Owatonna School District partnering with Minnesota State University on Owatonna

MANKATO — The Owatonna Independent School District is one of seven area school systems partnering with Minnesota State University, Mankato in a groundbreaking new Bush Foundation initiative to transform teacher preparation.
Over the next 10 years Minnesota State Mankato’s College of Education will collaborate with Owatonna and other public-school partners to dramatically change how colleges and universities recruit, prepare, place and support new K-12 teachers. It also will guarantee the new teachers’ effectiveness.
The new initiative – part of the Bush Foundation’s “goal for a decade” to increase educational achievement across Minnesota and the Dakotas – was announced this week in St. Paul by Bush Foundation President Peter C. Hutchinson and presidents of the participating universities.
To support the effort’s success, the Bush Foundation is investing more than $40 million in the 14 universities and related activities. Minnesota State Mankato will receive $6.3 million of that amount.
“We are thrilled to participate in this forward-looking Bush Foundation initiative,” said Michael Miller, dean of the university’s College of Education. “When our students – the teachers of tomorrow – succeed, our children are well-served. Exceptional teachers create exceptional schools and strong communities.”
“We all must embrace responsibility for the success of our educators, and we are proud to collaborate with the Bush Foundation through our teaching, our research and our work with area schools,” Miller said.
“Our university has a long history of embracing big ideas and applying real-world thinking to make tangible differences in people’s lives,” added Minnesota State Mankato President Richard Davenport. “This collaboration leverages our strengths, including Dr. Miller’s exceptional leadership. He and our faculty, with the help of our public-school partners, have developed many new ideas that will transform teacher effectiveness.”
With its school partners (Owatonna and school systems in Faribault, Gaylord-Arlington-Green Isle, Le Sueur-Henderson, Mankato, St. Peter and Waseca), Minnesota State Mankato will create a pipeline of strong teacher candidates by aggressively identifying, involving, mentoring and advising candidates.
The program involves two years of school experience focusing on the real instructional needs of E-12 learners. Miller said nearly all of the Minnesota State Mankato candidates’ school experience will involve instruction by teams of master teachers and faculty.
He likens the process to the model used for recruiting star athletes.
“We are working with the Bush Foundation to drastically improve all of our teacher and school leader programs by making them school-based,” he said. “We have strong buy-in from school partners, faculty and administration and state officials. This will alter all of our traditional and alternative programs.”
“It is an investment in teacher quality and retention, focusing on ongoing development and support, and instructional teams that include teacher candidates and college faculty,” he added.
Susan Heegaard, vice president and educational achievement team leader for the Bush Foundation, said the 14 participating universities have redesigned their teacher preparation programs after a rigorous, nine-month planning process. “The universities are taking a bold, courageous stance in guaranteeing the effectiveness of the teachers they train,” she said.
The Bush Foundation asked the institutions to use three strategies to promote and support teacher effectiveness:
• Develop practical methods to measure teacher effectiveness, based on a strong foundation of knowledge from current research data and experience;
• Discover, invest in and use the most promising 21st-century concepts for recruiting, training, coaching and retaining high-caliber new teachers;
• Improve teacher effectiveness for both new and experienced teachers as the core of professional development.
“These are big goals,” said Bush Foundation President Hutchinson. “They’re challenging. And we know we can’t achieve them alone.”
“This landmark effort offers the best chance in our lifetime to make dramatic improvements in the way colleges work together with schools and teachers to guarantee effective solutions that meet the needs of children, families and society,” Davenport said. “I know that our faculty, our E-12 partners and the other participating institutions are working hard to reach this goal.”

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