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Building Bridges: Communities of Practice from K-16

Session 3
Tom Woodward, Tim Stahmer, Jeff McClurken, Tim Owens, Martha Burtis — Henrico County Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, University of Mary Washington

Faculty in higher education regularly express their concern that incoming students are not adequately prepared for college learning, yet they rarely attempt to understand the current pressures and challenges that face K-12 educators. K-12 educators are increasingly pressured to prepare more and more students for higher education, yet they rarely have opportunities to engage in deeper conversations with college faculty about what college teaching and learning is like today.

We believe its time for us to understand one another, generally, as educators, with an overarching, shared goal of teaching todays students, from K-16. In order to empower our students to succeed at all levels, we need to engage in a continuous conversation about the pressures, challenges, and innovations that are occurring in our institutions. Furthermore, we need to be imagining ways in which educators at all levels can collaborate on shared projects and initiatives.

We will introduce this session by talking about existing models for K-16 collaboration and conversation, as well as the barriers to that collaboration. From there, we will work with the audience to brainstorm a range of approaches to fostering K-16 collaboration and conversation within our own communities. Attendees will leave with a list of practical approaches to address the challenge as well as a list of strategies for talking about this challenge with stakeholders in their own professional communities.

Conversational Practice

In addition to fostering informal conversation and collaboration with the attendees in the room, we will be making use of social networking and media tools to invite participation from individuals who arent attending EduCon. This will be particularly useful as a way to reach out to higher education colleagues who dont normally attend this event.

Conversation Links

Presenter Profiles

Jeffrey McClurken
Jeffrey McClurken
University of Mary Washington
Tim Owens
Tim Owens
University of Mary Washington

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