Over the past academic year, Neag School graduate student and high school English teacher Leszek Ward studied the effectiveness of regularly bringing small groups of students together with faculty advisors during homeroom at New Haven Academy, to determine whether implementing a structured protocol across certain groups would increase students’ sense of belonging.

Today, nearly every state recognizes and accepts American sign language (ASL) as a second or world language and a growing number of universities now offer ASL in fulfillment or foreign language requirements. The university is working on a partnership with the Neag School of Education for an ASL concentration within the world language teacher certification program.

But Douglas Kaufman, a literacy professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education, said the test is not culturally responsive and inclusive. In other words, it doesn’t consider the variety of ways that teachers connect to students or other hard-to-quantify measures.

Of the programs that do exist in California and elsewhere, there is no statewide quality control. A recent survey from the University of Connecticut found that most gifted classes in 2,000 schools in three Midwestern and Southern states didn’t actually provide much accelerated content.

“Why do dignity and justice go hand in hand? Because teaching for justice requires that we love the children we teach. And to love young people, we have to fundamentally believe that they matter. Mattering isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. It’s respecting the richness of young people’s identities and acting in the best interest of their humanity.”

“You don’t want to be hostage to even the well-meaning generosity of a philanthropists,” said Casey Cobb, an education policy professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education. “You don’t want to be held hostage to their vision or their way of getting there.”

Suzanne Wilson from the University of Connecticut and Mike Shaughnessy from Portland State University discuss their work on the forthcoming NAEP Mathematics Assessment Framework, courtesy of WestEd.

The Neag School of Education, UConn’s Department of English, and the Connecticut Writing Project (CWP) at UConn are proud to announce Connecticut’s winners of the 26th annual Letters About Literature competition, a nationwide contest sponsored by the Library of Congress for students in grades 4 through 12.

“Teachers and educators are not super supportive of acceleration,” said Betsy McCoach, one of the researchers and a professor at the University of Connecticut. “But it doesn’t make sense to pull kids together to do the same thing that everyone else is doing.”

Among the 53 “DREAMers” who played instruments and sang on the Grammy-winning big-band album “American Dreamers (Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom)” is Jesús Cortés-Sanchez ’18 (ED, SFA), ’19 MA, an aspiring music teacher in the integrated bachelor’s/master’s program with the School of Fine Arts and the Neag School of Education.