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Raymond Lorion earned his bachelor's degree in Psychology and French from Tufts University in 1968. Doctor Lorion has served in many academic and administrative positions over his 34-year career.

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In 2004, Doctor Lorion accepted the position of Dean of the College of Education at Towson University. He also serves as chair of the Teacher Education Advisory Board.

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These are his reflections. Doctor Lorion, thank you so much for sharing with us your reflection on your own professional growth and your professional career. This will add greatly to our understanding of the evolution

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of teacher education at Towson University. I think a good place to begin would be in the beginning. So, would you share with us some thoughts about your early social context, where you grew up, what you were thinking in terms of

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possible career choices as you went through school? OK. I grew up in Worcester, Mass. I was in a family with five children.

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I was the middle with two older brothers and two younger sisters. Through the eighth grade, I went to a parochial school. I then went to a Jesuit based prep school in Worcester

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and then went on scholar... And went there on scholarship. And then I went to Tufts University on scholarship. When you were in high school, did you have any sense of what you might be thinking of doing professionally?

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Yeah, I was pretty clear I was going to be a physician, an MD, and went to Tufts University in the pre-med program and I think I made it through three semesters and was dying of boredom.

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I thought basically what I was doing was memorizing a whole bunch of stuff. And we had a family friend who was a psychiatrist who was a psychoanalyst and I went and sat with him because I had taken a

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psychology course and went and talked to him about, so what's the difference between being a psychiatrist and a psychologist? And his answer essentially was if you want to make a lot of money, be a psychiatrist.

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If you want to make a little less but know what you're doing, be a psychologist. So I switched to psychology, made it really clear that my interest was only in clinical psych, that I wasn't interested

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in becoming a faculty member or researcher or anything. And then left Tufts and went to Rochester. Actually, I started at the University of Texas clinical psych program.

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I stayed for a semester. There are a number of things about it that I simply found distasteful. Dropped out, went back.

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I used to build houses to make money and so I went back and worked for nine months as a full-time carpenter. Rochester had accepted me originally and when I called they said that it was still open to go back there.

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And so I went there in the fall of '69, spent three years there, completed my PhD, was then completely ready to... In fact I was being interviewed for a clinical position back in Massachusetts.

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Did you have any opportunity to try out any kind of professional experiences when you were going through the doctoral program? Sure. For much of the time it was a mix of coursework

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and clinical work. I did internships, three of them, one in an outpatient VA clinic where I I worked with returning Vietnam vets. I then did a rotation at University of Rochester Medical

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School that involved work in the emergency room in psychiatry. Then I went to the outpatient mental health setting and then I went into sort of public health, the public health part of psychiatry at Rochester.

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And again, my intent, and in fact I said directly to my dissertation advisor that I would like him to be my advisor because of his reputation of getting people out quickly.

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But he had to understand, I wasn't interested in prevention. I wasn't interested in an academic career and I didn't even expect to work with kids. So what were you looking for when you completed this?

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I expected to be a full time clinician in an outpatient setting. I did some inpatient work. I didn't find it particularly interesting.

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I thought being an ER shrink was kind of fun and was about to accept the community mental health position and got a call from my advisor saying his research coordinator had just taken another position and would I be willing to stay an extra

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year and coordinate his community-based prevention project in Rochester City Schools. Apparently that was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning and since then I've been involved in

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school-based mental health research, school-based prevention research. Well, one look at your professional history and it is apparent that you have been very much involved in communities and

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the health of those communities in a variety of positions with higher education affiliations at Johns Hopkins and Ohio and Maryland, Temple, and University of Pennsylvania. It's a rich history and we don't certainly have the time

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for you to tell us about all of it. But are there certain highlights, things that that sort of shaped you professionally that you could share with us?

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Yeah. Early on when I was doing this outpatient clinic at Rochester, part of my agreement to stay in the research coordinator job was that I had to be a clinician.

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So the medical school hired me one day a week to set up a low- income mental health clinic with some other colleagues and it was working really successfully. But in the middle of it, I read a book by Matthew DuMont

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from Harvard called The Absurd Healer. And what the book pointed out was, and DuMont was doing the same kind of clinic at Harvard. And what it pointed out was that he suddenly came to the

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realization that no matter what he did, the waiting room would never end. And that really moved me from doing sort of clinical treatment to thinking about prevention.

