engaging and purposeful learning environment. Topics will also include other areas needed by professionaleducators for today’s classrooms including a wide variety of classroom management approaches, online learningenvironments, equity, suicide prevention, conflict resolution, and other current and timely topics as requested by thestudents and/or faculty.

This course will introduce you to a wide range of topics about what it means to be a professional educator, includingfamily and community engagement, unions and labor rights, working in professional learning communities and more.We will also spend time on interview skills, resume development, and other career readiness skills. As with itscounterpart, Reflective Educator I, we will also spend considerable time each week debriefing student teaching.

As an educator, how will you know your students are learning? How will you know that you are reaching all of your students? What will you do to improve your practice? Action research is a tool that can empower teachers and help them become reflective about their own teaching. It can help them to embrace and welcome dilemmas, paradoxes and problems in their teaching, facilitate more learning for their students, and produce results through change. This course will consist of engaging in inquiry by identifying a hurdle for student success, conducting a review of the literature on the issue, designing a methodology for an action research project, and then implement that research study while collecting data. Candidates will then analyze their data, write up their findings, and then present those findings in order to contribute to the profession. This course will meet once a week in the spring semester; M.Ed. students will meet in the morning and M.A.T. students will meet in the late afternoon after school. We will spend many classes in a workshop setting, working through writing the literature review, the methodology, and analyzing data

You have decided to become a teacher. What does it mean to be a teacher? How should we define good teaching? How do race, gender identity, and cultural identification shape your language and thinking? How can national and state standards help make you a good teacher? In considering these questions, accept the invitation of Quaker Parker Palmer to open your heart and your mind, to discover your identity and integrity and to “awaken the teacher within”—not only within yourselves but also within your students. This course presents the foundations of teaching - introducing ideas, goals, approaches, theories and concepts of teaching that are central to all other Earlham M.A.T. courses. As an introduction to teaching, Ed 510 explores the characteristics of the effective educator in today’s society. Topics covered include the M.A.T. conceptual framework, the Earlham mission statement, principles and practices (deriving from Quakerism) and their infusion in the M.A.T. program; also included are Indiana Professional Teacher Developmental Standards, and Indiana Content Standards. This course will also develop and reinforce candidates’ understandings of how to create and successfully participate in a community of learners. Rather than working in isolation, you will have ample opportunities to construct a culture of collaboration, both in and outside the classroom. In the process we expect you to learn and value consensus decision-making, which reinforces collaboration.

What are the most effective ways of promoting and facilitating the academic, personal, and social development of adolescents? To answer this question, the educator needs to understand the structures and processes of the adolescent’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth. Course plans, assignments, and classroom policies that are the most effective are those that are tailored to fit the developmental status of the student. This course explores multiple learning theories and adolescent brain development and applies them to classroom practice. We will also explore additional information about language acquisition, technology as a tool for learning, and student motivation. Finally, we will spend considerable time on the cognitively diverse learner, including students with exceptionalities. An important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings.

This course will build on previous courses to continue to develop both a theoretical understanding of equity issues in education as well as specific applications for candidates’ various educational settings and growth as professional educators. This course is rooted in the belief that our work as educators flows from our well-developed ideas of equity; as such, much of the course will focus on nurturing group and individual meaning-making of equity in education, which will be used to inform the practical work of examining opportunities for equity work within placements. In this course, we will also examine historical issues of diversity and equity in education, principles of equity and social justice, and how issues of equity affect learning. There will be flexibility in the course readings so that candidates have opportunities to choose texts that are most relevant to their work and passions. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on your practicum work will be a crucial part of this course, as well as in-depth discussions on the concepts and theories presented in the assigned readings.

This course seeks to provide you with beginning knowledge of how to holistically build unit plans in order to best serve your students and their learning goals. We will have a particular lens of viewing curriculum through a historically responsive and culturally sustaining lens. The primary project in this course will be designing a unit plan and lesson plan in an interdisciplinary setting that challenges middle school students to complete a Project Based Learning unit that focuses on global awareness. This course will meet from 8:30-3:30 for one week during the Summer semester, with some exceptions for flexibility. An important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. We will primarily dig into the purpose and objectives of a curriculum. A central piece of this course will be practicing making lesson plans and unit plans in an interdisciplinary setting.

