Accreditation Report
Section IV: Future Directions
This is an especially challenging period of time for our College of Education at Washington State University. The national and state education reform initiatives have heightened our college's awareness about the need for more and differently prepared school professionals at all levels - teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, program administrators, principals and superintendents. Our college's faculty is fully engaged in the redesign of all our pre-service professional preparation programs and continuing professional development programs to better meet the needs of our graduates who will enter this changing educational scene, as well as the schools, children, parents and communities our graduates will serve.
Many elements of program redesign are already in place, and others have received considerable attention and are in various phases of planning and/or implementation. This work has involved not only faculty and programs in the College of Education; but also faculty and programs in the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Agriculture and Home Economics, as well as the General Education Program of the University. Further, we have also sought and received input regarding our various program redesign plans from a variety of sources, including our graduates themselves, the professional education advisory groups for each of our certificate programs, teachers and administrators in our partnership schools, and other school professionals in the state from the 150+ school districts where our students are involved in practica, internships and/or student teaching,
Additionally, within the scope of our work, we continue to give special attention to diversity as an important social justice issue, and perhaps the most defining such issue of our times, affecting our students, schools, communities and society at large. At the same time, we are particularly mindful of our mission as a Land Grant University to serve the state. At Washington State University, our College of Education accomplishes this mission through our multi campus system, through our formal partnerships with P-12 schools and community colleges, and through our College of Education Center for Educational Partnerships, which offers outreach programs and resources of the college to schools and school professionals on a statewide basis.
Maintaining program quality while simultaneously handling the various aspects of educational reform - program redesign to meet high quality standards, diversity, P-12 school partnerships, access to professional programs on a statewide basis requires great skill and balance. We also recognize that there is some tension involved where issues of program quality, program access and the shortage of education professionals intersect. This tension is likely to define our next five years, just as that same tension is defining the nature of the education profession as a whole on a national basis.
We are concerned about the current state of the field of education with the strongly polarized views of preparation systems for school professionals. On the one hand, there are conventional degree programs redesigned according to new state standards, offered by colleges of education and accredited by long standing accreditation bodies; on the other are alternative certification programs, alternative providers of those programs and alternative accountability systems. Both the conventional and the alternative programs are attempting to meet current needs, although they may not be at all equivalent nor even adhere to a common standard.
How our college and others like it manage the complex tasks of continuously renewing our programs, dealing with our own individual institutional challenges, engaging the public dialogue and garnering support, or not, is certain to affect the future of the entire system of preparing education professionals, as we know it, in the years to come. Change is the hallmark of our times.
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- Overview of the Institution and the College
- Conceptual Frameworks
- Evidence of Meeting Each Standard
- Future Directions
- List of Links and Exhibits