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And much of my career then was involved in not only looking at what brings people at risk for mental health problems, but more importantly, what are the sort of secondary effects as they move along what I've referred to as the

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pathogenic sequence. So if kids are having trouble in school that leads to behavioral problems, that leads to turmoil with parents, et cetera.

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And so the dilemma was if you go into prevention, you have to keep moving to the sort of what comes before, OK, let's work on that, what comes before, and work on that. And inevitably, I ended up working with relatively young

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kids, sort of the Willie Sutton, the reason he robbed banks was that's where the money was. The reason I got involved in schools, that's where the kids were.

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And then, if there was anything... So, my work at Rochester and Temple became how do we find kids particularly at risk back in the '70s for what was called minimal brain damage or what is now called ADHD?

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And we identified ways to pick those kids up pre-kindergarten. And then I became involved in the politics of prevention. And that essentially meant the... I remember in a discussion while I was at Temple with the Superintendent in Philadelphia

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who said while we could reduce the number of kids identified as educationally handicapped by X percentage, it wasn't enough because it would create a problem in terms of the distribution of special ed teachers.

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And so it was not economically viable for them to prevent a third or more of the cases. If they couldn't prevent somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3, they weren't interested.

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I then brought that work down to the University of Tennessee, but got waylaid for a couple of years to go and work with the federal government as a visiting scientist and then the associate administrator for prevention at what was then the

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Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration and spent those two years and five years after that writing federal policy and I advised the Reagan White House for some years around the drug czar office, the Office of Drug Intervention

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and the like. At Maryland, we were going to replicate the work of picking up kids early, except, the Superintendent, Prince George's County said I could do that.

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But first I had to help him figure out how many 4th and 5th grade kids were involved with drugs because that was when there was the drug free schools money. And so we began to look at what were some of the, both the

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prevalence of kids' involvements early with drugs. That opened up a whole set of things around physical development and girls. It opened up the whole issue of one of the the significant risk factors back then, which is when the drug wars, the

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crack wars were going on, was kids' exposure to violence and kids' exposure to community violence. And we began to talk about community violence as an environmental toxin, that it had atmospheric

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implications. So it affected whether or not kids went outside. It affected parents' willingness. It also, as we looked at kids' early involvement in drugs,

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we discovered that, well, the federal government, at that point Reagan was still in, was saying just say no to drug use. They never said just say no to being involved in the sale and distribution of drugs.

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And one of the most effective prevention programs for kids below grade four was the drug sellers, because they would use these kids as observers. They would use these kids basically to carry the the drug

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to the buyer and the money to the seller. And if the kid got picked up, the kid could say, I have no idea what's in the envelope. And if the kid got picked up, because the kid had to attend

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school regularly, had to do well, had to stay out of trouble, they almost always got released. And then in our work with drug groups, with drug sellers, what we learned was that they had a career ladder

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and what they would do is pay, pay the kids with money until it reached the point at which they then became... They pay them partially in money and partially in product. And the kids could either sell the product or use the product.

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And they would regularly give kids samples, because if they could then move the kids into dependency, they didn't have to pay them. And literally, you know, then it was Darwinian. The

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really bright kids made it up the ranks, the less bright kids got arrested or something. So that led us to start looking at the overall sort of, what is the ecology of schools?

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How do you turn schools into positive safe sites? And that really was the work that I did at Maryland, and then part of the time I worked with the prevention folks at Hopkins, and the whole purpose of my going to University of

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Pennsylvania was to sort of continue that. They wanted to, they had brought a group of us in who had expertise in community violence, but they also were developing, at the School of Education, a pen partnership school in the West

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Philadelphia area. And I was directing a doctoral program in school community clinical child psychology for the, for the University of Pennsylvania.

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So we combined sort of the ecological studies with training people specifically to then go into schools and be prevention experts. And you were in at University of Pennsylvania for... About five years.

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And then you get a call. And I get a call. And somebody says, Ray, do we have a job for you? Right, right. Somebody called and said, Paul Jones called actually, and said

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I'd been nominated to be considered as the Dean of education at Towson. My first response, and I should always listen to myself, was I have no interest in being a Dean.

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But then I called two people. The first person I called was Brit Kerwan, who's been a friend, who was my Provost and president when I was at Maryland. We stayed in contact because I was

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at Ohio and he was at Ohio State. He was one of the strong supporters of my going to Penn. So I called Brit and I said, Brit, interesting conversation, yada yada.

