Wake Forest University
VIF Master of Arts in Education Degree Program
Program Description
The Visiting International Fellows program at Wake Forest University was created to provide a masters in education for teachers from other nations who are teaching in America for three years. The program features intense coursework, action research, integrated technology, professional leadership, and an electronic portfolio modeled on that used in National Board certification. We wanted to offer a program that would enrich their teaching in America and prepare them to return as leaders to the schools of their countries. The VIF masters program we created is taught by a highly qualified faculty, requires three summers of coursework and is offered at greatly reduced tuition.
Theoretical Framework: A Starting Point
The conceptual framework that guided our development of the VIF program was the one created by the department for both its elementary and secondary programs. It would not make sense to develop a program or evaluate its effectiveness using any other standard.
The eleven course curriculum we created fed off this conceptual stream and our instruction style and course content were guided by it as well. We, of course, were aware of a need to consider the VIF teachers’ unusual and diverse cultures and the schools they would return to, so we shaped the program accordingly to make it meet their special needs and interests.
Goals and Objectives: A Global Imperative
Wake Forest is nationally known for its technology initiatives but its purposes are also very intentionally directed toward developing in its students a global perspective. Wake Forest owns houses in London, Vienna, Venice, Beijing, Dijon, Harakata, and Salamanca where it offers year round programs. Half of our students study in these houses with Wake Forest faculty or in other study abroad programs. The Department of Education, moreover, offers the oldest and largest travel abroad course. So we were very eager to partner with the Visiting International Faculty in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to begin a Masters program for a select group of their teachers from South America, Central America, and other nations such as Canada, France and Peru. The goal for our program was to enrich these teachers’ three year tenure in the United States and to prepare them to return to their countries as leaders in their schools. We wanted, as well, to have them interact as much as possible with the talented teacher candidates in our Master Teacher Fellows program so those students could gain some part of that global perspective.
Description of the Program: Developing the Will and Wherewithal
Our first steps in developing the VIF program were taken with the Dean of the Graduate School, Gordon Melson, to determine if such a graduate program were possible. We had an outstanding Master Teacher Fellows program in place that competed with America’s best universities for outstanding graduate students. It is fully funded for each of the 30 fellows who were admitted to the program; each had a full scholarship and a $6,000 living stipend. This successful and very costly program was pertinent to our VIF hopes because the university had already invested significant resources to attract excellent students to its teacher education program. We understood that we could not realistically expect to create such support for a second program, especially one that was not preparing teachers for America’s public schools. Moreover, we wanted to offer a new and specially designed program, rather than merely fill spaces in our existing courses, so some tuition had to be generated to contract a team of excellent professors who would make up the new faculty for the VIF program. We also knew that tuition at Wake Forest, $830 per credit hour, put the 33 hour program out of reach for these visiting teachers. Because we realized that no scholarships or stipends would likely be forthcoming, we asked instead for a more than 80% tuition reduction that would set the three hour course tuition at $410.
The special tuition structure was approved because the university wanted to continue to develop leadership in public school teachers and to build an even stronger global stance in our program. With this incredibly reduced tuition structure in place, we began to design an eleven course Masters in Education program that would attract able teachers and would offer a strong curriculum of coursework that would help the VIF teachers advance professionally.
Description of the Program: Building a Curriculum for Leaders
Because our programs have focused on providing teacher leaders, we wanted to attract strong teachers who would be able to meet the high standards of our program and would take leadership roles in their countries when they returned in three years. So as we worked together to design a challenging curriculum we knew from the first that we wanted it to be similar to the MTF program yet appropriate to the entering cohort’s academic preparation and their teaching experience. Because they had been taught for three years, we knew it would not have a student teaching component; nevertheless we wanted it to have as much field experience as possible. We wanted the new ideas and skills embedded in the program to be tested by our VIF teachers in their American classrooms.
Among the eleven courses to be offered we wanted to include some of those from the MTF program that made it so strong.
We wanted the VIF program essentially to be built around an action research component, a strong course in technology, a course in educational leadership, and a course that connected them with very able student teachers of AP and the rare educational environment of North Carolina’s Governor’s School, and a professional development portfolio course.
The action research is built on a broad Educational Research course (721) and a follow-up research seminar (764) where VIF teachers examined the most recent research findings on classroom instruction. These two research components lead up to action research in their classrooms during their second school year in America. VIF teachers develope excellent studies on such topics as “in-class and on-line writing instruction”, “the effectiveness of language emersion as a means of teaching ESOL”, and a number of other very school-applicable inquiries. Their findings are presented at a research forum in their third summer that is attended by the other two cohorts in the program and guests from nearby schools.
