All in the Neag Family!

Posted on February 6, 2010April 20, 2016 by

Neag family

UConn blue must be in their DNA! Meet the Hale family of Clinton, Conn. They gathered at the Neag School last spring to celebrate the achievements of Carolyn (left). She graduated from our Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s Teacher Education Program with an MA in curriculum and instruction. As part of our dual degree program, she earned both a BS in education and a BA in biology in 2008. Now she is teaching science at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown.

Her sister, Rebekah (right), graduated from the same program in 2006 with a master’s in curriculum and instruction having earned a bachelor’s in special education in 2005. She is a special education teacher at Burr Elementary School in Haddam.

Also in 2005, their dad, Robert, graduated from the Neag School’s Executive Leadership Program. He is the principal of Westbrook High School. Their mom, Jill, graduated in 1982 from the Neag School with a BS in elementary education and is an assistant principal at Polson Middle School in Madison.

Home Run for Sport Management Alumna

Posted on February 5, 2010April 20, 2016 by

When Xaimara Coss went to basketball or football games as a child, she was often more interested in the guys on the sidelines than she was the players in the game.

“I used to wonder what the man with the clipboard was doing,” Coss says. “Who is that with the walkie-talkie, and who is he talking to? That was always a fascination for me.”

It may also have been her first clue that sports management would become her chosen career. But Coss also spent her share of time on the field, as a star volleyball player at Murry Bergtraum High School in New York City. That ability, plus her fascination with the sidelines, carried her to the Neag School’s sport management program and to the UConn volleyball team. She juggled the rigors of being a student-athlete and graduated in 2004.

Through her high school coach and mentor, Barbara Esmilla, who is now the principal of Bergtraum High, Coss was able to secure an internship with Major League Baseball during her junior and senior years at UConn. That path led to her current position as a royalty analyst at MLB. The job involves dealing with licensees who market merchandise with major and minor league team logos throughout the country and the world.

During her internship, Coss became involved with, and deeply committed to, baseball’s RBI Program — Reviving Baseball in the Inner City. MLB’s Community Relations Department administers the program in cities around the world, and while crunching numbers is what Coss does, working with children is what she loves.

To that end, she hopes to return to the Neag School in the fall to pursue a graduate degree, with special emphasis on the Husky Sport program that reaches out to inner city students in Hartford. Associate Professor Jennifer Bruening, director of Husky Sport, is grateful for the chance to have Coss back at UConn.

“The commitment and drive that saw Xaimara through her academic and athletic achievements,” Bruening says, “make her a great role model for young people.”

Once her master’s degree is in hand, Coss hopes to return to MLB, but in community relations and in a career that can help children in need. “I grew up in the inner city,” Coss says of her Brooklyn, New York, childhood. “I’ve seen too many kids without hope, without a light at the end of the tunnel. RBI, and programs like it, can be that light and I want to be part of that.”

For students who are currently in the sport management program, Coss says mentors and good connections help, but she offers advice that is useful in any career. “Leave a lasting impression,” she says. “During my internship at Major League Baseball, I could have done just the typing and filing that my job called for. But I wanted to show them I could do more than was asked of me. I still try to do that every day.”

Renzulli’s Offer to Match Contributions to Gifted Scholarship

Posted on February 3, 2010April 20, 2016 by

Neag School Professors Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis collaborate on their research focused on gifted and talented students.

When Neag School Professor Joseph Renzulli was awarded the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education last fall, he received a bronze sculpture and a gift of $25,000. Soon after, Joe, and his wife and research colleague Sally Reis decided to use the money to match any donation made to their scholarship fund, which was created several years ago.

The Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis Renzulli Fund for Graduate Studies in Gifted Education is awarded each year at the Neag School Honors Celebration, to an academically outstanding student who is pursuing a master’s or doctorate in Gifted Education and Talent Development.

To make a gift to their fund, please contact Abigail O’Brien, director of development, at (860) 486-4530 or via e-mail at aobrien@foundation.uconn.edu.

John N. Leach Fellowship Fund Established

Posted on February 3, 2010November 18, 2021 by

Dedicated educator, John Leach, associate professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education until his passing in 2009. — Dedicated educator, John Leach, associate professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education until his passing in 2009.

