About the WW Academy

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is reinventing American teacher preparation for the 21st century.The Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning will include two components: an educator preparation program and a research and development laboratory.

New Ways to Prepare Teachers

The WW Academy will offer only two programs—teacher education and school leadership. It will initially offer competency-based teacher preparation programs in middle and secondary school math, science and technology (STEM) teacher education. Other fields will follow. School leadership programs will be added after the teacher education program is fully operational. In the future, it will offer professional development programs and serve as an examining/certification center for teacher and school leader licensure.

The WW Academy’s Buckley Teaching and Learning Lab

Named for Woodrow Wilson Trustee and Chair Emeritus Walter Buckley, the Buckley Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) will engage in two activities— studying what works in the education of teachers and school leaders and developing tools and products to advance teacher and school leader education. The TLL will engage in research and controlled experiments on the Academy’s programs. In addition, the TLL, in cooperation with MIT and other partners, will develop products to advance competency-based teacher and school leadership preparation. The most immediate initiatives, which will be completed prior to the planned opening of the Academy in June 2017, are developing innovative fundamental features of the Academy’s teacher education program: subject-matter-specific competencies, challenge-based curricula, assessment tools and games, and a classroom simulator which will constitute the equivalent for teachers of what a flight simulator is to pilots, providing rich experiential learning opportunities beyond the clinical education that students traditionally receive.

Transforming America’s Schools of Education

The Academy seeks to be a vehicle for transforming teacher preparation and school leader policy and practice at scale. It will do this by disseminating and publicizing its work, targeting its research at policymakers and education leaders eager for improvement in teacher and school leadership education and under pressure to achieve it. The Academy aspires to become a model for teacher and school leader preparation programs around the nation and will work with college and university partners to adopt its model as a whole or various components. To facilitate this, the Academy’s programs will operate under the dual currency of competency and credits and will be open source.