Overview
The Professional Education Unit (PEU) at SUNY Brockport maintains an Advisory Board to support our continuous improvement efforts. The Advisory Board is made up of internal stakeholders, including faculty, staff, administrators, and students, and external stakeholders, including teachers, school counselors, principals, superintendents, and other partners. The Advisory Board meets twice per year, where they are provided with an update on PEU developments and assessment results, and are asked to provide their input on our programs. The PEU then presents feedback from the Advisory Board to all PEU faculty and staff at an annual meeting, to ensure feedback is considered as part of our efforts to improve programs.
Results
During the 2023-2024 Advisory Board Meetings, the Board provided feedback on behavioral issues of k-12 students, effective classroom management techniques, classroom management and de-escalation resources for teachers, teacher shortage areas, New York State’s proposals to change pathways to teacher certification in New York, and educator preparation programs that address the needs of K-12 schools and also fit into NYS’ proposals to change certification. Feedback from the Advisory Board was shared with faculty to inform their instruction on classroom management issues and strategies, and it was used to create a reference guide for teacher candidates that includes common classroom management strategies and a list of resources to learn more about their implementation. Advisory Board feedback has also been used in internal meetings to discuss program revisions and the proposal of new programs that would meet the needs of schools and leverage proposed regulatory changes to certification pathways in New York. These potential revisions are actively being worked on while we wait for the certification proposals to be voted on by the NYS Board of Regents, which is expected to occur in spring 2025.
During the 2022-2023 meetings, the PEU Advisory Board provided feedback on cybersecurity issues facing school districts, school IT policies related to security and data privacy, the assessment of our candidates’ ability to use technology during student teaching experiences, Brockport’s professional certification program offerings (specifically Literacy and School Counseling), schools’ teacher and staff shortage areas, and strategies to address barriers that sometimes prevent the University from placing candidates in clinical experiences into areas of need for districts, such as transportation and contractual issues. As a result of the Advisory Board’s feedback, the PEU updated our curricula and assessment instrument regarding our candidates’ use of technology in schools to more closely match schools’ needs, and has continued its work developing Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with districts to ease the candidate placement process.
During the 2021-2022 meetings, the PEU Advisory Board provided feedback on teacher shortage areas, the mentoring of new teachers, professional development areas that are helpful for new teachers, dispositional concerns of new teachers, ideas to enhance family engagement skills of new teachers, and helped to judge the quality of Brockport’s field experience and student teaching evaluation instruments. Their suggestions have been presented to the PEU, and are in the process of being considered and implemented. As a result of the Advisory Board’s feedback, the PEU updated its curricula to better prepare its candidates to engage families, and revised the unit-wide student teaching rubric to improve the clarity of the rubric’s language.