Southern has joined the Yale School of Medicine’s Comer School Development Program and the New Haven Public Schools in a partnership designed to improve teacher training.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Mich., recently awarded a $600,000 grant for the creation of the Collaborative for Developmentally Centered Education. The project will enable Southern students to participate in professional development opportunities in the New Haven schools, which are coordinated by the Comer program.
Michael Ben-Avie, director of assessment, said those professional development workshops previously were limited to the teachers in the New Haven school system, and therefore did not include the Southern students.
“The benefit to this collaboration is that they will now be part of the workshops, which focus on coordination of child development,” Ben-Avie said. “They help teachers assess why students are not learning, and whether the problems are social, physical, cognitive, language-based, psychological or ethical.”
He lauded James P. Comer, founder of the Comer program, as a national expert on child development. “He sits on various panels across the country and understands the broad landscape of education,” Ben-Avie said.
SCSU also has created a new course to apply the developmental knowledge, according to Ben-Avie. It will be taught for the first time in the spring.
Stephen J. Hegedus, dean of the School of Education, thanked the Kellogg Foundation for its support, as well as the Comer program and the New Haven Public Schools. “This program will help us effectively prepare students to understand the needs of child and adolescent development,” Hegedus said.
