Virginia Department of Education

Project PATRIOTS helps fund a pathway to special education teacher licensure for community college transfers

Sarah Holland — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:57:58 +0000

Project PATRIOTS helps fund a pathway to special education teacher licensure for community college transfers Sarah Holland Mon, 02/09/2026 - 10:57

Education advocates and experts have worked for decades to increase the number of special education teachers. Over the past 10 years, the workforce shortage has reached critical status, leading the US Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs to increase funding for special education teacher training.

Margaret Weiss. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

One such program is the College of Education and Human Development’s newly funded Project PATRIOTS: Pathways to Accessible Teacher prepaRation with InnOvations for Transfer Students. Led by Associate Professor Margaret Weiss with support from Assistant Professor Alexandra Raines, Associate Professor Kristen O'Brien, and Professor Kelley Regan, Project PATRIOTS will fund two cohorts of seven students each, transferring to George �鶹��Ƶ from a community college, whether through the ADVANCE Program or otherwise. Funding covers tuition, housing, transportation stipends, book stipends, licensure testing stipends, and more.

The cost of a degree compared to median salaries for special education teachers makes it difficult for some students to pursue the field. By removing financial barriers, Project PATRIOTS will increase access for potential teachers and improve their likelihood of staying in the field.

“The grant is intended to provide the support necessary for nontraditional students to get that special education teacher licensure and to increase access to this career pathway,” explained Weiss. “It provides our George �鶹��Ƶ special education program with an opportunity to graduate a greater number of highly qualified, well-trained special educators who will remain in the field."

Another key to retention is preparedness. Through CEHD and the Department of Special Education’s strong connections to local networks of support, the incoming cohorts of PATRIOTS students will have the opportunity to work with and learn from experts. The faculty of George �鶹��Ƶ’s highly ranked special education program will provide the coursework and Weiss plans to integrate the Virginia Department of Education’s (VDOE) Parent Resource Center, so students can hear the parent perspective on special education and learn how to best support students and their families. The cohorts will also attend the VDOE/Training and Technical Assistance Center (TTAC)'s Content Teaching Academies over the summer, learning alongside practicing teachers.

“These connections will really provide a unique opportunity for these students,” Weiss said.

Students in George �鶹��Ƶ’s special education teacher licensure programs may also have the opportunity to work directly with participants in the four-year �鶹��Ƶ LIFE program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities who want to go to college and earn a certificate of completion. Working for �鶹��Ƶ LIFE provides direct access to hands-on learning experiences right on campus.

Currently, the grant provides funding for two cohorts of students. Weiss hopes that the partnerships formed between community college divisions, VDOE, TTAC, and George �鶹��Ƶ will persist post-funding as an important pathway for prospective special education teachers.

“Every day, all of us in special education come to work because we want to put great teachers out there,” she said, “and we hope that our students will become leaders in this space because of their knowledge and preparation in high-quality instruction. We’re all excited to see where this program will lead.”

Learn more about the College of Education and Human Development

Topics

Campus News

College of Education and Human Development

Virginia Department of Education

College of Education and Human Development Division of Special Education and disAbility Research

workforce

Students

Principal Registered Apprenticeship Program hopes to grow future school leaders

Sarah Holland — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:56:26 +0000

Principal Registered Apprenticeship Program hopes to grow future school leaders Sarah Holland Wed, 11/12/2025 - 09:56

Research has shown that school leadership and student outcomes are strongly related: the better the leaders, the better the student outcomes.

But as school districts struggle with teacher retention in the aftermath of COVID-era lockdowns, school divisions are facing a drought in their hiring pools for school leaders. Now, they’re looking for ways to rebuild those pipelines.

�鶹��Ƶ, in partnership with Alexandria City, Arlington County, Stafford, Loudoun County, and Franklin City school divisions, received more than $150,000 from the Virginia Department of Education to pilot the Principal Registered Apprenticeship Program. This initiative is part of a nationwide expansion of Registered Apprenticeship programs supported by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Farnoosh Shahrokhi. Photo by Office of University Branding

“School leaders have an incredible impact on the culture and climate of the school, and this grant acknowledges that it is equally important to invest in school leaders as it is to invest in teachers,” explained Farnoosh Shahrokhi, associate professor of education leadership in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) and coordinator of the grant.

Apprenticeship programs are critical to the development and retention of educators across various levels, including school leadership.

“It’s one thing to know that something will be part of your job, and another to do it,” said Corey Kapelski, director of professional learning at Arlington Public Schools. “School leadership is such a wide-ranging job, and the apprenticeship gives them the opportunity to really dig deep into all the different roles a school leader has to fill.”

As such, principal apprenticeship hours are a core part of the curriculum for leadership certificate programs: the means by which educators receive their endorsement, which opens the doors for them to apply to leadership positions in school divisions.

While apprenticeship is critical to the experience, one major roadblock is the time and cost. Along with the cost of tuition, books, and other expenses, educators must complete 24 credit hours and at least 2,000 apprenticeship hours. Usually, this requires them to leave their full-time positions for a year and thus sacrifice their annual salary.