Last spring, the Neag School family was saddened by the loss of John Leach, associate professor of bilingual-multicultural education. With the approval of Sofia Leach, John’s widow, the Bilingual-Multicultural Education faculty and staff honored his memory by establishing the John N. Leach Fellowship Fund to be awarded to graduate students who demonstrate financial need and academic merit. Preference will be given to students enrolled full-time in the Neag School’s Bilingual-Multicultural Education Program.

Our goal is to raise the $10,000 to establish the fund as an endowment. If the endowment minimum is not met , we will establish the fund as a non-endowed account.

We invite you to help honor John and support future teachers by contributing to the fund. Gifts can be made payable to: The UConn Foundation, Inc.” In the memo line please write: John N. Leach Fellowship Fund #22668.

Gifts can be mailed to: Abigail O’Brien, Director of Development, 249 Glenbrook Rd. U-2064, Storrs, CT 06269.

All funds raised will be administered and held by the University of Connecticut Foundation, Inc., a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization dedicated exclusively to benefiting the University. Donors to the Foundation have the right to request in writing that their gifts remain anonymous.

Improving the Literacy Skills of At-Risk Kindergartners

Posted on February 1, 2010December 29, 2021 by

The inability to recognize even simple terms often leads to serious reading problems later, says Michael Coyne, whose research on reading interventions for kindergarteners, including intensive vocabulary training, is gaining national attention.

Coyne, an associate professor in the Neag School’s Center for Behavioral Education and Research (CBER), has won nearly $4.5 million in federal grants to study how schools can help poorly prepared kindergarten children bolster reading skills. His work comparing various methods of vocabulary instruction for kindergarteners was published in the September 2009 volume of The Elementary School Journal.

Poor reading ability, especially among disadvantaged children, remains one of the nation’s most pressing education issues. One-third of the nation’s fourth-graders cannot understand basic fourth-grade reading material, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent test. In Connecticut, one out of five third-graders cannot understand basic third-grade material, statewide tests indicate. In major cities, the number is nearly half.

Reading difficulty is a major factor in the academic achievement gap that finds many low-income and minority children lagging behind their classmates.

“Kids come into school with significant differences in their experiences in language and literacy,” Coyne says. “We see differences in their vocabulary knowledge, in their ability to think about sounds in speech, in their knowledge of the alphabet.”

In his vocabulary intervention study, Coyne cites earlier research showing that disadvantaged children often enter kindergarten knowing thousands fewer word meanings than their peers. Some cannot identify common objects and do not know terms such as “top” and “bottom” or “before” and “after,” he says.

Nevertheless, his research has found that specific vocabulary instruction for young children can make a lasting difference, he says. “Kindergarten kids, even those with at-risk backgrounds, can really learn sophisticated vocabulary if we provide support for them – the kind of vocabulary that’s going to give them long-term benefits,” said Coyne, the project director of two studies examining vocabulary interventions for young children.

At the Shoreline Academy in New London, one of Neag School’s CommPACT school reform pilot sites, kindergarten teacher Jeanne McDowell says Coyne’s vocabulary intervention approach has made a difference in her classes, even among children who are learning to speak English.

“I think it’s working very well,” she says. The program has not only expanded children’s vocabulary, it has made them better learners, she adds: “Children become very conscious of words … very inquisitive about words.”

Coyne is also co-director of a major study examining the effectiveness of a promising early reading program first developed at the University of Oregon and later published commercially. That program, known as Early Reading Intervention, is being tested in places such as North Windham School in Connecticut, one of about 25 schools in Connecticut, Texas, and Florida that are working with Coyne.

“Probably the majority of our kids coming in are deficient with oral language skills,” says Betsy Fernandez, principal at North Windham, where more than half the children are Latino, and many are from low-income families.

The ERI program is designed to give struggling readers extensive, systematic training in an understanding of the alphabet and the relationship between letters and sounds.

“It’s very explicit,” says Fernandez. “It really covers the key skills that need to be taught in kindergarten.”

So far, the results are encouraging, she says. “We found that the kids do very well. They make great gains.”

George Sugai, director of UConn’s Center for Behavioral Education and Research, says Coyne’s work has been significant “because he has tested and demonstrated effective … reading techniques that can be used successfully with young readers who have been unsuccessful in traditional core or basal reading programs.”

