EDHD shares plan for $4.5 million grant at Atlanta conference

Project IMPACT is a five-year teacher education program to promote preparation, effective instruction

By Andrew Addessi

At the recent American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education meeting in Atlanta, a team from Bowling Green State University's College of Education and Human Development shared an update on the $4.5 million teacher education grant that the U.S. Department of Education awarded it in 2018.

The college’s Project IMPACT is a five-year, $4.5 million, teacher education program to promote teacher preparation and effective instruction in three local districts — Toledo Public, Springfield Local and Perrysburg schools — and a public charter school, Toledo School for the Arts. Each helped decide which areas the project would emphasize in its schools, from culturally responsive teaching to universal design for learning.

At AACTE’s annual meeting in Georgia, Project IMPACT and its partners presented “Disrupting Partnership Norms: Educating for the Change our Partners Need,” focusing on two areas: collaboration and field coaching.

“The main focus of Project IMPACT is to develop strong partnerships with our partner districts in order to provide deeper connections for our teacher candidates,” said Dr. Tracy Huziak-Clark, an assistant dean for Educator Preparation and Partnerships who leads Project IMPACT.

“Our collaborations allow teacher education faculty to better understand the needs of our partners and to better prepare our teacher candidates to enter the workforce, ready to meet the current needs of PK-12 students,” she said.

Project IMPACT’s leadership team and its partner districts share a goal of promoting teacher preparation while fulfilling a secondary purpose of retaining new teachers. Additional institutions nationwide benefit from and build on this work as it progresses.