Education, MAT

Program Learning Outcomes

Teaching for Diversity & Social Justice Strand

• Understand that social justice issues are always operating, affect everyone, and are manifested in relationships, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.
• Problematize education practices, programs, and policies using social justice concepts, theories, frameworks.
• Contribute to honest and open-minded dialogue across different perspectives, cultures, experiences.
• Teach responsively and compassionately with a student advocacy, assets-based orientation vs. deficit perspective.
• Understand institutional, systemic forces of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression and how they play out in classrooms and schools.
• Develop tools to recognize and confront dehumanizing speech and actions.
• Develop a critically reflective teacher identity with the ability to question one’s own assumptions.
• Develop familiarity with and motivation to apply educational principles, approaches, and resources for teaching to diversity and for social justice.

Learning & Teaching/Development Strand

• Develop awareness of classroom teaching as a complex endeavor that involves understanding of curricular knowledge, diverse learners, high leverage pedagogies, classroom community/leadership, multiple forms of assessment, and the contexts of schooling.
• Contemplate the different purposes of education and one’s own classroom teaching, and the implications for our role as teachers that foster our students’ growth as humane, competent, and empowered learners.
• Understand the connections among theories, principles, and classroom practice and critique the assumptions that underlie them.

Curriculum & Instruction Strand

• Teachers are critical consumers of curriculum in the schools so they adapt vs. adopt curricular/instructional materials.
• Teachers conduct ongoing assessment (of students’ strengths, where students are, needs) that informs planning and teaching.
• Teachers know how to develop lesson plans and sequences of instruction.
• Teachers know how to build on student assets to develop literacy and numeracy in the content areas.
• Teachers connect their own curriculum and pedagogy to teaching for diversity and social justice.
• Teachers connect theory to their practice (e.g. how children learn to read to reading instruction; how children develop number sense to math instruction).
• Teachers identify broad and specific curricular purposes (e.g. powerful ideas, skills and strategies).
• Teachers apply frameworks and tools (“nuts and bolts”) to their curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.