Summer Institute for Future Teachers - an intensive four week residential program for high school students in Connecticut designed to expose them to the teaching profession, to develop knowledge and skills, and to further their education and career goals.

Professional Development School relationships - towards the seamless web between pre-school - K - 12 - community colleges - colleges and universities for teacher education - graduate studies - lifelong learning.

Outreach to the Community - grant-writing, speakers' bureau, community forums, honor societies.  The School as the center of learning in a community.

2) Retention - providing paths for success for learners within dynamic courses of study.

Expanding the University's attention on Teacher Education - connections with the Arts and Sciences, student services, recruitment, academic advisement, alumni planning.    Aero*Space and Environmental Education Resource Center

Infusion of the world cultures within and across the curriculum - regional, national, and international experiences.

Service learning, preservice and inservice experiences, field observation/participation, student internships, apprenticeships, object teaching - object learning.

Enhancing the modalities of learning and the variety of options for learning, including group, cooperative learning;  creating bright and safe places for discovery; seeking common literacies and strengths in a common core of societal assumptions and knowledge; asynchronous learning and different uses of time.

3) Reputation - highlighting the School of Education's identity as a major function of the university, for the university is the center of the wider community, region, state, nation, and world.

Building pride in the successes of the School's students, graduates, faculty, staff;  making connections across space and time, across the political landscape within state and national professional organizations and decision-makers.

Building on distinctiveness of individuals, programs, the university's networks, and the environment.

Revisiting the college's roots and strengths to prepare for the future  - 2011 - the 150th anniversary of the Normal School.

As the past was built on importing knowledge from the world, the School of Education's future will be built on maintaining even more effective connections with evolving educational thought and on seeking to shape the conversation.

Your comments on these thoughts would be most appreciated - David L. Stoloff, Ph.D. email: stoloffd@ecsu.ctstateu.edu

Begin with the senses.

Never tell a child what he can discover for himself.

Activity is a law of childhood.  Train the child not merely to listen, but to do.  Educate   the hand.

Love of variety is a law of childhood - change is rest.

Cultivate the faculties in their natural order.  First, form the mind, then furnish it.

Reduce every subject to its elements, and present one difficulty at a time.

Proceed step by step.  Be thorough.  The measure of information is not what you can give, but what the child can receive.

Let every lesson have a definite point.

First develop the idea and then give the term.  Cultivate language.

Proceed from the simple to the difficult, that is, from the known ot the unknown, from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract.

Synthesis before analysis - not the order of the subject but the order of nature.