Colorado Adopts Tuition Reimbursement for Professional Development

• By Bridget McCrea
• 04/24/08

To provide more professional development opportunities for teachers and paraprofessionals, and to assist them in achieving highly qualified status, the Colorado Department of Education, Office of Standards and Support, has teamed up with PBS TeacherLine to offer online courses to educators in the state.

The partnership is expected to improve math education while helping instructors meet NCLB "highly qualified" teacher requirements, gain graduate credits and increase their salaries.

"I enrolled in PBS TeacherLine courses to gain more content area knowledge, for salary advancement, and for guidance in finding and using Internet resources that are instructionally appropriate," said Megan Talbott, a second-grade teacher at Basalt Elementary School, Roaring Fork School District, in Basalt, CO, in a statement released earlier this month. "In the Fostering Cooperative Learning, Discussion and Critical Thinking in Elementary Math course, I discovered how to hold students accountable for their learning and ways to have them work together to understand mathematical concepts and develop essential skills. From the Math in Everyday Life course, I was able to create a math-based field trip in which students traveled around the school grounds collaborating on and engaging in activities such as measuring objects."

PBS TeacherLine is a provider of online facilitated professional development courses for preK-12 educators in math, science, reading and language arts, instructional strategies and instructional technology. PBS TeacherLine courses are offered locally to Colorado educators through PBS member station Rocky Mountain PBS.

Further information about the program can be found here.

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About the author: Bridget McCrea is a business and technology writer in Clearwater, FL. She can be reached at bridgetmc@earthlink.net.

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