“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.

Many school districts across Connecticut hold Neag School of Education teacher education graduates in the highest regard for potential employment.Throughout the Neag School’s partner school districts, juniors and seniors in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s (IB/M) program get firsthand student teaching experience in urban and suburban classroom settings; during their fifth year in the program, students receive further preparation through various professional development offerings and on-site internships.

E.B. Kennelly School in Hartford, Conn., hosted the second annual “UConn Day” at the school on May 2, an event that included a schoolwide parade and a basketball game with students playing against the teachers and staff.

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.

“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.”

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.

When Jim Penders applied to replace the retiring Baylock in 2003, Penders told then-athletic director Jeff Hathaway that his goal was not to be a college baseball coach. He said it was to be the UConn baseball coach.And in the years since, Penders has not simply been a great coach at UConn. He has been a great UConn coach. There is a difference.

Morgaen Donaldson, director of Education Policy Analysis at the University of Connecticut, said Connecticut should consider the wealth of existing research on what works for disengaged teenagers when developing how it will spend the money.