When recent Neag School graduate Sarah Hodge ’15 (ED), ’16 MA was still a high schooler, she enrolled as one of the first students in the Teacher Preparatory Studies Program at Bulkeley High School, an initiative funded by Bank of America and designed to prepare and encourage talented students, particularly from minority groups, to become teachers. Although she found that she liked working with students, a teaching career was not necessarily what she thought she wanted to pursue at the time.
While educators have long been encouraged to engage students in writing when teaching math, specific recommendations on how to leverage writing to enhance learning of mathematics have fallen short — until now.
Catch up on some of the Neag School news highlights you may have missed this past summer with these quick links.
This past July on the Storrs campus, 11 current teacher leaders representing 10 school districts from across the state spent five days engaged in a variety of learning activities during the inaugural Teacher Leadership Academy. The academy, hosted by the Neag School of Education from July 25-29, 2016, and co-directed by assistant professors Rachael Gabriel, Jennie Weiner, and Sarah Woulfin, was designed to enhance participants’ ability to support high-quality instruction, create conditions for reform, and lead change in Connecticut schools.
With 80 students currently majoring in the University’s human rights undergraduate program and another 40 to 50 enrolled as human rights minors, UConn stands out as one of just a handful of universities in the nation offering a degree program in the field of human rights.
But educating students in human rights issues need not be exclusive to college campuses, as Glenn Mitoma, assistant professor of human rights and curriculum and instruction, can attest.
“We have spent billions, passing endless pieces of reform legislation at the state and national level — yet still we have not succeeded in supporting and enhancing the teaching profession to the degree we must if we are to achieve the lofty goals all of us have for our nation’s schools,” says Richard L. Schwab, former dean of the Neag School and a longtime commissioner for The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF).
Middle and high school teachers are on campus this week learning how to use genocide and human rights education to address complex historical and current issues. The program – The Upstander Academy: Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse Summer Institute – was developed by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Upstander Project, with assistance from secondary educators in Connecticut.
In this piece written for Players’ Tribune, former UConn football star Casey Cochran ’15 (CLAS) — currently a graduate student in the Neag School’s sport management master’s degree program — shares, in his own words, the story of enduring his 13th concussion, an injury that ultimately prompted him to end his ambition of playing professional football. Today, Cochran is working to advocate for greater awareness about head trauma and concussions in sports.
Over nearly four decades, a total of more than 26,000 educators have convened on the UConn Storrs campus for Confratute, a weeklong summer institute that provides educators with practical strategies for engagement and enrichment learning for all students. Thanks to support from one philanthropic family institution known as the Barnes Foundation, close to 100 attendees have been able to attend Confratute over the past three years — including this summer’s program, which marks Confratute’s 39th year.
Neag School students completing the UConn Administrator Preparation Program (UCAPP) this spring presented their change projects — the program’s signature capstone assignment, in which students identify a need or opportunity for school improvement and work toward positive change — during the 2nd Annual Change Project Day.
