UConn Today, the University of Connecticut’s news website, featured the following Neag School Class of 2019 graduates in its Spring 2019 Commencement coverage. Click each student image below to read a Q&A with each individual. 

Over the past academic year, Neag School graduate student and high school English teacher Leszek Ward studied the effectiveness of regularly bringing small groups of students together with faculty advisors during homeroom at New Haven Academy, to determine whether implementing a structured protocol across certain groups would increase students’ sense of belonging.

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.

“Teachers and educators are not super supportive of acceleration,” said Betsy McCoach, one of the researchers and a professor at the University of Connecticut. “But it doesn’t make sense to pull kids together to do the same thing that everyone else is doing.”

As federal lawmakers prepare to debate legislation greatly reducing the use of restraints – and eliminating the use of seclusion – in public schools, a recent hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education focused on the use of restraint and seclusion and featured testimony from UConn expert George Sugai. We asked Brandi Simonsen, a professor of special education in UConn’s Department of Educational Psychology at the Neag School of Education and co-director of the Center for Behavioral Education and Research, about the use of restraint and seclusion and whether the federal government has a role to play in regulating their use in public schools.

The Rome Commons Ballroom at UConn’s Storrs campus was filled on Saturday evening with Neag School of Education Alumni Board members; Neag School faculty, staff, and administrators; friends of the University; and guests honoring seven distinguished Neag School alumni at the School’s annual Alumni Awards Celebration.

Fellow faculty members, students, alumni, family, and friends last month joined Joseph N. Cooper, assistant professor of sport management in the Neag School, to celebrate his newly released book, From Exploitation Back to Empowerment: Black Male Holistic (Under)Development Through Sport and (Mis)Education (Peter Lang, 2019), inspired by his research on the intersection between sport, education, race, and culture and the impact of sport involvement on the holistic development of Black male athletes.

When Alexandra Eckhardt ’11 (ED, SFA) was in elementary school her dad taught her to play Earth, Wind & Fire tunes on a four-string, junior-sized electric bass. He also taught her the acoustic bass because she loved low-noted instruments — but even the mini version was a stretch.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared on UConn Today, the University’s official news website. As of 2013, only 20 percent of school administrators were people of color and only 50 percent were women, despite women representing almost 80 percent of teachers. The number of black female principals is even harder to assess, though research suggests […]

U.S. News & World Report has issued its 2020 rankings of the best graduate schools of education in the nation, with the Neag School of Education ranking among the top 20 public graduate schools of education in the United States for the fourth consecutive year.