Academically Rigorous Curriculum

The Master’s of Education in Advanced Instruction offers a forward-thinking curriculum that provides current teachers with the opportunity to learn new and different ways of addressing problems of practice, which can lead to improvement in their own students’ learning and achievement.

The curriculum was designed by our renowned faculty to specifically meet the needs of today’s teachers. Based on a framework of how best to integrate theory and practice, the curriculum empowers current teachers to achieve positive outcomes in any educational environment through in-depth practice guided by the most current research in nine key areas:

• Curriculum
  The Curriculum domain cultivates a recognition that curriculum can never be neutral, nor comprehensive, and that all curricular products reflect and privilege particular perspectives. You’ll gain access to the skills and tools needed to modify and adapt prescribed/mandated curriculum to meet the needs, interests, and abilities of all students.
• Pedagogy
  Pedagogy enacts a wide-range of theoretically-grounded and research-based instructional strategies suited to the socio-cultural context, including: direct/indirect instruction, experience-based/skill-based approaches, lecture/small group work, Socratic Seminar/debate, and deductive/inductive reasoning. You’ll use varied instructional methods to promote student achievement and ensure student performance meets and exceeds communicated expectations.
• Assessment
  The Assessment domain ensures that graduates are able to demonstrate declarative knowledge of different forms of assessment—formal/informal, formative/summative, dynamic/authentic, etc.—all of which align with particular theories of learning. You’ll leverage these assessments in classroom observations and fieldwork placements, and analyze your influence on learning and its implications for planning.
• Reflection and Inquiry
  Reflection and Inquiry encourages teachers to take responsibility—in speech, writing and action—for their students’ learning. You’ll gain greater insight into problem-solving—making sense of challenging situations, identifying areas of practice that require greater scrutiny, defining goals for improvement and pursuing actions to accomplish them.
• Critical Thinking and Discourse
  Critical Thinking and Discourse covers a broad range of engaging topics, cultivating the skills required to listen to others and consider their opinions, analyses and insights seriously and critically. You’ll also develop the behaviors/strategies that support your own active intellectual involvement in discourse that crosses racial, cultural, class, and technological divides/barriers to help close the student achievement gap.
• Environment
  Environment attends to the complexities of the social context to ensure an equitable distribution of participation, power, and authority in the classroom by displaying a student-centered teaching and learning approach. You’ll gain the skills needed to create a motivating learning environment, adjusting and differentiating delivery based on students’ individual needs.
• Advocacy
  The Advocacy domain challenges socio-cultural norms, discourses, practices, policies, and structures that marginalize students within the classroom, school, community and society. You’ll learn ways to further your commitment to building communities of practice to ensure that everyone feels welcomed and has a voice in policy and practice.
• Instructional Technology
  The Instructional Technology domain prepares you to implement a wide range of teaching and learning strategies in digital and online settings. You’ll learn how to incorporate the concept of multimedia literacy in your classrooms and expand your understanding of literacy by expanding how you communicate and teach to include digital media.
• Instructional Leadership
  Instructional Leadership focuses on the steps required to implement and assess the results of a self- or group-initiated change project. You’ll learn how to recognize the characteristics of leaders and their role in providing pressure and assistance to help all participants accomplish and sustain an educational change.

Click here to learn more about the program or to speak with an Admissions Counselor call 1.888.628.1872.