Center for Teaching and Learning

Research Projects

Scenes of people thinking

What is it like to collaborate with other teachers? What is it like for the teacher to experience frustration and failure? What emotions and thoughts do these experiences generate within the educator? How do these reactions become expressed in their teaching? What methods can a teacher use to establish an optimal environment for learning? The Center for Teaching and Learning is pleased to support future teachers by offering a forum by which these questions could be explored through the Research Groups.

Co-Teaching

The collaborative approach to the classroom instills a new paradigm shift to traditional methods of instruction. It is also an approach that is in high demand in educational settings. Yet, new teachers are rarely exposed to methods of co-teaching. This project aims at researching effective practices in the university setting in order to provide teachers with the necessary tools for successful collaboration.

Connecting Cultures

Culture has long been known to be an influencing factor both in and out of the classroom, impacting how teachers and students communicate, how families and schools interface, and how all education professionals interact. This project is centered around creating more examples of how to bridge cultures that all educators can take into their classrooms and schools, moving the theory into their practice.

Neurodevelopment

The Neurodevelopment Core Project is focused on taking the neurodevelopmental constructs, finding effective ways of teaching these constructs to pre-service and in-service educators, and researching their impact in the classroom. This core project aims for teachers to effectively develop customized plans by creating profiles (strengths/ weaknesses) and implementing strategies (accommodation/ interventions) that relate directly to individual students.

Strengths-Based Assessment & Intervention

Pointing out a student's strengths can create a momentum that activates an indispensable self-resource. This core group is studying the potential impact of a paradigm shift where the focus changes from a deficit based perspective to exploring and using strengths to empower the student and their family.

Middle Eastern-North African-Southwest Asian Family Experiences with Special Education

Students with disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse families face unique challenges for which teachers and administrators need appropriate training. Research on the experiences of diverse families provides the understanding needed to form effective family-school partnerships and quality special education. The current research aims to gather data on a previously overlooked population: Middle Eastern, North African, and Southwest Asian (MENASWA) families that have children with disabilities.