University Courses on
Mathematics and Science Content Knowledge
Context: University Participation
SIDEBAR: Faculty
Evaluators asked course instructors to discuss the advantages of teaching these courses and what their universities found worthwhile about their participation. Among the benefits mentioned were:
- Universities valued the tuition funds and new students that the CMSI courses attracted.
- University-school partnerships helped the university fulfill community outreach missions.
- Universities developed and supported new programs and courses related to the CMSI courses.
- University pre-service teaching programs benefited from ties to schools that were strengthened when practicing teachers participated in the CMSI courses,
- Faculty learned by working closely with their CMSI CPS co-instructors.
- Faculty gained opportunities for scholarship, grant writing, and service work through their CMSI courses.
Instructors described the value their universities placed on the partnership as a way to bring new students to their campuses. In particular, the CPS request offered some institutions a chance to, as one instructor put it, “break into the business” of teacher professional development for CPS teachers. Universities were excited about the “potential to grow” in this area. Instructors at several of the institutions spoke about how these programs increased institution name recognition with CPS teachers. One explained that his institution was “underrated for a lot of years” despite their good work with teachers and that this program could help them move to “another level of importance in the Chicagoland area.” Universities that were more established in teacher professional development saw an opportunity to increase enrollments. One instructor, whose university was already well known to CPS teachers, spoke about the possibility of teachers pursuing their professional development even further and joining the university’s masters’ degree program.
The participating private universities were positive about the tuition stipends teachers received from OMS. One of the instructors talked about this:
. . . elementary teachers have to have ongoing professional development . . . And so we could position ourselves to do some of [this]. But traditionally we haven't been successful with that because we're so much more expensive than the state institutions. So that's been a real drawback. But with the CUSP, there was a potential to have the tuition, you know, have tuition taken care of and so I made a case for us.
University staff were optimistic about the potential for tuition stipends drawing teachers. These staff were disappointed when they were not able to meet adequate enrollment numbers for their CMSI courses. There was concern by some at private universities when they needed to discount tuition for CPS teachers. One person pondered whether they really “owed” this to CPS. There was also a comment regarding the long lead-time required by the university versus the short timeframe required by CPS.
Instructors described ongoing negotiations with their departments and colleges to free up their time to teach these CMSI courses and, in some cases, to give teachers additional tuition breaks to compete better with other universities. The instructors often had to “sell” the CMSI courses to their Deans and other university administrators.
You know they [the University] had to invest my time and agree for me to do it and it counted as part of my load . . . So I convinced [several upper administrators at the University]. And I think, you know, [these administrators] have been real supportive. . . . . It's, I see it as kind of a risky thing . . . for [our University] to do this . . . it takes. . . I mean it's already taken a good deal of my time. We've had a couple of committees and the Provost's been involved. And I'm spending so much time this summer working on a proposal for a four course sequence that I'm trying to sell to the administration here. . . And I am pushing that, you know, that we [at the University] should give a tuition reduction because we're, it's part of our mission to work with CPS teachers and we aren't really doing that now. And if we do that, then we are, we become close to competitive with University X, University Y and those places.
Universities offering these courses had to consider the effect of the courses on their staffing needs. One university instructor, concerned about program sustainability, noted that the creation and teaching of these courses rested with a relatively few individuals, adding to often overfull workloads. However an instructor at another institution explained with pleasure that the university had just hired a new person to work on math/science education teacher professional development—noting that this could help ease his workload because, “there’s a limit to how many nights I can work!”
Aside from enrollment and tuition, some of the universities saw their participation as part of their service to the community. Some instructors spoke of how the program helped them fulfill the university’s “agenda of social justice” and service to their neighborhood schools.
In some situations, university instructors spoke of how these CMSI courses had influenced their other courses and programs. One instructor explained this:
I mean [my university] is fully supportive of the program. In fact, you know we’re now designing a [new master’s degree program] based basically on the same model. We’re now realizing that the components that they built into CUSP courses are indeed really important. Now we have a year of experience of teaching such courses. And so you know [my university] is excited about this, you know, designing courses that specifically meet the needs of in-service teachers. We’ve learned from CUSP.
Another instructor felt that working on the CMSI courses helped with her work on the university’s pre-service teacher program. It also encouraged stronger relationships with teachers at local schools—schools that helped the university in turn by hosting pre-service student teachers.
