UIU hosts Iowa Dept. of Ed. prof. seminar
FAYETTE, Iowa (June 18, 2007) – From June 19-21 Upper Iowa University will host teams of Iowa middle and high school teachers and administrators as well as secondary teacher education faculty members for an Iowa Summer Professional Seminar.
The three-day professional development session will focus on Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), a research-based strategy that engages students in the process of differentiating the types of questions that can be asked of a text. QAR gives teachers a framework for organizing comprehension strategy instruction across all grade levels from elementary through high school and in a variety of content areas.
The seminar is funded by the Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant awarded to the Iowa Department of Education, the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners and the Iowa Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and is one of several planned for this summer.
Upper Iowa University faculty who are members of the six major project teams of the Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant includes Dr. John Andersen, Assistant Professor of Education; Dr. Dawn Behan, Associate Professor of Education; Dr. Janet Kehe, Assistant Professor of Education and Dr. Gail Moorman Behrens, Director of UIU Teacher Education and President of the Iowa Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. This is the second year for the grant.
Seminar leader Dr. Nance Wilson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning Principles at University of Central Florida, Daytona Beach, earned a Ph.D. in Reading, Writing and Literacy at the University of Illinois-Chicago. It was there she studied with Dr. Taffy Raphael, the researcher who developed and tested the efficacy of QAR in improving students’ text understanding. Dr. Wilson has consulted with the Chicago Public Schools since 2003 and with the Iowa Department of Education since 2005.
For more information about Upper Iowa University’s teacher education program or other majors, visit www.uiu.edu.