Angela Prince is preparing future teachers for achievement with students in special education.
The new assistant professor during the Iowa State University School of Education focuses her research on behavioral discrepancies and special education legal and policy issues.
“I’m an advocate for transition-aged youth – over 16 with disabilities who definitely are reaching that high-school-to-work, high-school-to-college stage of these lives,” Prince said. “I ask the questions like, ‘After students leave twelfth grade, what outcomes are they experiencing? How well did perform with employment, with post-secondary education, including on-the-job training?'”
Teaching with passion and purpose
Prince earned her doctoral degree in special education from Clemson University, a land-grant institution in South Carolina. Just before that, she spent seven years teaching in public places schools. But her adoration for the discipline began in high school, when she baby-sat for a 3-year-old boy with cognitive disabilities.
Now, Prince focuses on high-incidence disabilities, or those exhibited among the many greatest amount of students in college settings. Her work includes studies of learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral disorders, and mild intellectual disabilities.
“Coming to Iowa State University is a lot like here we are at my original purpose,” Prince said. “I are usually more research-oriented whilst providing quality teacher preparation experiences.”
Marlene Strathe, the director of Iowa State’s School of Education, said Prince’s mixture of expertise and energy will grant the teacher preparation program to keep at it its concentrate on preparing future educators to empower students with disabilities.
“Angela brings expertise in the transition of scholars with disabilities to post-school education, employment, and living,” Strathe said. “Her work includes legal analysis of educational issues involving students with disabilities. She exhibits energy and enthusiasm within her work together with undergraduate and graduated pupils in special education.”
Providing quality preparation
Prince said that Iowa State’s teacher preparation program, which supplies students a solution for your dual certification inside special education and general education, prepares future teachers well.
“Iowa State’s future teachers who pursue dual certification understand curriculum requirements for elementary educators, and gain the special education concentrate research-based interventions for disabilities,” Prince said. “I’m really excited about that part.”
This fall, Prince is teaching SP ED 330, Review of Instruction as a student with Mild/Moderate Disabilities. The course explores educational services and programming for young students with mild or moderate disabilities at a historical perspective. Students also discuss current trends and practices while examining practitioner journals and research articles.
“In the course, our future teachers read and summarize peer-reviewed journal articles, then demonstrate their knowledge for their peers,” Prince said. “I think their knowledge gets to be more real in their mind, so they purchase a greater contact with different interventions – maybe some that they have seen, while others that happen to be brand-new. Employing cool part. They observe the theories are applied, and then they get excited. You will find their enthusiasm as being a teacher grow.”
Education majors’ enthusiasm and empathy, said Prince, is built-in every time they arrive on campus. This is the job with the education program to use things after that.
“Our job in teacher preparation presents research-based strategies,” Prince said. “Rather merely something they heard worked, or something they read more the online world, our strategies are old as demonstrated through journal articles or through textbooks that happen to be authored by well-founded authors.”
Forming partnerships
Prince said another objective of Iowa State’s teacher preparation program is assisting future teachers recognize how families and college districts can best performance together to make sure that student success.
“One of your hurdles we will need to overcome will be the stereotypes pre-service teachers sometimes have about families, or pre-conceived notions about what will be the family’s responsibility and what’s the varsity district’s responsibility,” Prince said. “It’s critical that we help our future educators observe the challenges as a team experience and much less as being an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ scenario.”
Prince said her level of public schools gave her multiple possibilities to assist families needing an advocate – which supports her instill that view in their students.
“When parents were jaded within the process, I found it being a excellent possibility to hear the parents’ concerns and tell them I had been on their own side – I possibly could form an alliance with him or her,” Prince said. “You perform a great number of listening, and lots of question asking.”
