CSCH Steering Committee member Lisa Sanetti interviews CSCH affiliates Xiaomei Cong and Angela Starkweather about their work in the UConn Center for Advancement in Managing Pain.

Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom. If you have an accolade to share, we want to hear from you! Please send any news items and story ideas to neag-communications@uconn.edu.

Neag School alumni Jamie S. Baker ’03 (ED), ’04 MA, and Ronall L. Cannada ’05 (ED), ’06 MA visited the UConn Storrs campus this past spring to attend the inaugural 2019 Black History Month Networking Night, held to connect students from UConn’s ScHOLA2RS House, led by the Neag School’s Erik Hines, with alumni and friends of the University. They each reflect here on the impact of the event, as well as on their careers in education since graduating from the Neag School.

Starring alums Karissa Niehoff ’10 Ed.D. and Jesús Cortés-Sanchez ’18 (ED), ’19 MA, plus appearances by music ed majors and Jonathans XIII and XIV, Neag School Commencement Weekend was full of Husky spirit.

Ronald Beghetto explains why all students need to be creative thinkers. He considers whether creativity is a generic skill, and how – or if – we should assess it in schools.

University of Connecticut baseball coach Jim Penders ’94 (CLAS), ’98 MS became the all-time winningest coach in program history on Thursday night as the Huskies defeated Tulane by a 8-5 score in New Orleans.

For the past four years, the Northeast Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) Academy, an evidence-based professional development program in the area of social-emotional development, has been used across the state of Massachusetts. Administered by the Neag School of Education through its affiliation with the Northeast PBIS (NEPBIS) Network, a loose affiliation of state education leaders in the Northeast, the PBIS Academy has announced it will continue its partnership with Massachusetts through the spring of 2022, after a bid to renew its contract for four additional years was recently approved.

“I fully expect that over the next few years, Ivy will become not only a beloved teacher, but also a leader in the schools where she teaches and in the broader educational field,” says Horan’s faculty advisor and Neag School Prof. Dorothea Anagnostopoulos. “She will be a force to reckon with as she works to improve schools for and with her students and their communities.”

James Kaufman, a professor at the Neag School of Education, theorizes that creativity is both a widespread phenomenon and critical to human development. Rather than reserving the term “creative” for the favored few who produce globally acclaimed works of art or world-changing discoveries, he said, creativity is a label just as easily applied to the prosaic activities of everyday life — learning, problem-solving or making a junior high art project.

“Of course games and other forms of playful learning have a place in classrooms! Board games, card games, video games, role-playing game, simulations, even Kahoot!™ quizzes with leaderboards and badges—they can all contribute to student engagement, motivation, and the creation of an interactive situated-learning environment,” says Young.