Representatives from the U.S. Department of Education will be on campus Tuesday to officially present Metro with a $9.5 million Teacher Quality Enhancement grant, the largest federal grant in the college's history.

Working in partnership with Denver Public Schools, Metro will administer the five-year grant, which will be used to implement the Secondary Teacher Enhancement Project.

As part of the project, Metro's Teacher Education Department and School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, along with DPS teachers, will be jointly involved in teaching and mentoring secondary teacher education students, and new teachers hired from Metro's secondary teacher education pool.

"We are revolutionizing, on a national scale, the way teacher education students and newly hired secondary instructors are supported," said Betsy Zeller, director of Metro's Office of Sponsored Programs. "Through this grant, LAS, Teacher Ed and DPS will work with the students from the time they begin course work in their discipline, during the time they do their clinical work and then after they are hired by DPS for the first three years of their teaching careers. This is a drastic improvement in how teachers are supported. In the past, they would do their discipline course work in LAS. Then, they would move on to Teacher Ed for their clinical work. Finally, they would go to work for a school district. There was little coordination." This TQE project, as it is developed, will serve as a teacher education model for the rest of the country.

To further that coordination, LAS and Teacher Education faculty will work closely with DPS to ensure that the college curricula aligns with what secondary education students will ultimately be teaching.

"The preparation of teachers is a college-wide undertaking and involves departments from across the college," said Interim President Ray Kieft.

Other components of the project include establishing a Center for Teaching Excellence at Metro, which will be used to model best practices by DPS and Metro master teachers. In addition, the project calls for providing incentives for Metro faculty to be involved with DPS through faculty exchanges and curriculum development. Meanwhile, the Colorado business community will be involved in identifying funding sources to support Teacher Education students.

Kieft said the award demonstrates the quality of Metro's academic programs. "We've been identified as Colorado's premier teacher preparation institution," he said, adding that at least one other Colorado institution applied for but did not receive the grant.

Numerous faculty and staff were instrumental in developing the successful proposal as was the Fund for Colorado's Future and Bruce Benson, chair of Metro's Board of Trustees.

"The intention is for this grant award to be only one of several that Metro receives over the next few years," Kieft said.