Training soldiers to be teachers
Apr 2nd, 2004I've highlighted a few articles on military personnel before, and noticed this initiative in South Carolina that I thought should be added to the pile. It seems South Carolina is implementing a program that will train military personnel in teaching, as many teachers in that state begin to retire. And they are using distance learning to achieve this, before the troops return home. From Information Week …
As many as 34,000 teachers, about 45% of the total number in South Carolina, are expected to retire within the next five years. Educators at the state's leading universities believe they've found a potentially rich source of new recruits: military personnel finishing their active duty and looking for civilian work.
The problem has been that few of them want to spend the time and money to train, because they aren't eager to give up a paycheck and go back to school full time. That's why the state's Transition-to-Teaching, or T3, Coalition turned to an IBM Lotus-based virtual classroom and content-management system so military personnel around the world can prepare for certification in their free time before leaving active service.
"In talking with service members, it came across … that they wanted some way to get in the classroom without spending 2-1/2 years training to become teachers," says James Allen Jr., a retired major general who spent 35 years in the military, then a decade as director of South Carolina's veterans' programs.
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