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Why would I possibly want to do it? And he said that he had returned to Maryland. This was an absolutely perfect job because of Towson's reputation with schools and the fact that part of what he

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understood the president wanted from Towson was somebody who would open doors into Baltimore City schools. And then I called a long sort of career mentor and personal friend, which was Seymour Sarason from Yale.

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And Seymour and I had worked together and been in contact for thirty years. And in a nutshell, Seymour said, if you want to change schools, you got to change teacher education.

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And effectively he said, so pal, it's time to put up or shut up, which is why I decided to take the job. I mean, the other reality was that our kids had never left Maryland.

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So my wife, who always has more votes than me on things like this, said, we're going. So. And so obviously you considered this greatly. And what did you envision doing when you came to Towson as

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the Dean of education? I was clear that I wanted to do three things. One of them, and this was sort of the charge given to me by the president and the then Provost Brennan, was one that in

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some sense I had to work to change the culture of the college so that the college faculty were more involved in research and scholarship than they had been. Two, what I wanted to do was to begin to involve the faculty and

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the courses around issues, not only of responding to kids needs, school-based needs, but also to sensitize them to what happens in schools often times is a ripple of what happens outside the school.

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And thirdly, what was really clear was that, and to me was a real concern, was that Towson, which produced more teachers than any institution in the state of Maryland, had almost none of its students take jobs in Baltimore City.

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And it seemed to me to be unconscionable. The other is that that one of my colleagues at Penn is Richard Ingersoll, who was then beginning to do the work on teacher retention and attrition.

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And I've been involved in the preparation of physicians. I've been a psychiatrist, I've been involved clearly in the preparation of clinical psychologists and lots of career clinical scientists, but had a real problem when I heard that

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teachers, 40% or so of teachers were out of the profession in five years. And we weren't talking about like I did moving from job A to job B to job C, but in the same field.

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We were talking about people who went to undergraduate, became teachers and within five years decided I'll do whatever else I can do, but I don't want to do that. And I'm still working on the, we have to do something

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about reducing the attrition. Partly because when people design interventions, whether they're behavioral interventions or academic interventions, and they put them in schools that are particularly

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challenging, what you always find is in the early time, the first three to five years, it works really well. Once you've got the program, what you then find is that you

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can't sustain the change, and it became really clear that you can't sustain the change because the people you trained are gone. And what you effectively have to do is to keep, you have to keep starting again.

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And we all know that it takes a minimum of three to five years to become a really effective teacher, just like any other profession. And so we were bringing people in, spending lots of resources,

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and we still do. And, you know, basically we were losing 40% of our product. And the fact is, particularly in the schools that I work most closely with, which is inner city schools, low performing

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schools, part of the problem is you can't create a strong school if you keep changing the principal, and you can't create a solid body of teachers if you keep changing the principal, and

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if the teachers leave, the parents have no reason to believe the school cares about their kids' education. Because we're really clear that teachers don't decide in April and May to leave.

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They decide in October and November. And then they just sort of tread water in many cases. And if, you know, a parent goes back and says, where's so and so that taught my last kid.

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And the answer is he or she is gone. Parents very clearly say, you know what? What makes you think we're going to believe you care about our kids?

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So that's been, I think, the things that I'm hoping before I get out of here that we will have made some headway on. Would you share with us some of the things that you've done and

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you've established as Dean that has connected us more with city schools and that community? Yeah. One of the things, and it was sort of serendipitous that

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I was involved with, is what's called the Cherry Hill Learning Zone. Cherry Hill is a low income, predominantly African American community in Southeast Baltimore City.

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It has a long history of being essentially isolated both geographically and culturally from the city and economically from the city. You have to go through bridges to get in and out of it. And at

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one point it was a relatively effective middle working class African American community. Was designed in the late '40s as a place for returning World War II vets to be employed in the various factories in

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Baltimore. We became involved with setting up a program in the high school. But to do that, we really needed to get involved in the pre-K to 12, pre-K to 8 schools that fed the high school.

