Assessment Disseminatin Project

Fifteen Emporia Middle School students have been staying after school to help train future teachers.

The students volunteered to assume roles in a series of classroom skits that were videotaped for future teacher preparation classes at Emporia State University. The skits will be used to demonstrate effective and ineffective teaching techniques.

The project was coordinated by Anthony Ambrosio, director of Multicultural/Diversity Assessment and Jerry Long, associate dean of The Teachers College. The skits were performed with the cooperation of Darla Mallein, EMS eighth grade social studies teacher.

"Basically, we are acting out vignettes of classroom scenes that demonstrates what teachers shouldn't do," Mallein said. "I am the teacher who does everything wrong."

Four scripts were written for Mallein and the eighth grade students, all with multicultural or diversity themes, Ambrosio said. Scripts were based on input from education professional on campus about what skills are important for future training. For example, one of the scripts deals with helping teachers avoid cultural or gender biases.

Students attended rehearsals after school several days, with the actual taping done two afternoons last week.

The video tapes are among new course materials that will help future teachers deal with diversity issues in the classroom and promote learning for all students, he said. Teachers in training will view the videos and talk about things they could do in the situations depicted.

"Thus we hope to gauge how our aspiring public school teachers would solve problems before they get out in real world classrooms," Ambrosio said.

The video project also will be presented to principals, teachers, university faculty and other education professionals at a national conference in Seattle in June. The presentation was one of 21 selected for the conference, he said.

Middle school helps with videos showing teacher dos and don'ts