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Faculty engage in extensive collaboration with educational professionals in many local, state and national contexts. A major strategy for ensuring collaboration with public schools in the state is the PDS Alliance, a partnership between the unit and partner schools. The Alliance is collaboration among professionals in the public schools, university faculty and staff, and KU students designed to enhance education. The Alliance is discussed in detail in Standard 3 and on the web at http://soe.ku.edu/pds/. Over the years, the unit has also been involved with (and provided leadership for) KSDE and other teacher education units in the statewide PDS effort.
This Institutional Report has attempted throughout to emphasize that the professional education efforts of the university are much broader—and deeper—than some narrowly defined licensure unit. The university affects the lives of children and families through its educational research, professional development, and service with a myriad of activities, many integrally connected with the unit but organized through centers and institutes. Additional structures within the unit that embrace collaborative strategies in working with families, children, communities, educational agencies and organizations include:
The Institute for Educational Research and Public Service, established in 1997, serves both unit faculty members and the State of Kansas. This Institute has a two-fold mission. The first part of this mission is to provide faculty with infrastructure support for research. The support includes assistance with identifying funding sources, proposal development, and grant administration. The second part of the Institute's mission is to help schools and other educational agencies respond to initiatives that are educationally beneficial to the State of Kansas and that contribute to the teaching, research, and service missions of the School. The Institute also houses the University’s TRiO programs, administers the state’s afterschool program network, provides professional development to the state’s teachers through Reading First and other grants, and is responsible for coordinating the state’s planning for early childhood and child abuse and neglect efforts for the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund. At the heart of these programs lies an interest in promoting educational opportunity for youth and young adults in the state. The Institute has provided professional services to schools in 85 counties in the state over the past two years, managed many of the unit’s grants and contracts, virtually all of which are clearly collaborative in nature and seek to engage the professional talents of educators and human service providers serving the needs of our state and region.
The Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation (CETE), http://www.cete.ku.edu/, funded primarily by KSDE, established a partnership with all Kansas schools, both public and private, beginning in 1980 with the first state mandated assessment. CETE is responsible for the state’s educational testing program. Communication with teachers, building principals, test coordinators and superintendents takes place several times each year through registration, survey and assessment activities. The Center also visits select schools yearly to conduct pilot testing, and regularly brings in teachers from across the state to participate in scoring sessions for the Kansas assessment performance activities.
The University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (CRL), http://www.ku-crl.org/, conducts research that focuses on solving the problems that limit individuals' quality of life and their ability to learn and perform in school, work, home, or the community. CRL is concerned with the validation of assessment and instructional practices that can be used with broadly diverse groups. It is committed to translating the procedures it validates into instructional materials and products that practitioners can use. CRL operates an international network to train educators throughout the world to use the products of its research. Through both its research and training missions, CRL has developed a broad array of working partnerships with hundreds of schools, school districts, and state departments of education. Since its inception, CRL has engaged in research agreements with hundreds of educational entities and has trained in excess of 200,000 practitioners in more than 4,000 school districts to use its materials and procedures. Within the CRL, Advanced Learning Technologies, or ALTEC, http://www.altec.org/, provides instructional Web-based resources, professional development, program support, scaleable online assessment, and assistance for those with special needs, utilizing the most advanced and innovative technologies available to improve teaching and learning.
The Beach Center on Disability, http://www.beachcenter.org, is affiliated with the unit’s Department of Special Education. Primary foci of Beach Center research include assistive technology, disability policy, family-professional partnerships, family quality of life, health care, foster care and adoption, positive behavior support, and self-determination. The Beach Center is committed to listening to the priorities of families, incorporating family priorities into the Center's research agenda, to carry out research in a participatory way, and to ensure that the research makes a meaningful and sustainable difference in the lives of families who have children with disabilities.
The Center for Psychoeducational Services, http://soe.ku.edu/research-services/cps/, operates under the umbrella of the unit and is a training site for candidates. Student clinicians in school psychology, counseling psychology, reading, special education, and other education fields who earn credit while they gain practical experience working directly with clients staff CPS. Faculty who are certified or licensed in their fields supervises all student clinicians.
