Teacher Education

Increase Your Teacher Prep Enrollment With GoReact

A short video clip focused on how K-State College of Education uses GoReact to broaden recruitment

A Kansas university located in a small town can now recruit teacher candidates nationwide by using GoReact.

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Hillary Gamblin:

What other benefits have you observed from using GoReact? I know you mentioned earlier, how it’s helped your program.

Mark Ellner:

Well, one thing it has made us extremely competitive. And we’ll talk about this a little more even with our student teaching. But it has increased the competitiveness of us. I never really understood until I got into academic a little bit, I always thought it was just got there to be the best teacher you could be. But the reality is, we are all in the business, right? We’re all trying to recruit students, we’re sitting here in a tiny little, or I wouldn’t say tiny but a small town in Manhattan, Kansas, we’re trying to recruit people from all over the world, especially all over the country.

Mark Ellner:

And so this has allowed us to broaden our recruitment quite a bit. And as I said, it has made us extremely competitive. Because when I did my student teaching, I was given a limit of 50 miles. Well, I grew up in a small town and I wanted to go back there and student teach but I was outside 50 miles. Well, think of the amount of money I could have saved by going home and living with my parents, or going back to the school I’m familiar with, are somewhere where it’s more apt to what I want to teach.

Mark Ellner:

So if I want to teach in a big city like Kansas City, well, in the past we haven’t let students do that. So now what we’re allowed to do is you can go student teach anywhere, we have students teaching abroad, in fact, we had some students scheduled to go to Italy and student teach last spring. Which they got kicked out of but I can have my students go anywhere. And by having that option, and having it for me as a teacher not really be worried about how I’m going to accomplish it. It just makes us so much more competitive, it makes us be able to get students from Florida, it makes us be able to get students from anywhere, you know, anywhere. And we actually started in our undergrad program, we do an online.

Mark Ellner:

We’re actually graduating more undergrad teacher licensure people, students than face to face. And we might say, is that a problem, but the reality is, if we’re able to give them the quality feedback, the quality education, I think it’s a thing we can accomplish. And we’re getting better every year. I will say this, I know nobody at the university was more prepared to go online in a seconds notice then the College of Education. And again, we were able to do a lot of that stuff because of our experiences and are used to GoReact and having that video feedback that we already had.