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That meant that the discussion went from talking to the high school to talking to the city, the public schools. And we then talked to the the principals of the... It's a also unique community because it has four K 8 schools

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almost, I mean, within a kind of two mile circumference. So it's about a half a mile between any school to any school. When we talked to parents and teachers, the issue became the

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community support of the schools. That led us to talk to Baltimore City about their support of the community. And ultimately we developed a contract that Towson signed, the

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mayor signed, the then Superintendent of schools signed, and the community agencies including the ministers, et cetera, signed, that Towson would go in as a partner in what was a community wide intervention around improving schools.

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And we've had, we probably gathered, obtained about two and a half million dollars in outside money for that including a congressional set aside. We've had some success.

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When we started, all four K-eights were in restructuring. At this point, one of them is closed, the other three are performing pretty well. Most importantly, what we're now in discussion is about

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literally the city is going to rebuild all the schools from the ground up. They're either going to gut and renovate the schools or put in new schools.

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And they're now talking... And do the same with the high school. And over the next couple of years, they're talking about creating a campus. So in effect, they won't be three separate K-8 schools.

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What they will be is an integrated approach. And one of the schools may deal with kids as early as two years old and go up to second grade. Two of them may be 3-to-8 schools.

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They will then ideally prepare students who are highly competitive for all the competitive schools in Baltimore City, but they'll also be a kind of thematically focused high school that's going to be built in.

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We're discussing what the focus would be. So that's one of them. And they still see Towson as a real partner. Part of the the agreement we're discussing now is to turn that

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specifically into a place to train urban teachers that we would put interns from early childhood through secondary and special ed into this particular community. The city would use it to not only train pre service teachers

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and then employ them, but it would also use it to kind of refresh teachers who are struggling in other challenging city schools and to create a new model for how you involve parents and and how you fill in the educational gaps in the

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parents, which is a real problem in much of the city. Would that then involve a certification or coursework for the pre- service teachers who are involved?

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I think we have to talk about what that is. I mean, part of what we will be doing is involving some of what we're learning through the Breakthrough Center work and the turn around process that the

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state is going through. And Baltimore City and Prince George's County and Dorchester County are going through as part of Maryland's Race to the Top grant, which leads into the second group that I that I'm

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involved with. Some years ago, Brit Kerwan called and asked if I would work with the State Department of Education because they had received $250 million from the federal government for Race to

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the Top, five million of which was targeted for evaluating both formatively and summatively all of their Race to the Top efforts. 125 million of the money gets distributed among school systems

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and the 125 million are for specific MSDE, Maryland State Department of Education projects. And we've created... I agreed to do that as long as it was a USM center and not just

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the Towson Center, and that it had to involve faculty and educational scientists and social scientists from across the system's institutions. And right now we have probably 40 people involved in various

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research and evaluation projects. And so the intent is to create an entity that will last after 2014. My fantasy is that it will become the evaluation unit for

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MSDE. But more importantly, it'll also be an entity that any school system can call on to come in and do either formative or summative research to do a needs assessment.

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When they write grants, they have to write evaluation. So we could do that. We're developing a large set of longitudinal data sets that will in fact allow them to document the impact of interventions on

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attendance, student outcomes, teacher retention, et cetera. So those will all be in place by within a year. So that's... One of the things you have here is I also, for I guess at least twelve years, maybe longer, been involved with Roslyn Carter

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Institute for Caregiving out of Americus, Georgia. And I've had the good fortune then of working directly with President and Mrs. Carter during that period.

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My role is really to work with them around caregiving as a preventive intervention and also given my background in evaluation science to work with them about how do you evaluate caregiving?

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Mrs. Carter's particular interest is in creating legislation that will support caregiving efforts as part of any kind of National Health focused intervention. Great.

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And you also for a long time, this is sort of for your own professional growth, been involved in work in South America. Yeah, I've been, I've had an appointment at Catholic

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University in Santiago, Chile for, I don't know, since the early, the mid '90s, early '90s. Initially it was to go and work with them to develop master's programs in community psychology.

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But it evolved into... Catholic University, it's the largest university in Chile and it's a comprehensive university. So it's got a medical school, a law school, school of public

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health, and part of my role has been to work with all of those entities and with the Chilean government around preventive, both preventive interventions and sort of university community partnerships.

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Some of the things we're really proud of is that we were able to change laws in Chile and in the past if a woman was physically abused, was in an abusive relationship, in a marriage, because Chile is a Catholic country and does not

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allow divorce. Not only couldn't she get a divorce, if she left her husband, he could sic the police on her for abandoning him and she would be returned to him.

