York College enriches lives and enables students to grow as passionate, engaged learners with the confidence to realize their intellectual and human potential as individuals and global citizens.

Teacher Education Unit Vision

The vision of the teacher education unit builds upon the vision and mission of York College. The unit’s vision is to develop a cadre of professional educators who, having been taught by models of good teaching, are prepared with an array of theories, tools and skills necessary to create rich learning environments in which urban children and youth can strive for and reach success.

Teacher Education Unit Mission

Teachers prepared by the York College Teacher Education Unit demonstrate caring and ethical professional behavior in order to build teaching and learning environments that draw on the strengths of students’ diverse cultures, languages, exceptionalities, multiple intelligences, and learning styles. By providing our students with learning experiences that develop deep and broad content knowledge and life skills (G1), our teacher candidates become effective practitioners who will:

Empower Learners to Achieve at the Highest Levels by being able to

• Understand the full range of student needs represented in an urban classroom (G5)
• Respond to the diversity of learners in the classroom when designing and implementing instruction (G7)
• Prepare students to be active and effective participants in a political and social democracy (G2)
• Collaborate with parents and leaders/agencies in the local community (G4)

Embody Pedagogy by being able to

• Design and implement curriculum and instruction that represents broad and deep knowledge of pedagogy (G6)
• Assess students using a diversity of measures, analyze the results, and make instructional decisions to optimize teaching and maximize student performance (G8)
• Exhibit strong written, verbal, and non-verbal communication skills (G10)
• Embed technology into the learning experience (G11)

Exemplify Professionalism by being able to

• Act as reflective practitioners with a strong conviction that learning is a lifelong process achievable by all (G9)
• Collaborate with the professional educational community (G12)
• Demonstrate a commitment to social justice and equity issues in multicultural, multilingual, urban schools (G3)

Enact Knowledge by being able to

• Demonstrate a broad and deep knowledge of academic content (G13)
• Access and build content knowledge (G14)
• Examine the power and biases of knowledge and knowledge construction (G15)
• Evaluate emerging content knowledge using scholarly research based evidence (G16)
• Evaluate content knowledge for relevance to K-12 classroom (G 17)