Teacher Retention and Renewal through Visualization and Immersive Technologies in Rural Education

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The goal of this project is to support teacher retention and renewal through professional development institutes for two cohorts of rural teachers over 42 months. The first cadre will consist of 56 teachers, 28 from North Carolina and 28 from Illinois, constituting 7 teams in each state. The second cadre will consist of 104 middle and high school mathematics and science teachers from North Carolina and Illinois, 52 from each of the two states. Thus there are 13 teams from North Carolina and 13 teams from Illinois in each cadre. The following workshops and institutes will be conducted: Summer Institutes 2002-2005; Fall Workshops, 2004-2005; and Spring Workshops, 2003-2006.The project addresses four interrelated elements for the revitalization of rural communities: 1) building and sustaining a community of master teachers who support novice teachers through mentoring programs; 2) providing resources and training to develop teachers' use of visualization technologies and content expertise to create pedagogically sound conceptual models for student learning; 3) enhancing standards-based curricula through the use of visualization technologies to encourage student engagement; and 4) developing a sustainable and scalable model that continues to assist teachers to become effective leaders and agents of change.