Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, University Relations, (785) 864-8853.
LAWRENCE-- A University of Kansas educational psychologist researching urban school reform programs will offer suggestions for improving the preparation of teachers when she lectures as the Gene A. Budig teaching professor for 2000 on Oct. 19 at KU.
Nona Tollefson, the Budig teaching professor, will deliver a lecture titled "New Demands Call for Changes in Personnel Preparation in Schools of Education" at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, in 150 Joseph R. Pearson Hall. The speech is free and open to the public.
"In the presidential campaigns, the candidates are talking about the importance of improving student performance in our schools nationwide," Tollefson said. "Finding ways to improve how teachers are prepared is part of the general call to improve student achievement nationally."
The suggestions Tollefson will make are based on work she has done with KU graduate students and schoolteachers in Lawrence and Kansas City, Kan., in the KU Professional Development Schools Alliance and in research with her KU colleague, Steven Lee, on urban school reforms. Tollefson will summarize the preliminary findings of an experimental program introduced by the KU-PDS Alliance.
The KU-PDS Alliance was developed to improve initial teacher preparation and to develop strong partnerships between schools of education and the schools in which students fulfill their student teaching and internship experiences. The alliance also provides professional development opportunities for KU School of Education faculty in the participating public schools.
Tollefson's research indicates that students preparing to be teachers are better able to apply the concepts they are learning in their university when they are in the school district classroom setting. She is proposing that schools of education integrate more of a university student's time in the school district setting.
"The opportunities for applying concepts and strategies they are learning are greater when students remain in the school building and interact with the students and teachers," Tollefson said.
For example, at KU and other many other research universities, teacher preparation traditionally begins with campus-based experiences. Students then move from observing classrooms, to shadowing a teacher, to small group work in a school classroom to six weeks of student teaching. At KU, after six weeks of student teaching, education students begin graduate-level courses and must complete a semester internship before they can be certified to teach in Kansas.
Tollefson said, "One of my suggestions will be to integrate the graduate-level coursework with students' school-based experiences."
In 1989, Tollefson was the School of Education's first faculty member to receive the Chancellor's Career Teaching Award.
She also received the Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 1981 and was named to the Kansas Women's Hall of Fame by the Commission on the Status of Women at KU in 1986. In 1987, she received an Outstanding Educator Award from Unified School District 497 in Lawrence.
Tollefson earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder and master's and doctoral degrees in education from Purdue University, West Lafeyette, Ind. Her research interests include classroom assessment, student motivation, program evaluation and teacher preparation.
She joined the KU faculty in 1967 as a lecturer in educational psychology and research. Tollefson became a professor in 1984 and served as chair of the department from 1987 to 1995. Early in her career she worked as a teacher-counselor in a junior high school in Grand Island, Neb., and as a student health counselor at Tulane University in New Orleans.
When Chancellor Gene Budig left KU in 1994 to assume duties as the president of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, the Kansas University Endowment Association set aside $250,000 to establish a permanent symbol of Budig's outstanding work for the university. Budig designated the School of Education as the recipient of the funds, and this teaching professorship was established in Budig's name.
The lecture is the first of several events sponsored by the School of Education during Homecoming weekend in celebration of the school's recent move into Joseph R. Pearson Hall.
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