The grant provides full funding to those selected by their school divisions to participate in the certificate program, removing those barriers and giving more individuals the opportunity to advance their careers in education.

In this first grant cycle, 12 participants were selected from the five school divisions. And in thinking about long-term sustainability of school divisions, the program has the potential to solidify a leadership pipeline.

“Because Alexandria City Public Schools is a small school division, the leadership pipeline is important. We like to build strong candidates from within,” said Pierrette Finney, chief academic officer of Alexandria City Public Schools. Finney graduated from George �鶹��Ƶ in ‘06 with her MEd in education leadership.

George �鶹��Ƶ’s Education Leadership Program is well-established as a top-tier program for aspiring leaders in education. In addition to Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the coursework is aligned with National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) standards and holds Specialty Professional Associations (SPA) accreditation for high-quality standards by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration. Other hallmarks of George �鶹��Ƶ’s program are the inclusion of improvement science pedagogy and tools in its curriculum, its faculty that span a wide range of professional backgrounds, and its coordination with an advisory board that represents its partnered school divisions, Shahrokhi said.

“George �鶹��Ƶ has been a long-standing and trusted partner of Loudoun County Public Schools in leadership preparation. Their programs combine rigorous academic study with practical, job-embedded experiences that align with our district’s vision for leadership development,” said Tanisha Holland, director of human resources and talent development for Loudoun County Public Schools. “Their program emphasizes reflective practice, equity-centered leadership, and systems thinking, all essential for success in today’s schools.”

Out of the six Virginia universities that received a portion of the grant money, George �鶹��Ƶ is collaborating with the most school divisions for the grant. That speaks to the university’s and CEHD’s intentional and sustained investment in the local community and commitment to building strong, lasting partnerships with school divisions, as well as serving as a hub for collaboration amongst educators and leaders across the region.

“The wealth of knowledge and collaboration with other school divisions only fosters a greater partnership and makes us stronger as a school, stronger as a school system, and stronger as a region,” said Finney.

Learn more about the College of Education and Human Development

Topics

Campus News

College of Education and Human Development

Education leadership

Northern Virginia

Virginia Department of Education

Technical assistance grant supports early childhood teachers throughout Virginia

Sarah Holland — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:39:48 +0000

Technical assistance grant supports early childhood teachers throughout Virginia Sarah Holland Wed, 07/30/2025 - 15:39

The first few years of a child’s life are some of their most important. Those years, full of learning, exploring, and growing, can shape their future for decades to come. It’s critical, then, that early childhood educators have access to the necessary tools to help children succeed at the early stages of their development, including young children with delays and disabilities.

Christan Coogle, associate professor of special education in �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance Center (TTAC), is hoping to expand and improve the toolboxes of teachers across Virginia to better support students with delays and disabilities.

Christan Coogle. George �鶹��Ƶ is part of a collaborative network of TTAC across the Commonwealth. Photo provided.

“There’s an increased need for resources and support in settings in which 2-5 year olds receive their education, particularly related to inclusion of children with delays and disabilities and how to best promote their development through effective interactions and practices,” said Coogle. The number of children with delays and disabilities continues to rise, and birth to five is a “critical window of opportunity” to alter and enhance their developmental trajectory, as well as their everyday interactions with peers, family members, and educators.

Within this window, evidence-based practices—practices with demonstrated effectiveness through rigorous research methods and replication across studies and research teams—are critical. “We know children cannot benefit from evidence-based practices they do not receive. The earlier we can reach children with delays and disabilities and their families, the better outcomes they have,” Coogle explained.

In collaboration with associate director Amber Gant, and coordinators Jacqueline Kilkeary, Alexandra Morris, and Kate Welsh, the TTAC team is bridging the gap between research and practice for educators in the field and building state capacity through differentiated supports which are responsive to school districts’ specific preferences and needs. These include resource banks, professional development sessions, and coming alongside administrators and educators to deliver and facilitate coaching. They have received more than $600,000 in funding from Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) since the program began in 2024-25.

This year, Coogle and her team organized a new method of support. Partnering with early childhood leaders within the VDOE, TTAC delivered three conferences for early childhood educators, hosted in Fredericksburg, Williamsburg, and Roanoke. Attendees included teachers, therapists, administrators, and representatives from VDOE. “This is an opportunity to come together and hear from one another with a commitment to learning from and growing together and disseminating information to the local communities in which we all serve," said Coogle

All of this comes together to help create more inclusive classrooms—as defined by the Commonwealth of Virginia's guide to inclusion—that are supportive of students across a spectrum of ability and development. Through this project, educators have access to quality support whose efficacy and fidelity are backed by data and whose implementation is supported by policy.

“Having a framework in which state agencies, practitioners, and institutes of higher education partner together to reach a common goal is something unique about Virginia,” Coogle said. “Educators, faculty, and administrators often say, ‘we want to do inclusion, but how do we do inclusion.’ This partnership provides a system of support to increasing knowledge, supporting the transition of knowledge to practice, and delivering evidence-based practices.”

