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. ”

In Making Teacher Evaluation Work, Rachael Gabriel and Sarah Woulfin walk you through the entire teacher evaluation process—from policy to practice—offering context and strategies with the goal of improving the process for everyone involved. Here, they discuss their book on the Heinemann Blog.

The work of more than 70 faculty researchers and graduate students from the Neag School of Education will be presented as part of this year’s American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Annual Meeting, taking place Thursday, April 27, through Monday, May 1, in San Antonio.

But as del Campo and Thomas Kehle, professor of school psychology at the University of Connecticut, who co-authored the review on ASMR and frisson point out: It appears that both are induced or enhanced through the practice of mindfulness, which involves focusing attention on one’s internal and external experiences in the present moment.

Nowadays, there are new motivators and mantras at the Maxfield Park Primary School. Throughout the day, both inside and outside of the school, students are guided by a set of core values — being safe, responsible and respectful. Beverley Gallimore-Vernon has been leading the shift in behaviour at the school since she became principal a little over one year ago, and much of her success is attributable to the school-wide positive behaviour intervention and support (SWPBIS) program that the school has been piloting under the guidance of the Ministry of Education.

There’s not much research available to prove whether or not game-based learning even works, according to a 2012 paper that University of Connecticut researchers published in the Review of Educational Research.