SAN FRANCISCO — One of Dr. Lillian Poats’ pet initiatives as dean of Texas Southern University’s College of Education is a book club in which students, faculty and staff read an agreed-upon book about urban education or minority school children and informally meet to discuss it.
“What’s great is that the book club has gotten us talking to each other instead of each of us going into our offices and closing our doors,” Poats said. “This has started a dialogue around our students and helps them better understand what it means to become a teacher working with minorities.”
Another successful TSU strategy in recent years, Poats said, has been group training in mobile technology for faculty who were not yet using smartphones and tablet computers. “Some faculty have grandchildren who could work phones and iPads, so we needed to get the faculty up to speed,” she said.
Poats’ remarks came during a workshop at the annual American Educational Research Association conference. The TSU dean spoke at a workshop titled, “A Dialogue with Deans of Education at HBCUs.” During that session, she and Dr. Marshá Horton, education dean at Virginia Union University, shared some of their best practices.
Horton said she frequently steers students to the university’s career services office to apply for one of the myriad internships ranging from McDonald’s to the White House. Because college students in her state cannot major in education, they instead major in interdisciplinary studies and focus on a specific content area.
As education dean for only a year, Horton adopted this motto: “It’s All About SWAG.” The acronym stands for “Students With Academic Greatness” and incentivizes young people to strive for good grades by rewarding them with signed certificates from Horton if they earn a 3.2 grade point average. So far, at least 10 percent of her students have qualified, she said.