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The other is that the that the emergency rooms didn't have a protocol for child sexual abuse since in a Catholic country that doesn't happen. And we were able both to change the laws about about a

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husband's right to sort of demand that the police return his wife, but also worked with a group of of Chilean leaders, including the wife of the president, to free up, to make divorce and separation more feasible.

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The other is that we spent time learning about the Chilean health delivery system, which is based upon community clinics. But the other is that they develop natural social networks

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as one of the providers of healthcare. One of the interesting visits was one of these community clinics where all of the babies born within a fixed period of time,

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and usually it's somewhere between 10 and 15, when they have well baby visits, all 10 or 12 or so babies come on the same day at the same time and mothers are around the table like this. And as each baby gets examined by the pediatrician, the

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examination is discussed openly. So every mother gets to know what a symptom looks like. Every mother gets to know what he or she, what she could do in the event that this happens, every mother learns

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when to call the pediatrician. But what's really important with what the pediatricians talk to us about was the fact that what was created was my, if I'm one of the mothers, being able to say, Hey, your kid

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had what I think my kid had, call you up or visit you and say, what did you do? How did it work? And what the physician said is that there aren't enough

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of us. So we have to expand the kind of health delivery capacity of folks. And in some sense, part of what they were doing is just building

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skill sets in the community. And that's a model that we then expanded in a couple of ways in some of the projects we did in Chile. I think I'm going back there next year for an update.

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Once again, it sounds like you're building communities, communities of mothers. Doctor Lorian, you have now been the Dean of the College of Education for nine years.

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What lessons have you learned about running a college of education? What things have presented themselves or made themselves apparent or added to your understanding of preparing

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teachers? A couple of things. One is how critically important it is to trust the faculty.

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I think from the time I got here, having spent my career in medical schools and in research one institutions, one, I was amazed at how many courses faculty taught. I was amazed at how much other stuff they did, and

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particularly how committed they were to their students, et cetera. And so a Dean doesn't change a college. What a Dean ideally does is to provide resources to those and

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then get out of the way. Second is that if you're going to change the college, you got to bring different people in than are here. And so one of the things that I think I've contributed is

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changing the expectations for what incoming faculty would look like and then using my background to help them write grants, to help them think about research, both individual and collaboratively.

00:35:05.360 - 00:35:20.280

I think the other is that the notion that the College of education here, one, teacher preparation here is a campus- wide activity. It is not a college of education activity.

00:35:21.400 - 00:35:38.750

Towson is unique, I think, nationally, because most colleges, most institutions that started as normal schools and state teachers college and then became universities do all they can to hide their histories, and they certainly relegate the

00:35:38.750 - 00:35:55.140

college of education and teacher preparation to a lower status. That is simply, the reverse is true here. I mean, everybody acknowledges that teacher preparation is

00:35:55.140 - 00:36:14.870

Towson's sort of defining both responsibility and its defining source of excellence. The other is that we can't do what we do without partnering fully with MSD, with the State Department of Education and with

00:36:14.870 - 00:36:30.170

local school systems. And then, and I think you heard me when I got here asking, you know, whether we had such confidence in the students we prepared that we give school districts a

00:36:30.170 - 00:36:41.890

three-year guarantee. And that we would then, if one of our products, our teachers was encountering trouble, we should be, a principal should be able to call us and get somebody to come

00:36:41.890 - 00:36:56.940

watch the classroom and make some observations. I'm still working to try to get teacher preparation be a five- year process with two years at the university and three years in the field where they're, school districts are more involved in

00:36:56.940 - 00:37:15.060

the preparation and we're more involved in the induction and retention. And is that... By law the state of Maryland prepares teachers in a PDS setting. That sounds... Your idea sounds a little bit like an

00:37:15.060 - 00:37:28.280

extension of that concept. Yeah. The other thing that the state of Maryland has recently passed in the last couple of years is an obligate, first,

00:37:28.280 - 00:37:40.140

not only that it's going to be a three-year pre-tenure period then a two year pre-tenure period, but every school system has to have an induction coordination officer, and there are very strict rules

00:37:40.140 - 00:37:55.130

for how teachers, how much mentoring and from whom they receive mentoring during their first three years. Part of what we need to do is to restructure professional development schools so they fit that mentoring model, because in

00:37:55.130 - 00:38:08.680

effect, every school that hires new teachers is required to provide that sort of support. I think we can do something to help that. We have a, part of the Cherry Hill renewal proposal is in fact

00:38:08.680 - 00:38:21.880

to create what we're calling a professional development school learning center, where the professional development will be not only for preservice teachers, but for everybody in this case in that campus.

