After Dr. Shawn Faulkner interviewed at Northern Kentucky University in 2004, he cancelled his other scheduled interviews without knowing if he got the job.

“I called my parents from the hotel, and I said, ‘This is where I want to be.’ I knew from being on campus, meeting the people and knowing what the mission of the university was that that’s what I wanted to do,” he says.

Prior to completing his doctoral work at the University of Toledo, Dr. Faulkner taught for 16 years—first with middle schoolers at Temple Christian School and then in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

However, he knew higher education was where he wanted to be, and NKU gave him the chance to do both.

“My heart was with undergraduate students and working with schools,” he says.

Dr. Faulkner, now professor of middle grades education, celebrated his 20th anniversary last year. During his time here, he also took on several leadership positions, including assistant chair for Graduate Programs in the College of Education and chair for the Department of Teacher Education.

But his favorite part of his job is overseeing field experience for NKU students and watching teacher candidates get into classrooms. 

“I have done that every semester that I’ve been here. It’s been 42 semesters of field experience supervision. It helps keep me grounded in what’s happening in schools on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “I’ve been in nearly every middle and high school in northern Kentucky and a good chunk of the Ohio schools that we work in. There’s hardly a hallway that I can go down in those schools that I don’t know the teachers.”

Dr. Faulkner’s passion for being in schools—and bringing NKU students into local schools—led him to propose a new initiative at Tichenor Middle School with his colleague Dr. Mike DiCicco, professor of literacy education at NKU.

“Everything is collaborative,” he says. “There’s nothing about it that is a solo effort—we’re always working together to get things done.”

Drs. Faulkner and DiCicco approached the principal, Mac Cooley, about an embedded partnership that would allow several courses from the university’s middle grades education program to be taught on site. This would allow NKU students to be fully immersed in the day-to-day operations and workings of a middle school.

Since the fall of 2018, NKU has had a dedicated classroom in Tichenor Middle School and a signed agreement with the Erlanger-Elsmere Independent School District.

This partnership has allowed NKU students to complete “shadow studies,” where they experience middle school through the eyes of a sixth, seventh and eighth grader. They’re able to debrief with middle school students and their teachers about whether instruction is working or not. Some of them even chaperone or volunteer at school events like the school dance, family cultural night or literacy night. Dr. Faulkner also brings in panels of administrators and instructional coaches to meet with students about job searching,

Since 2018, Tichenor Middle School has hired 15 NKU alumni. Dr. Faulkner hopes to grow the embedded partnership and expand to other schools in the region so that NKU students can be better prepared after graduation. He and Dr. DiCicco have already begun to replicate some of the embedded experiences with the secondary education majors by partnering with neighboring Lloyd Memorial High School in Erlanger. 

“If we were here on campus, it would be incredibly hard to replicate. We’ve been trying to get teacher preparation away from the university’s campus and in schools,” he says. “Just like if you were preparing nurses, you would do that in a hospital. Or lawyers in a courtroom. You put them where they’re going to be working, and you prepare them there. We wanted them to see more of the regular day-to-day feel of being in school and to benefit from the expertise of people who were at that school. They can kind of get their hands dirty, in a sense, to experience some of the things that don’t show up in the textbooks. If you’re going to be teaching in a middle school, the textbook doesn’t tell you about doing breakfast duty, supervising hallways and interacting with families and becoming part of the community. We wanted our students to have a more robust experience.”