Teaching Quality

For years, many of the nation's secondary school students have failed to get the kind of intensive, ongoing literacy instruction they need, either to catch up in the basics or to move beyond them.

As a result, said Professor Sheila Valencia of the University of Washington College of Education, educators and students alike have found ways to work around texts.

Learning science, especially under the rigorous new Next Generation Science Standards, comes with complex linguistic demands for students.

For English language learners (ELLs) and their teachers, those demands can present a barrier to engaging in complex forms of scientific sense-making and decrease students’ future opportunities in STEM disciplines.

Too often, communities are left out of the equation in preparing future teachers.

“We’ve generally done a poor job accessing the knowledge and the assets that exist in our schools and communities,” said Ken Zeichner, Boeing professor of teacher education at the University of Washington College of Education. “There’s this idea that we’re coming in to help save schools and students.”

That’s a view that Zeichner wants to change.

While most practitioners recognize the need to better support students, especially those who have been historically underserved, many struggle in knowing, concretely, how to do so.

Kara Jackson, an assistant professor of education in the University of Washington College of Education, is working to change that and improve middle-grades mathematics teaching and learning at a district-wide scale.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Washington College of Education No. 8 among the nation's best education schools in its annual graduate school ratings, released March 16.

UW College of Education again ranked No. 2 among education schools at public institutions in the U.S., behind only the University of Wisconsin-Madison (at No. 4 overall) in the 2017 edition of the U.S. News ratings. This is the third consecutive year that UW has been ranked second among public institutions by U.S. News.

Amid the tumult of adolescence, with stresses and mental health issues afflicting nearly every teenager, many schools struggle to help students manage their emotions so they can succeed academically and in their lives.

Professor James Mazza is working to change that reality.

University of Washington College of Education faculty and students will present their explorations of what works in education during the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting April 8 - 12 in Washington, D.C. The theme of this year's AERA meeting is "Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies."

As more schools open access to advanced courses, teachers increasingly find students in their classes possess a wide range of reading abilities.

So how are teachers to lead an advanced class when their students' reading abilities may range from the 2nd percentile to the 98th?

University of Washington College of Education Dean Mia Tuan outlines steps that would enable Washington to attract and retain high-quality teachers in an op-ed published January 23 in The Seattle Times.

The latest edition of Research That Matters, "Passion & Promise," explores how the UW College of Education is approaching the biggest challenges in education with a spirit of possibility. The following story about the College's efforts to improve early learning also appears in the online version of the magazine.