Meet Our Paraeducators
The Academy for God participates in Nashville Bible College’s (NBC) professional development program called ‘ProDev’. The program is offered to qualifying full-time undergraduate students who wish to pursue work experience in the fields that are offered by NBC. Students who wish to work with our school are taken into the Academy’s paraeducator program. The term ‘proDev’ belongs to Nashville Bible College, yet in our program they are paraeducators and undergo the training that follows their administrative or instructional trajectories.
Paraeducators (PE) are equipped with the same operational training as faculty – CPR certified, Mandatory Reporter Training, background checks, and crisis response training provided by the Metro Nashville Police Department. They work with our director of security for traffic guard training and our principals for lunch and recess supervision protocols and expectations.
While most PE’s are supervision and monitoring, some have opportunities for group and classroom instruction at the K-6 grade levels. The two opportunities are a 25-30 minute targeted reading group for 2 days a week (at or above benchmark) or a 30-minute History and Geography class at 4 days a week. They are never used for core reading, math, Bible, or science. The lessons they teach are provided by highly scripted programs. They are not developing content nor designing the instruction. The programs they use are educative (as you teach with them, they teach you how to teach). This is one of the tremendous benefits of having well-developed instructional materials.
Those PE’s that do instruct are not left to themselves. They are supported by a scheduled cadence of training and resources, supervision, observation, and feedback directly from the Primary Grade level Instructor, Literacy Lead, Instructional Coach, Principal of Primary, and Head of Curriculum and Instruction. They also have dedicated prep and collaboration time built into their schedules.
We view the para-educators as teacher candidates invited into a developing pre-service teacher training program that will build K-12 educational qualifications through relevant experience and meaningful certifications. Many argue that the failure of US education falls on the colleges of education, as they do not equip pre-service educators with the skills or knowledge needed for effective instruction. They focus on ideological beliefs, preferences, and instructional myths (i.e. learning styles), highly abstract educational philosophy, and generic and content-free skills instruction. Educators in training could be better served by focusing on cognitive science and the mechanics of memory, deliberate practice of technique and classroom routines, and systematically building domain-specific content knowledge combined with explicit instruction, which is precisely the direction that our paraeducator program is headed.
