A program that teams higher education with primary schools is coming this fall to another public school in Jefferson County.
Several University of Louisville student teachers will be at Westport Middle School working side-by-side with veteran educators.“We have a designated classroom at those schools, and it’s actually called the University of Louisville classroom, so that our students here in the program will actually take classes on site," says U of L’s program director Harrie Buecker.It’s like the clinical model used in the medical field to train up-and-coming doctors, she says, adding the program has been proven successful in Atkinson Elementary School which acted hosted the pilot program.Three JCPS elementary schools already have the program and Westport will be the first middle school. Buecker says Atkinson Elementary rose through the ranks from being a poor performing school and is now held as a model.“They [students] can see their professor teaching at Westport a strategy that they need to know about but they’re seeing it actually happen instead of just hearing about it hypothetically in a classroom here," she says.U of L is one of three Kentucky universities that received $500,000 from the state Council on Postsecondary Education to implement the program.
