Introducing Teachers College

Letter from the President

As both an alumna of Teachers College and its new president, I welcome you to the nation's oldest and largest graduate school of education -- a place whose founding vision was to bring educational opportunities to all members of society, and whose faculty and students, time and again during more than a century of leadership, have demonstrated the power of ideas to change the world.

Our legacy is the work of a long list of thinkers and doers that includes James Russell and John Dewey; Lawrence Cremin and Maxine Greene; Edmund Gordon and Isabel Maitland Stewart; Mary Swartz Rose and Morton Deutsch; Arthur Wesley Dow and William Heard Kilpatrick.

These are people who created fields of inquiry. At Teachers College today, our work is about living up to their legacy by ensuring that we not only build knowledge, but enhance its impact by engaging directly with the policymakers and practitioners who will put it to use. Because of our preeminence, it is both our privilege and our obligation to focus our coursework and our research on the questions of the day in each of the fields we serve. To that end, we favor no ideology or single methodology, but instead seek answers that meet the genuine needs of teachers and other practitioners, and the children they ultimately serve.

Whether you plan to teach, conduct research, serve as an administrator, or pursue a career in health or psychology -- or even if you are already active in one of these fields -- at Teachers College, you are undertaking a journey that will change your life and the lives of others by unlocking the wonders of human potential.

As you explore this catalogue, I urge you to remember that the education you will receive at Teachers College is as much about the people you will meet -- your professors and your fellow students -- as it is about the knowledge you will find in books. So as you join with us in our work, open your hearts as well as your minds. Only then will you truly be able to say -- as I proudly do -- that you have learned everything you needed to know at Teachers College.

Susan Fuhrman,
President
Teachers College, Columbia University