00:38:22.360 - 00:38:35.400

But it'll also be a hub where teachers from schools in the neighborhood and in, you know, relatively close other schools will come and participate in professional development.

00:38:35.400 - 00:38:46.440

And then we'll have a set of those hubs across the city and across the county schools, et cetera. And I think that we're developing both that model and what the budget will look like for it.

00:38:47.240 - 00:39:03.190

I mean, I think that's the other thing I learned is that part of what a Dean's job is to do is to understand budgets. And Towson unfortunately has a history of saying we will do something without acknowledging that to do

00:39:03.190 - 00:39:18.160

something, you either have to not do something or more likely what you need to do is bring in resources. And resources may be people, that may be money, and it may be finding time, releasing faculty so that they can do things.

00:39:18.160 - 00:39:29.600

But part of my job is to manage the money and the resources. So what else would you like? Well, Ray, what have we forgotten?

00:39:29.600 - 00:39:43.550

What do you want to say that didn't get asked in a question? What did we miss? I think, for me, the biggest difficulty, I mean, clearly it was a legitimate concern when I

00:39:43.550 - 00:39:56.960

got here, was the fact that I've spent lots and lots of time in K-12 classrooms, but I've never been a teacher. I've been an observer of teachers. I've been somebody who was brought in to sort of solve

00:39:56.960 - 00:40:08.840

problems that were going on with kids or with teachers or with parents and schools. But I've never been in front of the classroom and taught. And, you know, I think there are good and

00:40:08.840 - 00:40:22.580

bads about thinking about a Dean of education who doesn't have that background. On the other hand, because I don't have that background, I don't take things for granted that people who have it take for

00:40:22.580 - 00:40:34.080

granted. You know, one of the things that's interesting is that, as you pointed out, I've been here nine years, which for me is a long time.

00:40:36.480 - 00:40:48.640

And interestingly, I have no interest in looking anywhere else. And, you know, although I wasn't, I was clearly incorrect when I said I don't want to be a Dean.

00:40:48.920 - 00:40:57.640

I'm absolutely certain I don't want to be a Provost or a President. So it's been a fun nine years. It's gone faster than I thought.

00:40:58.600 - 00:41:14.920

And, you know, I think I've learned a lot. I think I've contributed something here. And I think before I finish, which he'll be about three or four years from now, Cherry Hill will be up and running.

00:41:15.360 - 00:41:32.630

Ideally CAIRE, which is our Research Center, the Center for Application and Innovation Research and Education will be a freestanding entity that in fact will keep... The really nice thing about that is we've got faculty from across

00:41:32.630 - 00:41:44.810

the campus who are collaborating on school-based policy research and intervention research, which is something that wasn't happening before. And more importantly, we've got teachers, we've got people from

00:41:44.810 - 00:41:55.800

across the system and including Morgan and including Loyola, et cetera. We've got people at Western Maryland and Eastern Maryland. So it's getting set up.

00:41:56.440 - 00:42:13.250

So that's it. We have one last question we ask everybody. And I think that although you haven't been in front of a classroom of kids pre-K through 12, you certainly have been a

00:42:13.250 - 00:42:28.000

teacher for a very long time. What kind of advice would you give to someone who's considering a career in teaching? Well, I've sort of been a teacher.

00:42:29.760 - 00:42:42.360

I have never taught in 40 years more than two courses in a year. I think in my entire career I've taught no more than two undergraduate courses.

00:42:42.400 - 00:43:00.680

So the vast majority of my time was teaching professional courses either around research design and evaluation science or clinical interventions, whether it be individual therapy or other therapeutic modalities.

00:43:03.000 - 00:43:26.550

Again, I think part of... And it's almost always been with graduate courses with doctoral students in highly selective programs so that it was not only appropriate but effective to put a huge burden on them to teach, to learn, and to

00:43:26.550 - 00:43:45.840

participate in the instructional process. I think somebody who wants to teach in a K-8 has to spend... Ought to start by doing tutoring, #1, and they ought to because what they have to do is understand...

