Foundational Principles

The Unit is dedicated to the development of teachers and other professionals who are personally involved in both lifelong learning and in the continuous improvement of the educational systems in which they work. We believe that this endeavor is both noble and necessary for our survival as a society. It is worth the passionate commitment of life’s work. To achieve this goal, the faculty and staff of the Unit are committed to the principles of scholarship, integrity, leadership, and a devotion to service that will help make lifelong learning a reality for us and for those we serve.

The acronym SAILS (Scholarship; Attitudes and Dispositions; Integrity; Leadership; Service) has been adopted to reflect our vision and our responsibilities: It informs the conceptual framework that underpins our vision of teachers and other school personnel; it conveys what we believe to be true in teacher education; it reflects our vision, is easily communicated to others, and lends itself to evaluation. For us at Southern, SAILS represents the core through which our values, beliefs, and dispositions are revealed. It is the thread that ties coursework, field experiences, and faculty-student-teacher interactions together. It is what informs our practice.

We believe that scholarship is an essential ingredient in becoming a lifelong learner. Scholarship requires familiarity with, and a contribution to, that body of knowledge that encompasses ways of knowing and learning; it is a respect for the methodologies of research and for the evaluation of data and ideas necessary to support instructional and leadership initiatives; it is a commitment to persistence and diligence of inquiry that takes one beyond simply a casual exposure to information, ideas, and approaches to problem solving. Above all else, scholarship is an ongoing and proactive effort to try to make things better as we face not only the complexity of the learning process but also the diversity of each individual whom we serve.

As a faculty and staff, the Unit values self-motivation and self-evaluation as the critical elements that help us make a difference in the experience of both our students and educational communities that we serve. We value and respect individual differences as a positive contribution to our society; we value and encourage the participation of all members of a community in the education of their children; we value our own self-development and learning just as we foster learning in others.

The Unit believes that integrity guides our actions through research and practical experience. Integrity means adherence to a professional code of ethics and high standards of conduct. We believe that we must exhibit the courage to do the right things from both a moral and a professional perspective; that failure to do so might very well mean that all our students are not given the opportunity to maximize their potential, to be the very best that they can be.

Leadership is critical in all aspects of learning and education. We believe that all educators should be leaders - teachers, counselors, and coaches as well as superintendents and principals. Self-leadership requires a sense of discipline, clarity of goals, professionalism, and an awareness of our strengths and weaknesses. Leading others requires that we are aware of their individual needs, and that we are willing to help them achieve their goals. Leading a school or other learning community requires shaping of a vision and moving toward that vision in an explicit fashion. Finally, leading a community requires active engagement in issues of critical importance to that community. This engagement is not reactive but proactive; its goal is to help the community clarify its needs and expectations of its educational system. To exercise a successful leadership role in today’s educational community, leadership approaches should be drawn from and developed according to contemporary research. It is no longer sufficient to try to influence, using only traditional methods. School leadership requires an appreciation and exercise of visionary, moral, situational, and transformational leadership approaches. We also believe that a demonstration of these approaches, by example, is the most powerful influence that any leader can exercise.

Understanding the value of service begins with a sense of giving rather than taking. Service requires that we extend beyond the bare requirements of our respective roles or positions in an educational community. Service views the creation and support of a better community as an essential and critical part of student development. To make this a reality, educators need a connection to their school communities that helps them to better understand the lives of their students and their students' families.

The learning outcomes for the Unit are firmly grounded in a knowledge base that encompasses all five principles of the Unit. These learning outcomes clearly recognize that the organization and development of the Unit is guided by the literature on teacher education and recognizes that this literature influences the preparation of teachers and teacher educators (Reynolds, 1989; Wittrock, 1986; Darling-Hammond, 2000). The learning outcomes further recognize that we, as teacher educators, operate within the changing context of public school education, and that education has undergone pervasive reforms since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 (Skrtic, 1991; Lambert, 1995). This is no less apparent in the current No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which will have sweeping implications for colleges of education. Such reforms have essentially questioned the traditional hegemonies of research methodologies within schools and have placed a renewed emphasis on contextual understandings as well as the construction of knowledge as critical ingredients to student success. (Vygotsky, 1962; Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Skrtic, 1991; Lambert, 1995).

Levine and Trachtman (1997) articulated a set of critically important assumptions that guided the fundamental evolution of our Unit:

1. There is a knowledge base about teaching that resides among practitioners.
2. Knowledge about teaching is created in school settings.
3. Teaching and learning must be contextualized if teachers are to be oriented to continuous learning in practice.
4. Teachers’ learning must be collegial in order to generate more knowledge and to produce comfort with public practice and habits of delivering instruction.
5. Teachers’ learning must be problem-based in order to develop a problem-solving orientation toward practice.

The theme of creating lifelong teachers and learners as well as the learning outcomes of our Unit are grounded in theory, reflected in school practice, and constructed within the context of the changing nature of public education today.

Although the Unit encompasses programs in school counseling, administration, and exercise science as well as classroom teaching, the term "teacher" is used to refer to all educators, regardless of specific position within a school system, for all educators are truly teachers. The Unit’s knowledge base is linked to its learning outcomes via SAILS. The key to this knowledge base is its linkage by all programs in the Unit to these five organizing principles.