It was coming home,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona ’01 MA, ’04 6th Year, ’11 Ed.D., ’12 ELP said of heading to Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field to give this year’s commencement address. Students could not have agreed more. At a string of outdoor ceremonies May 8–12, students and families gathered together for the first time in many long pandemic months.

Dr. Violet Jiménez Sims, the associate director of teacher education at Neag, said that education students could meet some of the demand for teachers. Her five-year program partners with 13 districts in the state, and she said that many of these districts hire their graduates. Dr. Niralee Patel-Lye, who directs Neag’s accelerated teacher certification program, said the department recently piloted a program that places students in full-time teaching positions.

“Summer school programs help children get better at both reading and mathematics. Students who attend summer school tend to have higher test scores than those who don’t, which means that offering voluntary summer programs is likely to help students catch up from pandemic-related learning slowdowns,” says Kathleen Lynch, an assistant professor of learning sciences at UConn’s Neag School of Education.

“The visits to UConn are really important to the students taking UConn classes for credit in high school,” says Brendan Wilkosz ’03 (ED), ’04 M.Ed., who has been at Berlin HS since 2004, and teaches a chemistry class that grants UConn credit through the ECE program. “There can be a disconnect for the students if they are physically separated from UConn. This year, that was not possible, but it was important for me to do something, so we worked on a virtual day. There was a real willingness at UConn to get that done to have students experience the challenges and complexities of the work, but also see that the research is cutting edge.”

Sarah Woulfin, an associate professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education, said she prioritized students’ humanity during the pandemic, which she hopes will continue. “I am somewhat optimistic that this will stay in a certain way and perhaps in certain pockets,” she said.

“I think it’s a nice gesture, but I think that it’s more important to see what the city does in terms of actions, policies that have an impact on people’s every day lives,” says Tamika La Salle, an associate professor at the Neag School of Education.

To support teachers in implementing ambitious reform efforts, professional developers and teacher educators need to know more about teachers’ thinking about argumentation. Specifically, there is a need to understand more about teachers’ views and evaluations of students’ mathematical arguments as they play out in practice. In this article, we share a tool developed to elicit teachers’ pre- and post evaluations of students’ mathematical arguments on a problem-solving task

LEARN, the Regional Educational Service Center for southeastern Connecticut, has hired Tricia Lee as principal of The Friendship School in Waterford. Presently, Lee serves as assistant principal at The Friendship School.

Renzulli is professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he also serves as director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. His definition suggests that “giftedness” consist of three characteristics in equal parts: intelligence, creativity and perseverance.

Sandra Chafouleas, a professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education and co-director of the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health (CSCH), said that all schools need to make learning joyful and emphasize relationships, flexibility and a focus on the whole child. Most importantly, Chafouleas said, schools needed to invest in building teacher-student relationships. She said that just one teacher could make an enormous difference in the path of a child.