The technology course (607) is outstanding in its ability to help the VIF teachers learn how to use advanced technology in an integrated fashion to advance their students’ academic success. Our department’s technology program was one of six ISTE award winners, so they receive first class instruction. At the same time they are made aware of how far behind many schools are in technology and how the teachers need to adapt their cutting edge knowledge to take advantage of the resources available. Many of the VIF teachers, in fact, use their new knowledge and skills to push their American schools to new awareness and application of technology.
The VIF leadership course (758) embraces some of the strongest principles used in fields from business and industry to non-profit and community services. The instructor has served as a principal of a school, so the course places primary emphasis on the literature in the field of education and each VIF teacher completes an internship with outstanding local leaders from a wide array of fields.
In addition, the VIF teachers participate in an Advanced Placement Institute (787) where they are taught by outstanding AP teachers in their field and where they learn alongside teachers who plan to teach AP in schools across the Southeast. After a week of study in the AP Institute, the VIF teachers are engaged in a weeks internship at North Carolina Governor’s School where they observe extremely gifted 17 year old students being taught using many of these advanced methods. We want our VIF teachers to be immersed in this idyllic educational setting so they will have a sense of how exciting teaching and learning can be. We want them to return to their far away homes with a model for excellence in education that will transform their schools. Just as our MTF program is designed to attract outstanding students who will become leaders in the public schools, we created the VIF program to shape the schools of our neighbors in the lands faraway.
The Professional Development Course (716) is modeled on our Star Teachers Conceptual Framework and the NBPTS certificate. It features reflection on the artifacts of their classroom and i-movies of their teaching with reflective commentary. Beyond this course work, we developed structures that insured that VIF teachers are able to meet with our Master Teacher Fellows and other teachers in social and professional settings. We set up class sessions for both groups where each of the VIFs speak informally about teaching in their native lands and the place of education in their culture. This is a very easy-going session but a very effective means for expanding our MTFs understanding of the broader world of education. We also established a MTF/VIF lunch where we pair two MTF students with one VIF teacher to let them interview them about their experience as teachers. We also try to make our VIF Research Forum a place where local teachers and other graduate students from our program can see the fine action research the VIF teachers have developed in their classrooms. A chance for even more engagement with American teachers was created for VIF teachers when they were in class for a week with AP teachers across the region and when they serve as interns at Governor’s School and with leaders in the Winston-Salem community. A strong current of engagement is also created when they are given a full week in the Schools Attuned program led by very able American teachers. All of this activity transformed both the VIF teachers and the American teachers who come to admire and have deep affection for them.
Indications of Success: Program Evaluation
We believe that our experiment in global leadership has been a success and will continue to grow and that it will enrich the VIF teachers who join it. The course evaluations have always been extremely high and that is gratifying: No item on our ten statement course evaluation instrument ever received less than 3.3 on a 4.0 scale on any of our course evaluations. The end-of –program evaluations have been even more encouraging. Those teachers who have spent three years with us and now return to their native lands have spoken in their program evaluations in a laudatory way about the benefits of the program and the excellence of the faculty. One VIF teacher wrote of the challenge to think carefully about new teaching strategies: “I have enjoyed the most the instruction that has pushed me to be a better teacher and leader. If I weren’t enrolled in this program I wouldn’t have learned the gamut of strategies I did, and most important, reflected on my teaching where it is going and what I want to continue doing.” Another VIF teacher assessed the power of the program in terms of how she felt about herself and her place in the program: They “respect our diversity. They gave us a new vision about education. They made us feel each one of us was special.” A third VIF teacher took a very broad look at what her three summers at Wake Forest had meant to her: “I’ve loved our having experienced what it feels like to study at an American University. The program was great, the teachers were wonderful and the treatment of the university was just perfect. Thanks Wake Forest for teaching me a lot about my profession and for showing me how nice America is.” And when asked how they would change things in the program one VIF teacher spoke altruistically of the future: “Don’t even think to stop giving more VIFers a chance to improve at such a prestigious University.” Finally, another said simply but globally, “I can’t think of anything I would change. Thanks!”
We can think of things to change to make the program better as it moves forward and we will. We have the rare flexibility at Wake Forest to drop courses, faculty, and events that do not work well for the VIF teachers. We have added an orientation dinner that includes all of our VIF teachers and increasingly developed events and course segments that will help the VIF teachers professionally and enrich our other graduate students’ global awareness.
Unique Contribution: Special Timeframe
We believe the VIF program is unique in that it offers powerful teaching ideas and skills to teachers who are in America long enough to try them out in American classrooms yet must leave for home soon enough to take them back to their own cultures where, with the status of a US masters degree and the power of this new pedagogy, they can become leaders in their nation’s schools. It has the rare quality, too, to have been created to meet this group of international teachers’ interests rather than their fitting into a pre-existent program needed to fill empty seats and meet FTE requirements. It has been a win-win solution.
