In order to keep pace with growing student enrollment and an aging teacher force, FAU’s College of Education will be participating in Project Good FIT (First Introduction to Teaching), a new program developed by the state of Florida.

Project Good FIT will give freshmen education majors the opportunity to participate in a paid teaching internship, working side by side with veteran teachers one day a week. The project will try to counteract the growing rate of freshmen education majors (50 percent) that switch majors within their early college years by providing prospective teachers with a meaningful hands-on experience. Participants will learn classroom management and lesson planning skills while trying out teaching to make sure it is, in fact, a “good fit.”

“Project Good FIT will enable us to provide realistic teaching experience with excellent mentors to ensure that students in our program are provided with good role models and hands-on experience in the classroom,” explained Gregory F. Aloia, FAU’s College of Education dean. Aloia will work with Bev Robinson, a provost of Palm Beach Community College’s (PBCC) Belle Glade campus, to identify the first 25 candidates who will participate in Project Good FIT.

Project Good FIT hopes to assist Florida public schools which will need to hire 20,000 teachers each year for the next 10 years in order to keep pace with the aforementioned criteria and the state’s constitutional requirement to reduce class size. Statistics show 20 percent of newly hired teachers choose to leave the profession within three years. However, research shows that new teachers who participate in programs that involve mentoring, such as Project Good FIT, are twice as likely to stay teachers.

Individuals and businesses can sponsor a Project Good FIT student for $6,100 a year.

The sponsorship will pay for the student’s tuition and fees at the community college and allow the student to be paid an instructional intern. It will also provide a stipend to the student’s mentoring teacher and the onsite project coordinator. Stephen Prielozny, president of the Bank of Belle Glade, has already signed up to be the first sponsor of a Project Good FIT teacher candidate.

For more information on Project Good FIT or on how to sponsor a student, contact David Rutherford, director of development for the College of Education, at (561) 297-1023 or [email protected].