New M.Ed. in Teaching and Learning Schedule Built with Working Teachers in Mind

Aquinas College is pleased to announce that our master of education in teaching and learning degree will now accommodate teachers who want to maintain their current teaching positions, yet still wish to further their education without relocating or taking time off to do so. Our new, more adaptive schedule will make it possible for more students to encounter teaching and learning in the Dominican tradition, benefit from the experience and expertise of the faculty in the School of Education at Aquinas College and collaborate with other professional educators striving to enhance learning for the students in their classrooms.

To complete the program, Master of Education students will choose from an expanded number of course offerings on the Aquinas campus during June and July for two consecutive summers, with some courses offered during the academic year in a directed study format. During those times, students will come to campus one weekend each semester of the Fall and Spring for two consecutive years.

Throughout the academic year, studies, research and practical application of theories and skills learned will be completed under the direction of a designated Aquinas professor. The program is a total of 33 credit hours and will begin with a new cohort each summer. Courses will be delivered in a sequence that builds one upon the other.

The entire program is designed with the working teacher in mind. Education from the Dominican perspective helps educators see the complexity of the teacher’s influence on the students they teach, the colleagues with whom they work and the families of their students. According to Catholic tradition, the dignity of the human person and the salvation of souls are at the heart of a teacher’s work. Educators in our program experience this, and from their experience, learn to implement it in their own classrooms.

The second core principle of the complementarity of faith and reason is also realized in the experience of graduate studies in Education. In the Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis states, “When certain categories of reason and the sciences are taken up into the proclamation of the message, these categories then become tools of evangelization; water is changed into wine. Whatever is taken up is not just redeemed, but becomes an instrument of the Spirit for enlightening and renewing the world” (#132). This is experienced in classes such as Data Driven Decisions, where the focus on the numbers is for the good of individual students.

The prudent stewardship of God’s individual and communal gifts is realized more fully and embodied in the motto of the School of Education at Aquinas College, “Teaching: Gift and Mission.” Educators have been called and entrusted with a gift for others by embodying the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “The life that comes from the fullness of contemplation, such as teaching and preaching, is more excellent than simply contemplating God. Just as it is better to enlighten others than merely to shine, it is better to give the fruits of our contemplation to others than merely to contemplate” (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, 188, 6).

We receive the great mandate of Jesus to go into the whole world and teach. Is teaching your passion, too? Aquinas will prepare you like no other program in the country!