Metro Hartford Alliance Newsroom (Dean Gladis Kersaint was elected as a new trustee)  

The Neag School of Education honored more than 100 of its students last night at its Annual Scholarship Awards Ceremony. Formerly known as the Honors Day Celebration, the event — held at the Jorgensen Center for Performing Arts on the UConn Storrs campus — brought together current students receiving Neag School-affiliated scholarships in the coming academic year; their guests; and the donors whose contributions to the Neag School make these sources of financial support possible.

Melissa Bray is a professor of school psychology in the Neag School of Education. She joined the faculty in 1999 and is a two-time alumna of UConn, having earned her undergraduate degree in communications sciences from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and her master’s degree in school psychology from the Neag School. Bray is a licensed psychologist and licensed speech language pathologist; a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society; and a member of a select group called the Society for the Study of School Psychology.

“My recent research has involved looking at privatization in other contexts, and trying to determine whether the issues and problems you see in these other contexts could impact charter schools,” says Professor Preston Green. “I explored the issue of whether a charter school `bubble’ is emerging, akin to what we saw in the lead up to the housing crisis.”

Professor Michael Coyne of the Neag School’s Department of Educational Psychology has been named co-editor-in-chief of The Elementary School Journal. Suzanne Wilson, professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and Sarah Woulfin, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership will serve as associate editors.

Preservice education establishes the foundation for a successful science teaching career. However, preservice teachers often experience tension between their university and school-based experiences related to the different expectations for teaching and learning across these settings.

Faculty in the Neag School teacher education program this March brought together more than 70 people — from current students and alumni to local educators and school administrators — for an interactive discussion focused on the theme of “Teaching in Turbulent Times.” Prompted by ongoing discussion in recent months among faculty and educators about political divides surfacing in today’s classrooms, the event — led by Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, executive director of teacher education at the Neag School — was intended to serve as an opportunity for a diverse range of people in the education field to network and speak openly, offering suggestions and concerns.

The Neag School of Education has long dedicated itself to providing aspiring educators with in-depth, firsthand experience in the classroom as part of its rigorous teacher education program. Its partners include numerous schools across the state of Connecticut at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

For the past 10 years, E.B. Kennelly, a public neighborhood elementary school in Hartford, Conn., has been one of those school partners — and an exemplary one at that, having been recognized this past year with the National Network for Educational Renewal (NNER) Richard W. Clark Exemplary Partner School Award for 2016. The award recognizes a partner school collaboration that is advancing the complex work of developing, sustaining, and renewing partner schools.

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.

“In the case of Enron, the gatekeepers failed to consider the risks that Fortune 500 companies posed to the financial markets,” Preston Green explains. “They wrongly assumed that these entities would play by the rules. As a result, Enron was allowed to engage in its illegal activities for several years without detection. ”