COE is showing up big at national conferences

At times, Dr. Meredith Critchfield looks around a conference hall and marvels.

“The level of Grand Canyon University participation in these major national educator preparation conferences is pretty remarkable,” said GCU’s Dean of the College of Education. “You’d think it was a GCU conference but, no, we are just getting accepted at extraordinarily high rates.”

Seven COE faculty will present at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California, that begins Friday. Nine Lopes are slated to present at April’s Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation (AAQEP) symposium in Phoenix, with two more at the Higher Learning Commission Annual Conference in Chicago.

Conference organizers typically use a blind review process, so there’s no behind-the-scenes favorites.

“The acceptance rate really reflects the quality of work we are doing,” said Katie Sprute, a COE senior faculty chair who has presented seven times at national conferences in the last five years. “So much of it is in alignment with what we do at GCU and the pressing issues taking place in education today.”

She said many institutions of higher education have expanded online learning, and that’s right up GCU’s alley as an innovator in the field for more than 15 years.

“It’s important to share what we are doing and help them innovate and not have to reinvent the wheel,” said Sprute, who will join Dr. Sheila Damiani at AAQEP to present, “Building Virtual Bridges: Fostering Community in Remote Higher Education.”

She is focusing on how to build that community, especially among online faculty.

“In COE, we have (several hundred) faculty, and a large percentage are adjunct faculty. So as a leader of our college, I need to make sure I offer support and build relationships with faculty that help us retain them.”

One way, she will share, is with the development of a community building committee, which she chairs at GCU. Collaborative communities are now part of every college, a network where faculty can connect and share knowledge.

The faculty has become so active at submitting to conferences that they are now sought, said COE Associate Dean Dr. Emily Pottinger. “You make a name for yourself, and they ask you back over and over again.”

COE leaders said this didn’t happen by accident. They analyzed major conferences where they could make the most impact and developed scholarly work to share at them.

Attendance at the conferences also helps to build a network across the country.

“They see who we are, the level of excellence we supply, not only in programming but in scholarly work, and also how we uplift the field of education,” Pottinger said.

GCU also gains partnerships – such as with a company called 240 Tutoring – or gleans ideas from others at the conferences.

Pottinger is presenting at three upcoming conferences, including at AACTE (“Setting Sail for Success: Educator Dispositions as the Captain's Compass,” with Julianne Brett), on professionalism among educators.

 “It’s a hot topic because of the lay of the land in education. There are a lot of eyes on us and criticism of the field,” she said. “We want to make sure we are preparing future educators who will uphold this level of excellence.”

Teachers are credentialed, just like nurses, so it’s important to live the part professionally, while also advocating for the profession, which is another of her presentation topics.

“This is highly regulated, and people are making decisions about my profession who may not have a background or understanding of my profession,” she said. “So, we have really honed in on the last couple of years getting our ground students involved in the legislature, even going to experience what it is like.”

Pottinger also is presenting on the use of artificial intelligence to prepare teacher candidates for assessment exams, a system currently under development at GCU where assignments and quizzes are tailored to the education field.

Teaching other teachers is a natural for COE Faculty Chair Dr. Alicia Kozimor. She does typically three conferences every year, including this year’s AAQEP presentation, “From Recruitment to Retention: Comprehensive Approaches for Sustaining Future Educators.”

She will share how that in two years COE has increased retention of students in the College of Education, to make it the highest among ground students at the university.

Kozimor said focusing staff and faculty on support for students’ social and professional growth by having leadership also reach out to students personally has helped.

“We are making a concrete effort to make connections with students if they are not coming to class or are not participating, to lift them up and make our GCU classroom a safe space to learn to be professionals before heading into their own classrooms.”

It involved a lot of personal contact by leadership – another area GCU can share with others that has worked.

“We knew it was going to be a lot of phone calls and talking to students, but we buckled down to do it,” she said. “Sometimes they think of us faculty as their parents and when I call them, it’s like ‘oh grandma is calling, and I’ve got to pick it up.’

“Just knowing that we care, we are noticing when they are not there, and we want them to be there.”

That is a GCU process worth sharing – at conferences far and wide.

Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at mike.kilen@gcu.edu

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AACTE presentations

AAQEP presentations