Cal State Long Beach received a $920,000 Improving Teacher Quality (ITQ) grant from the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) and will be working with Cabrillo and Jordan high school to support teacher development in English and history.
According to CPEC’s website, “An ITQ grant is a multi-year partnership between one or more institutions of higher education and one or more local education agencies in high-poverty areas.”
Cabrillo and Jordan high school are the lowest performing high schools in the Long Beach Unified School District and have a low socio-economic status.
“We’re trying to target high needs schools,” director of CSULB’s History Project Dave Neumann said.
Faculty from CSULB’s College of Education and departments of English, history, liberal studies and teacher education will be involved in the project.
Directors of the project agree that the ultimate goal is to improve student performance through shifts in teacher disposition and practice.
One of the biggest areas of need in the schools is literacy, which is the reason English-language arts and history-social science were chosen as the focus subjects, Neumann said. The goal is to improve expository reading and writing to help students in all subjects.
According to the press release, “The grant, which was awarded jointly to the CSULB history and English departments and College of Education, will provide teacher training… to deepen their content knowledge, learn discipline-specific literacy and pedagogical strategies, and collaborate within and between departments in refining instruction.”
The money from the grant will help pay for materials and personnel in order to give teachers time out of their schedules to be able to sit down and collaborate with each other on effective teaching strategies.
“Teaching strategies are often seen as generic,” Neumann said. The program will train teachers in specific strategies for their specific subjects.
CPEC has been conducting grant competitions and supporting initiatives that target improving the curriculum knowledge and instructional competence of the California teaching workforce for more than 20 years, according to their official website. The current ITQ Grants Program is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
“We’re excited about the idea of partnering up with the high schools,” Neumann said. “We have a lot of hardworking teachers and we want to do what we can to support them and improve education for students.”
Teaching workshops for the ITQ program are expected to start in June 2011.
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