00:43:46.840 - 00:44:03.200

I used to teach school consultation and my instructions to my students drove them nuts because my instruction was I want you to go into the classroom. They were going to spend either a semester or a year.

00:44:03.240 - 00:44:19.400

I said, I want you to go in the classroom, I want you to sit in the back of the room and I want you to do nothing and say nothing until I tell you otherwise. And then we would meet together, usually with six to eight

00:44:19.400 - 00:44:34.840

students and they would talk about what they saw and until they got to the point where they were absolutely appreciative of how, one, of how complex teaching was in K- eights, particularly in challenging schools.

00:44:36.000 - 00:44:48.850

And how much like a conductor of an orchestra a teacher was in terms of, you know, what was going on there, what's going on there, et cetera. Until they had a real deep appreciation for a teacher as

00:44:48.850 - 00:45:04.460

teacher, my point was they had absolutely nothing to offer a teacher as a consultant because... And so I think part of somebody who wants to be a teacher ought to really get to

00:45:04.460 - 00:45:24.000

know it before they... And they get to know it partly because the seductive part is to watch somebody who doesn't know something learn something. I think the the other thing is that we have to be more

00:45:24.000 - 00:45:40.260

candid to our students about how long it takes to become a teacher. The notion that you do two years, the junior and senior year, you walk across the stage and you're now ready, makes no more

00:45:40.260 - 00:45:53.840

sense for that than when I was preparing new clinical psychologist or psychiatric residents. You really have to have the experience. You have to have been exposed to a variety of things.

00:45:55.080 - 00:46:12.010

I think the other thing particularly, actually, regardless of what population, is you have to like the kids and you have to listen to the kids. Kids tend to have a good sense of what they need and they

00:46:12.010 - 00:46:28.630

pick up quickly whether you like them, respect them. And we all know that teacher expectations have a great influence on student outcomes. And lastly, they really have to understand the culture of the

00:46:28.630 - 00:46:44.710

school community, that if you're going to teach in a school, you got to walk around the neighborhood. If you're afraid to walk around the neighborhood, you got to wonder whether you should be teaching in that school because

00:46:44.710 - 00:46:55.880

that fear comes out when you meet a parent. That fear comes out when you drive into the neighborhood and you make sure all your windows are closed and your doors are locked.

00:46:57.040 - 00:47:12.790

It comes out when you hustle out of the building and drive away. It, you know, it's a hugely different interaction with a parent if you go to their home and knock on the door and have tea

00:47:12.790 - 00:47:29.880

or coffee or water or something. And I think one of the things that we would do when we were training folks to work in mental health at Temple is I would make them take the Broad Street subway from the beginning

00:47:29.880 - 00:47:42.200

to the end so they could understand how public transportation worked. And that was at a time when if you came in late for an appointment, all you got was the rest of the time.

00:47:42.840 - 00:47:57.060

And I wanted them to understand how impossible it was to get anywhere on time. I also made them go to Temple Hospital emergency room and Chestnut Hill Hospital emergency room to see how people...

00:47:57.060 - 00:48:12.320

How differently people were treated by professionals and the lack of respect that people had so they could understand why people came in angry, not expecting help, et cetera. And I think we need to do that in teacher preparation too.

00:48:12.680 - 00:48:28.600

I think our students should write a kind of history and kind of community description in terms of the neighborhood that they're going to teach in. They ought to have the kids take them for a walk.

00:48:30.200 - 00:48:41.720

So I think that's what I would do. The other is that every good teacher has a group of parents that gets renewed every year who are important advisors and consultants.

00:48:43.720 - 00:48:58.140

And you know, at the end of... One of the things we tried in Philadelphia at Penn was to promote kids the last two weeks of the school year rather than the first two weeks, because they don't do anything the last ten days anyways, for the most

00:48:58.140 - 00:49:09.950

part. So let fourth graders become fifth graders. They get to meet their new teacher, they get to own the new environment and they spend those last ten days understanding what

00:49:09.950 - 00:49:26.420

they're going to learn and sort of what and you could they can go home with a note to the parent of here's what you want to cover this summer because this is what... And they come into school much, knowing the teacher, but that means you have to have

00:49:26.420 - 00:49:37.680

stable teachers. So those are some of the things that I think are important if you're going to be a teacher. Thank you very much. Oh, you're welcome.