Office of Undergraduate Teacher Education and Accreditation

Grant Personnel

Project Director - Kelly Tharp

Instructional Coaches

Screven County Elementary - Carole Counts

Screven County Middle - Gilda Rackley

Screven County High - Joyce Jamerson

Savannah River Challenge - Beth Overstreet

Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)

Professional Development District:P-16 Partnership for Teaching/Learning Renewal and Reducing the Achievement Gap

One of the most significant and complex problems facing schools today is providing quality education for all students from preschool through doctoral programs. Georgia Southern University was awarded a $489,426 grant by the US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to concentrate on two critical goals in addressing this issue. These two goals are:

The significant gap in the academic performance between minority students when compared to non-minority peers, and between low SES students when compared with their more advantaged peers; and,
The need for all teacher education candidates to possess the knowledge, skills and dispositions that will enable them to teach all children and to understand how ‘the system’ is failing some youth.

This project is addressing the systemic causes for these problems within the Screven County Professional Development District (PDD) through professional learning communities. Georgia Southern University has been in partnership with all three Screven County Schools for five years. The PDD expands this partnership to include the district’s alternative school and the state-run residential minimum security juvenile facility located in the county (Savannah River Challenge Program).

Instructional coaches at each site are providing instructional leadership for this system-level school reform and in meeting the goals of the grant. Instructional coaches mentor the school community in the improvement of instruction resulting in improved student learning. This is done through classroom observations and feedback, structuring learning communities, guiding the review of data to impact classroom instruction, continually evaluating progress of the FIPSE Grant and providing induction support.

Professional learning communities will address systemic issues identified by the school system. The topics of study through the grant will be culturally responsive teaching, poverty education, and differentiated instruction. Teachers at each site will become experts on one of these topics. They will be responsible for redelivering the workshop content and inform faculty of the school-level implementation plan. By the beginning of the 2005-2006 school year instructional changes in all classrooms will reflect the professional learning focus of the FIPSE Grant.

The concerted effort to address the two identified goals will also have a positive impact on two related issues specifically, the shortage of minority teachers and the perception among teacher educators that high achieving schools provide the best sites for training teacher candidates.

The contents of this Web page were developed under a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.