This course seeks to provide you with knowledge of how to holistically build unit plans in order to best serve your students and their learning goals. We will spend time discussing best practices in instruction, paying particular attention to engaging learning activities and how to meet the diverse needs based on the students you have in your classroom. This course invites you to think about the dynamic rather than static elements of curriculum. More precisely, consider the dynamics of student interaction with curriculum. We will have a particular lens of viewing curriculum through a historically responsive and culturally sustaining lens. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on the assignments and you use in your classroom will be discussed in this course, as it will be a time to process and share ideas about what works and what doesn’t in relation to your curriculum. Another important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. A central piece of this course will be practicing making lesson plans and unit plans, as well as designing a work sample that reflects central elements of curriculum and instruction.

No matter our goals, even the most worthwhile ones, if we do not assess them to find out what students have learned, then we will never know if we have reached those goals. We will spend time discussing best practices in assessment, paying particular attention to how and when to use formative and summative assessments. We will dig into best practices in designing assessments, as well as how to analyze assessment data for information on how to help teachers better teach and reteach concepts. We will also begin thinking about how to use data as an educational researcher, and start to identify needs in the classroom that can be addressed in an Action Research project. This course will meet once a week during the fall semester, with some exceptions for flexibility around your placement school’s schedule and your work sample. Reflections on the assessments you use in your classroom will be discussed in this course, as it will be a time to process and share ideas about what works and what doesn’t in relation to your curriculum. Another important facet of this course will be discussions, activities, and presentations related to our readings. Topics will include how to formulate a variety of assessments designed to show student learning or performance, how to use assessments to further student learning, dealing with high stakes testing, and more. A central piece of this course will be practicing making formative and summative assessments.

Career exploration and pracitcum planning.

Educational internship.

Educational internship.

This course in the M. Ed sequence explores the roles of individuals as professional educators. The course will include topics such as professionalism, leadership, organizational change, diversity, conflict resolution, consensus governance, and other current and timely topics as requested by the students and/or faculty. In this course you will: Consider and discuss what it means to be a professional educator in today’s society; Participate as a professional colleague in listening, discussing, critiquing and reflecting on readings and presentations; Apply these perspectives to your own emerging and expanding definition of what it means to be a professional educator; Understand how the vision we hold of ourselves as professional educators affects both our individual classroom practice as well as the larger community and society.

This course in the MEd sequence is designed to help you continue to define what it means to you to be a professional in your context and to explore your role beyond your classroom or work. As you have “renewed the teacher within”, you have undoubtedly discovered the importance of networking. You have benefited from the collegiality of your colleagues in this class, but what now? How will you continue to be a lifelong learner? How will you continue to develop as a professional and as a leader? How will you become part of networks that will sustain you as you continue to grow? How will you contribute to your job, school, and colleagues now? How are you envisioning school, or your job differently now and how will you act on your new understandings?

As you are about to graduate and enter into the job market, you may be wondering what pathways in education exist in your area of interest. This course will help you research different career pathways and examine a plethora of options for after graduation, and include guest speakers from different areas in education. We will also spend time planning your next steps and envisioning a long-term future for yourself and your career. Lastly, we will focus on interview skills, resume development, and other career readiness skills.

As an educator, how will you know your students are learning? How will you know that you are reaching all of your students? What will you do to improve your practice? Action research is a tool that can empower teachers and help them become reflective about their own teaching. It can help them to embrace and welcome dilemmas, paradoxes and problems in their teaching, facilitate more learning for their students, and produce results through change. This course will consist of engaging in inquiry by identifying a hurdle for student success, conducting a review of the literature on the issue, designing a methodology for an action research project, and then implement that research study while collecting data. Candidates will then analyze their data, write up their findings, and then present those findings in order to contribute to the profession. This course will meet once a week in the spring semester; M.Ed. students will meet in the morning and M.A.T. students will meet in the late afternoon after school. We will spend many classes in a workshop setting, working through writing the literature review, the methodology, and analyzing data