History and Mission
A General Introduction to IET
Initiatives in Educational Transformation (IET) is a professional development Master's degree program for licensed, practicing K-12 public school teachers in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The philosophical aim of IET is to help teachers develop a repertoire of practices that challenges them to surface, revisit, and rethink the routines and assumptions that shape their work. Recognizing that the practice of schooling often thwarts what Parker Palmer calls the "inner landscape of a teacher's life," IET seeks to intentionally create spaces where teachers can reflect upon their practice and, in the critical company of others, design thoughtful and constructive responses to the obstacles that inhibit student learning.
The IET Experience
IET was founded in 1992 in an unusual collaboration between master teachers and university faculty who were quite worried about lack of effective and coherent professional development for teachers. Today - and 1,500 graduated teachers later - IET has helped to shape a generation of educators who are better able to meet the needs of children and families. Indeed, IET graduates and faculty are sought out after for their insight into the problems and possibilities inherent in public schools and education, and also for the habits and skills they bring to the workplace.
Initiatives in Educational Transformation is hosted by the Graduate School of Education (which is inside the College of Education and Human Development) of George Mason University (Virginia, USA). Teachers enroll from numerous school districts across Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Teachers study on GMU's urban campus in Arlington, or on the Prince William campus, which is in one of the fastest growing counties in the United States.
More than School Reform: We're about Transformation!
Because our goal for teachers is to literally transform their school environments, IET grounds its work with teachers in reflective practice and critical pedagogy, which contributes to the notion of schools as just communities. All aspects of our planning and teaching revolve around the premise that every act of a teacher has moral implications for children and families. This means that teachers struggle with issues of what it means to teach in moral ways, to promote social justice, and to shape the educational context of US schools at the beginning of this new millennium. We consistently make the case for action - that teachers can be agents for change in schools and have the potential to marshal resources for the betterment of children.
We begin by asking teachers to consider the problems they often face in their classrooms - such as how best to teach a topic or idea, or how to maintain a healthy class environment, or how to be inclusive or how to incorporate multiple languages or learning styles. Teachers choose topics that are bothersome to them and their learners and, in collaboration with both colleagues and the children themselves, find new and often ground-breaking solutions. Teachers go about this work using well-tested and progressive methods of research and continuous inquiry. This culminates, we believe, in the creation of an alternative vision for teaching and learning that offers insight into how learning might be done differently within the constraints of current school structures.
In order to create rich learning environments for our young, the faculty of IET firmly believes that teachers must have a vibrant intellectual life of their own. Therefore, the notion of "teaching" in our community is not simply a technical enterprise. It is an art form, a craft that grows and develops and gets better and more effective over time. As teachers-of-teachers, university faculty strive to provide powerful examples of teaching and learning in the graduate school setting. As a result, innovative and evocative learning experiences are the hallmark of our learning cohorts. For example, the sensibilities of the arts, literature, music and drama encourage teachers to re-visit the aims and practices of schooling. And at other times, insights from the social sciences, science, mathematics, and architecture bring new insight into teaching practice.
The Power of Diverse Perspectives
IET recognizes that our society is not just an "American classroom," but a global and interconnected community. Thus, IET works hard to build a graduate-level learning community that enables teachers to not only respond to today’s learner, but prepare themselves - and our young - to live in a complex and complicated world. Therefore, our graduate classroom is filled with all sorts of diversity - age, grade level, years of experience in teaching, race and ethnicity, social and economic class, political and religious dispositions, philosophical orientations, language traditions, nationalities, sexual orientations, and so forth. The robustness of such a community - organized to work collaboratively in small and large groups - provides teachers with a rare opportunity to grapple with the complexities that are present in their classrooms and schools.
University faculty in IET are asked to work in the same fashion as the teacher-students enrolled in our graduate courses. As such, all teaching and curriculum planning is "co-planned" and "co-taught" (as opposed to, say, tag-team planning or teaching). In addition, members of the faculty are sought out for their intellectual and social diversity, which includes a wide array of community and para-professional experiences.
Finally, diversity without a framework that allows for rich interaction would be misguided. Therefore, IET has created special systems that encourage not only reflection and growth, but lasting and generative relationships. For example, as has been noted, this initiative is designed with the belief that collaborative learning communities serve to counter teacher isolation; teachers apply to and work in school-based teams throughout their two-years in the program. Similarly, the program seeks to build close connections between the university and the public schools in which our teacher-students teach. The teacher-students meet each week with their school-based colleagues, and university faculty attend these team meetings at set intervals over the course of the school year. In addition, because all of the IET students are full-time teachers, the schedule of IET is unique. Over the course of their two-year program, graduate students have two weeks of eight-hour class days in the summer and one eight-hour class day each month (often on a Saturday).
The work of IET is to rekindle and focus the passion teachers have for their craft and to give them the kinds of resources that make it happen. Indeed, we think the world can be changed and that it happens one teacher and one classroom at a time.