Through a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation, University of Connecticut assistant professor of educational leadership Jennie Weiner will investigate how microaggressions and discrimination affect the experiences of 25 black, female principals. Neag professor Laura Burton is the co-investigator on this project.

Education Week (Ann Traynor is quoted about getting a first teaching job)

“Charter schools can and should play a role in improving equal educational opportunity,” says Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at UConn’s Neag School of Education, who co-authored the report with Julie F. Mead, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In order for that role to be realized, policymakers need to be dedicated to ensuring educational equity at all levels and throughout each stage of charter school authorization, with particular focus paid to planning, oversight, and complaint procedures.”

The five-year $2.4 million grant will work with 20 middle schools in Alabama with both homogenous and heterogeneous student populations in terms of race and poverty levels.

“We are including only middle schools in this project because of the importance of adolescence as a critical timepoint for intervention to prevent violent behavior,” McDaniel and La Salle say.

“I hope to be able to someday marry what I’ve learned at the Women’s Center with my teaching,” Grace explains. “At the Women’s Center, we’re constantly working on taking articles that we read, or videos that we watch, discussing them, and learning how to become people who can create a better world. This is a lesson I hope to apply to my own teaching practices!”

“We tend, as adults, to overplan and overstructure young people’s experiences,” Ron Beghetto says. While structure is important, he said, so is “letting kids determine their own problems to solve, their own ways to solve them.”

Education Week (George Sugai is quoted regarding testimony at a U.S. House of Representatives committee meeting on the use of restraints and seclusion in schools)

“I really love our philosophy at the center: to create better writers, and not just better writing,” says Schweitzer. In the future, Schweitzer would like to take that approach in her own classroom, encouraging her students to develop their writing skills and understanding of the writing process.

In his recent text entitled “Why we need to rethink how to teach the Holocaust”, professor Alan Marcus, from the University of Connecticut stresses the importance of the Holocaust survivors in education, stating the following: “Without survivors, the Holocaust will pass into being taught strictly from learned memory.”

“I’ve found — both anecdotally and in my research — that freedom to push and pull at the game’s narrative and ruleset provides students with a sense of greater personal ownership, and therefore greater depth of knowledge about content than usually accompanies schoolwork,” says Slota.