George �鶹��Ƶ, Coogle said, is particularly well-positioned to support this work. And this work is part of the university's commitment to advancing 21st-century education for all, as part of the Grand Challenge Initiative.

“That’s one thing I really love about technical assistance work,” said Coogle. “It really is a model of a state agency like VDOE partnering with not only practitioners and educators, but also institutions of higher education to work together to meet a common goal, which is ultimately to increase inclusion and enhance outcomes for young children with disabilities and delays.”

Learn more about the College of Education and Human Development

Topics

Research

College of Education and Human Development

Helen A. Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities

College of Education and Human Development Division of Special Education and disAbility Research

Virginia Department of Education

Real-time feedback is part of a holistic approach to helping new teachers succeed

Sarah Holland — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:13:51 +0000

Real-time feedback is part of a holistic approach to helping new teachers succeed Sarah Holland Mon, 11/18/2024 - 14:13

When you think of uses for bug-in-ear technology, futuristic communications or covert operations are probably the first to come to mind. Teaching is almost certainly not the first, or second, or perhaps not even the hundredth thing.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

But at �鶹��Ƶ, faculty members are always looking for unique approaches and innovative solutions to challenges. Challenges like sharing real-time feedback with education interns so they can best serve their students.

Supported by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE), the Dynamic Coaching Outreach Program in Special Education: General Curriculum (DCOP) through the College of Education and Human Development and the Kellar Institute for Human DisAbilities helps facilitate a “more dynamic coaching and feedback cycle” throughout the teaching internship experience through the use of technologies like bug-in-ear, video conferencing, and more. Specifically, the program supports those interns pursuing their master of education (MEd) in special education.

The special education graduate students have different needs than other MEd students, in that they are often working full-time in the classroom with a provisional license while completing their studies. Because they are provisionally licensed, they do not have mentor teachers in the classroom with them as traditional, pre-service interns do; they rely more on university supervisors during their internship to give feedback. DCOP was designed to provide new pathways for that feedback in order to address these unique needs.

When the program was originally developed in 2012, it was almost exclusively about the use of bug-in-ear technology to provide immediate live feedback to special education teacher interns in the classroom. In the past five years, the program has expanded into a three-pronged approach: using technology to enhance supervision, developing a novel eCoaching process, and incorporating professional development for both interns and supervisors.

“The eCoaching model takes a nonevaluative approach,” explained Kelley Regan, professor of education and the principal investigator (PI) on the VDOE grant. “It’s encouraging, supportive, and flexible.”

The goal of an internship for any teacher is to have the opportunity to practice what they’ve learned in a live classroom environment. ECoaching has the additional benefit of more structured feedback loops from supervisors to interns to provide high-quality and more instantaneous feedback at a much greater frequency.

“You can observe a classroom over Zoom, then immediately send an email with feedback, for example,” Kristen O’Brien, associate professor of special education and co-PI, said.

But as Peggy Weiss, associate professor and co-PI, explains, it’s not just about the technology: “It’s about how they use the technology to support teacher interns in reaching the goals established with their supervisors.”

And sometimes, the most valuable techniques are the simplest. Cheryl Temple, one of the supervisors in the program, once had two interns in different schools facing the same challenges in their classroom. A facilitated video call with the three of them gave the interns an opportunity to learn from each other and brainstorm possible solutions.

Shilpi Patel, adjunct professor at George �鶹��Ƶ and internship supervisor for DCOP, utilizes weekly virtual eCoaching sessions to provide continuous nonevaluative feedback, reflection, and goal setting for her interns. For two of her interns, she used data from classroom observations to track their progress in implementing a behavior management system; both showed marked improvement.

From left to right: Kristen O'Brien; Margaret Weiss; and Kelley S. Regan. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

“Beginning teachers enter one of the few professions where they are expected to perform at the same level as experienced veterans from the very start,” Patel said. “ECoaching provides essential support for novice teachers, helping them refine their instructional practices and positively influence student achievement. And it has consistently proven to be a powerful method for enhancing teacher efficacy.”

And that efficacy could be a key to keeping teachers in the classrooms. As school districts continue to grapple with teacher retention, self-efficacy and perseverance are, according to associate professor Pam Baker and co-PI, key ways to improve retention rates.

For Susan Jennings, MEd ‘23, a learning disabilities teacher at Herndon High School, that sense of confidence and self-efficacy were two of the greatest outcomes of her internship experience. When asked what she recalls as being the most helpful part of the internship, it wasn’t the technology itself, but how Patel, her internship supervisor, utilized it to give Jennings the tools she needed to succeed.

“I continue to use many of the strategies Ms. Patel shared for scaffolding lessons for learners with disabilities in my classroom,” she said, “including the lesson planning template for more engaging learner-centered lessons.”

At the end of the day, DCOP demonstrates that it’s not just about the technology: it’s the human on the other side providing the support and investment in growth that helps these teachers succeed.

“Our coaches prepare our interns to be self-reflective in developing strategies for growth and overcoming challenges,” said Regan. “It equips them to be successful when that coach is no longer in their ear.”

Discover more through the MEd in Special Education