Master of Education in Teaching and Learning Degree Course Offerings

Our graduate programs go beyond mainstream thought and practices, fostering intellectual inquiry and creative mastery.

Foundational Course Offerings

This course is focused on strong planning, both long- and short-term, which is imperative for effective instruction. Educators will develop instructionally sound lesson plans to guide instruction, rigorous expectations, and learning for all measured in multiple modes of assessment. 

State and national standards for educators require that teachers know and demonstrate a wide range of literacy methods and skills to promote effective and appropriate classroom communication as educators in all content areas play an important role in the literacy development of students. This course provides candidates with instructional strategies to support students’ literacy development in their current or planned grade-level(s) or content area(s) of certification. Candidates will explore ways that reading, writing, speaking and listening are developed and used in learning grade-level and discipline-specific curriculum, including adaptations for culturally diverse and exceptional learners. Content Knowledge for Teachers is a co-requisite for this course.

This course will introduce the theoretical grounding of culturally relevant teaching (CRT) practices that are designed to explore, utilize, sustain, and expand cultural diversity practices that influence the education of traditionally marginalized student populations.

This course introduces the final action research project’s components, a professional learning project requiring students to employ writing, research, and improvement science skills.  The project will be designed to improve participants’ professional practice or address a systemic issue impacting the learning of traditionally marginalized student populations in learning environments. 

This course is the completion and presentation of the final action project.  The learning orientation of this course requires students to seek growth through networking in learning communities where they study, test, and refine contents of the professional learning projects for the final research presentation. 

PK-12 Education Concentration

Subject matter expertise and research are integral to practitioners’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).  This course will support educators in evincing mastery of knowledge of specific subjects and introduce key principles and strategies of research methods in Education. Educators will develop and enact a personal growth plan to gain content knowledge and research skills specific to their focused content areas. 

This course familiarizes students with relevant research, as well as provides students with opportunities to investigate theoretical perspectives, issues, and dispositions regarding educational environments, instruction, and professionalism. Additionally, this course is an introduction to the tenets of improvement science. 

This course will engage students in guided inquiry focused on common problems of equity encountered in education systems. Emphasis is on enhancing students’ knowledge of content and pedagogy, which impacts learning. Additionally, this course provides applied learning in improvement science.

STEAM is an inclusive curriculum that integrates multiple disciplines, particularly science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. This course will introduce the integrative approach to STEAM learning that supports students in developing and using employability skills of communication, creativity, collaboration, leadership, critical thinking, and technological proficiency to create and consume in authentic ways.  This course will support candidates in subject-matter alignment and discipline integration to support student-centered learning. 

This course will support candidates in applying inquiry-based models for STEAM instruction. Candidates will create lesson content for a STEAM unit plan.  

This course will support candidates in understanding the role of the teacher and student in assessment and how to implement assessments in STEAM learning. Candidates will create formative and summative assessments for a STEAM unit plan.

This course is a 30-hour practicum experience designed to support the observation and practice of STEAM integrative instructional approaches. The course is focused on STEAM inquiry-driven units embedded with real-world, relevant problem solving that requires a high level of discipline integration. 

Education Systems Improvement Concentration

This course provides candidates with a foundational understanding of improvement science through transformative research frameworks. Candidates will explore a systemic issue impacting the learning of traditionally marginalized student populations and develop an intervention based upon the plan-do-study-act (PDSA) disciplined-inquiry model to improve the issue(s).

This course introduces a multitude of teaching strategies and techniques to reach all students. The course provides practical application for establishing and maintaining a well-managed learner environment with established high expectations for both student learning and behavior.  Educators will learn how to create learning environments that have mutual respect and caring between teachers and students and students and students.

The course introduces critical literacy as a foundation to reflective thinking and strategy-building for critically conscious decision-making relative to issues in education. 

This course aims to broaden educators’ disposition towards and knowledge of external resources and factors that help drive the development of effective interventions that impact educational systems. With a directed focus on engagement, the course will address community-engaged scholarship, stakeholder engagement, community-partnered research, and civic engagement as collaborative support to families, communities, and education systems Improvement. 

This course will explore foundations for building equity educational systems through the application of improvement science in culturally authentic and/or disenfranchised contexts.  Emphasis in the course is on the knowledge, skills and dispositions required for educators to provide an effective equitable education. 

This course will survey psychological and historical factors surrounding literacy acquisition and the early establishment of formal educational institutions. The focus will be on constructing critical views that examine, interrogate, and evaluate practices and behaviors immersed in current and historical reforms that impact educational systems. 

This course introduces research design, implementation, analysis and assessment criteria focused on research methods in Education. The course will focus on principles and strategies of APA-style research. 

“Voorhees University adheres to the federal definition of a credit hour with respect to courses offered face to face, in a hybrid format, and online, as developed in 2010 and published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 34, Part 600.02.  A “credit hour” is defined as the amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that is an institutionally established equivalency that reasonably approximates not less than: 
 
1One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester hour of credit for didactic instruction, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or 
2At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution, including laboratory work, internships, practice, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours. 
 
The University offers semester-based credit courses in 15-week-semester and 8-week-block sessions within the lecture (face-to-face), hybrid, and distance learning (online) modalities. One (1) hour of credit is granted for each hour of direct instructional time in face-to-face, hybrid, and distance education courses, creating a 1:1 contact hour to credit hour ratio. Three-credit lecture (didactic) courses require a minimum of 45 class contact hours. For every hour of classroom instruction each week, students are expected to engage in a minimum of two hours of independent learning activities (e.g., reading, research, completing assignments, studying).  The formula for converting classroom instructional time and laboratory time to the number of credit hours awarded is the number of hours of classroom instructions per week+ number of lab or practicum hours divided by 2 = total credit hours awarded. 
 
One credit hour for distance learning is defined as three (3) hours of instruction and/or student work per week that leads to equivalent learning outcomes required for an on-campus course. Three credit-hour courses taught in the eight-week format require a minimum of 12 hours of student effort and 300 minutes of contact hours per week. 
 
The amount of time that should be offered in a course per week will vary with the length of the course. 
 
Time per week over 15 weeks: 
1 Credit Course: 1 hr. direct instruction, 2 hrs. student work
3 Credit Course: 3 hrs. direct instruction, 6 hrs. student work 
 
Time per week over 8 weeks: 
1 Credit Course: ~2 hrs. direct instruction, 4 hrs. student work
3 Credit Course: ~6 hrs. direct instruction, 12 hrs. student work