As individuals, a few faculty explained that they learned something important from teaching these courses, particularly through co-teaching with a practicing CPS teacher. This was common for faculty interviews during the 2002-2003 year (Wenzel et al., 2003). However during 2003-2004, very few of the university courses had teachers co-instructing with the faculty because the salaries of these teachers had to be paid partially by the universities rather than being fully paid by CPS. Typically, universities budget for one faculty member to teach a course. If a program does not have large enough enrollments to pay an additional person, the preferred co-teaching model becomes financially unsupportable.
Finally, some individual faculty members contributed to their career/tenure portfolio by doing research and service related to the CMSI courses, in addition to teaching. A couple of the faculty have already published and presented scholarship around their teaching experiences in this program, or plan to. For example, one of the university faculty and CPS co-instructor pairs co-authored a paper and presented it at a professional conference. Others were heavily involved in serving their university as designers of expanded teacher pre-service and professional development programs, related to the CMSI university-based program. Still others had been involved in writing and receiving grant funding to cover their efforts with this and related programs. All of these activities would potentially benefit the faculty instructors’ university careers. However, some faculty explained that they risked their reputations by supporting a program that depended on successful and continued enrollment in their CMSI courses.
Both the universities and individual faculty found significant benefits from their participation. These helped sustain their participation in the program. However, as mentioned in the previous sections, these benefits came at the price of a great deal of faculty work, some dissatisfaction with the support they received, and disappointment in low enrollments for their courses.
University instructors interviewed mentioned that the availability of these programs relied heavily on the tuition subsidies that the OMS gave to the enrolled teachers. For example, in 2004, two spoke at length about the challenge of recruiting teachers to their private-university courses without significant subsidies. Private universities needed to cut tuition costs to be more competitive with public universities, but it was not easy to convince administrators to do this when program enrollments were so low. One instructor noted the issues in this way:
If we don't have Board money, then we can't do it. What teacher is going to be willing to pay, you know like $2,000 to take a course, . . .[when other universities are] offering them, you know, they have grant money. . . . But there are plenty of programs around where teachers have to pay almost nothing. And so we're going to be asking students to pay $2,000. It ain't going to happen. So I guess one of the real difficult things for me is on the one hand I'm trying to convince people [at my university] we ought to go for this. But . . . if we go for it, we invest the time and effort and then a year or two from now we got this thing up and going and then there's no more tuition money, then who looks bad? Me. I've invested university resources in a program that we have to scrap. So, I mean, it all makes me kind of nervous.
The active recruitment of teachers to these courses was and is critical. The enrollment of teachers into these courses was not always consistently high, even with tuition subsidies and OMS help with recruitment. Analysis of the K-5 and Middle Grades endorsement program courses (Fall 2003, Summer 2004, and Winter 2005) showed that of the 52 scheduled courses, five had to be cancelled due to low enrollments.
Asked by one of the evaluators about cancellations and low enrollments in other courses, one instructor explained that she would keep offering the course, but worried that the university had their doubts about the sustainability of this:
. . . but if something doesn’t change I’m running out of believability. People say I’ve heard that before. So if I didn’t believe in it, it wouldn’t be picked up.
All of the cancelled courses were at private universities. Instructors interviewed mentioned their concern that higher course tuitions at most private universities made recruitment challenging. Several faculty expressed frustration that more active recruitment, in addition to the catalogs, was not undertaken to help avoid the cancellations. Several instructors described the importance and value of the work the OMS did to recruit teachers and coordinate the program. One instructor noted in 2004:
The coordination, the catalogue, the taking enrollments, and being able to advertise it for us to have a central location to deposit this. The catalogue is extremely helpful for us to look at. Who was offering what courses when? Where did we fit in? To me that’s been extremely helpful--that administrative piece.
Another instructor commented in 2004 on a number of ways that the recruitment and enrollment process could be improved. For example, in several courses teachers had not received CPS acceptance letters (as of halfway through the semester in one case, and as of the last day of the course in another) confirming their enrollment in the course/program. Further, according to one instructor, the CPS applications did not provide the instructor with useful information about the teachers enrolled in the course. Working to improve enrollments was difficult because it was unclear who made OMS policy decisions about the courses. Initially, the OMS used manual, paper-based rosters to keep track of course enrollees. This record-keeping system, at times, made it difficult to identify which CPS teachers took which courses.
