Experts in high-poverty schools, special education awarded prestigious Fien Professorships at UF
An expert in preparing teachers for high-poverty schools and a nationally-known authority on special education have each been awarded the prestigious Irving and Rose Fien Professorship in Education at the University of Florida College of Education.
Professor Dorene Ross of the college’s School of Teaching and Learning, and Professor Mary Brownell of the Department of Special Education are the new recipients of the endowed professorship, which for the past decade has supported researchers dedicated to helping “at risk” learners in K-12 schools.
A co-creator of UF’s renowned ProTeach teacher-preparation program, Dorene Ross is well-known for her efforts to bring quality teaching to students living in poverty. She works as a professor-in-residence at Rawlings and Metcalf Elementary Schools in east Gainesville, helping the schools change their cultures and the teachers to develop self-evaluation methods to improve their teaching practice. As a faculty member of the college’s Lastinger Center for Learning, she has helped to design a school reform strategy that focuses on improving outcomes for children through teacher and principal development using coaching, collegial collaboration and inquiry to enhance the capacity of district, school and teacher leaders. She also is part of the leadership team implementing and evaluating systemic reform in elementary schools in Miami, funded by the Kellogg Foundation. Her research interests include teacher socialization for poverty schools, inclusive teacher education and whole school reform.
Ross said she hopes to correct major flaws in the way educators currently approach school reform. One problem, Ross said, is that results of school reform are often assessed by the very individuals who proposed the reform in the first place—undermining the credibility of the findings. When school reform does work, Ross said, it is often closely tied to the efforts of a single reformer, and can’t be translated to other schools.
Ross would like to work collaboratively with other faculty to link them to schools in partner districts and create extensive blended professional development opportunities that couple online access to expert knowledge with school-based coaches who help teachers develop inquiries around their new learning. This approach bypasses the one-size-fits-all approach to teacher professional development and makes it more likely teachers will implement what they learn.
“By drawing on the vast resources available at UF we can create a library where groups of teachers can come to find exactly the material they need to meet the demands of their classrooms,” she said, “rather than asking all the teachers in a single school to study the same material.”
An accomplished special education teacher herself, Mary Brownell has devoted much of her career to helping school systems find ways better ways to prepare and retain teachers who are truly qualified to teach special-needs students and other high risk learners. She is the former co-director of UF’s Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education, a nationally recognized center for conducting and synthesizing research on policies and strategies for retaining and improving the quality of special educators. Much of her research is dedicated to understanding the motivations and characteristics of the best special education teachers—with an eye toward helping school systems develop such teachers and retain them.
Brownell is currently working on a U.S. Department of Education-funded effort to create a new model for professional development for special education teachers. She said she would like to spend the extra funding from the Fien professorship to attract graduate students and work with other colleagues interested in literacy to develop a better knowledge base of how to teach reading, particularly to high-risk learners and those with disabilities. She is interested particularly in finding ways to incorporate technology into the work she and her colleagues are doing. She believes that advances, such as virtual reality technology, hold enormous potential for improving the initial preparation and ongoing professional development of all teachers, including special education teachers.
She says using technology to improve teachers’ abilities to teach high-risk students reading would have significant advantages over current approaches to teacher education and professional development.
“Teachers and teacher education students could have access to high-quality examples of instruction and they may even be able to practice in interactive, virtual reality environments that would allow them to learn strategies before trying them out on students,” she said.
Brownell believes that the University of Florida should lead the way in developing educational technology that has potential to significantly improve teachers’ knowledge and classroom instruction in literacy. According to her, teachers providing literacy instruction to students with disabilities and other high-risk learners need to be the strongest in the system.
“At the University of Florida, we have researchers in education and other fields, such as computer science, that could make such a dream a reality,” she said.
The Fien Professorship was created in by the late Irving Fien, founder of Fine Distributing, a Miami-based food distribution company. In 1998, Fien made a gift establishing the endowed professorship in honor of his wife Rose, who had died the year before. With matching funds from the state and additional gifts from the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, the professorship is now backed by $1.17 million in funds.
“Irving Fien’s gift has a greater impact than he probably anticipated,” said Catherine Emihovich, dean of the College of Education. “He wanted to pay back the debt he felt he owed to the public education system, and he wanted to do his part to make the world a better place. In an era of shrinking government funding, gifts like his are much more vital to education than they were just five to 10 years ago.”