Coyne came to UConn in 2001, but his interest in helping poor readers began years earlier. As a special education teacher in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, he worked with third-, fourth- and fifth-graders who already were unmotivated and falling behind.

“They were mostly kids with learning disabilities,” he says. “Almost all of them had reading difficulty. It seemed to be this bottleneck to having them have success in other areas.”

Coyne says he began thinking that the problem needed to receive attention earlier, one reason his research has focused on kindergarten children. He hopes to help them avoid what he calls “a trajectory of failure.”

“There’s been a real advance in our ability to identify kids who are at risk,” he says. “There’s a lot of evidence that with targeted, intensive support, kids can change those early trajectories.”

Coyne is a frequent consultant to school districts and state education departments across the nation. Last year, he received the Distinguished Early Career Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children, a national special education advocacy group. He also won the Neag School of Education’s Outstanding Young Investigator award in 2004.

Guidebook for Parents Penned by Gifted Team

Posted on January 27, 2010October 17, 2018 by

Practical Strategies for Cultivating Child’s Love of Learning

Light Up Your Child’s Mind, a new book written by Neag School of Education professors Sally Reis and Joe Renzulli, is aimed directly at parents, offering them practical advice on how to play a more meaningful role in a child’s education, both in and out of the classroom.

“Parents have been sold a bill of goods on test scores,” say Renzulli and Reis, the husband-and-wife research team from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented based at UConn. “We want to help them do more to promote a love of learning in their children.”

The idea for the book first came about when they were contacted by an agent who had seen a story about their work in Psychology Today. That led to the search for a collaborator, someone who, Reis says, “could take the heart of our academic research and make it interesting and accessible for parents.” They found that person in Andrea Thompson, a New York-based freelance writer who has worked on several books dealing with parenting and psychology.

While the book includes research and interviews with parents and children, for Reis and Renzulli it is also a very personal story. They freely discuss the problems their own children faced as students; a son was, they say, “a classic underachiever,” while a daughter was found to be gifted but learning disabled, what Reis and Renzulli call “twice exceptional.” Now young adults, both have had very successful college and graduate school records and professional careers, and they had no objection to being part of their parents’ book.

Each child also illustrates the book’s different approaches to parental involvement. With their son, Reis and Renzulli say, there was little they could do to prod him through his adolescent school years.

“It was difficult personally, but we also felt that, professionally, this was something we should fix,” Reis says. “Ultimately, we realized that this was going to have to be his decision, not ours.”

Husband and wife, Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, are Distinguished Professors of Gifted Education at the Neag School of Education and are nationally renowned for the research and scholarship.

With their daughter, Renzulli says, he and Reis were her “best advocates,” helping her teachers understand both her strengths and her weaknesses. “Teachers are receptive,” Reis says, “to parents who say, ‘I’m looking for a way to help my child be more engaged at school, and this is what I know about him or her that might be helpful to you.’”

Throughout the book, Reis and Renzulli reinforce the message to parents that can be found in its earliest pages: “We urge a different focus,” they write in the Introduction, “one having less to do with good grades and the ‘right’ colleges and more to do with early experiences in creative thinking and productivity.”

While not wanting to diminish the importance of grades and scores, Reis and Renzulli say they dislike seeing bookstore shelves crammed with standardized test preparation study guides that parents have been led to believe are the keys to success. Equally, if not more, important, they argue in Light Up Your Child’s Mind, is nurturing passions, interests and talents outside the classroom, not unlike the effort parents undertake when a child plays soccer or basketball.

“There’s as much to be gained,” Renzulli says, “from taking a child on a museum visit, or on a bird-watching hike, or on a local archaeological dig. All of it helps promote a love of learning.”

As for school itself, enjoyment and engagement go a long way toward stimulating academic achievement. But if it sounds as though Renzulli and Reis want to replace an “eat your vegetables” approach to education with one that favors “eat more ice cream,” nothing could be further from the truth.

“We’re advocating a buffet,” Reis says. “School should be a selection of introductions to big ideas, to names, events and people, coupled with choices made by the student in the areas he or she is interested in.”

For Renzulli, years of experience have taught him that engagement works. “I can get more out of anybody, diapers to doctorate, if I start with something in which they have an interest. We all do better and work more effectively at something that we’re turned on to and enjoy.”

Light Up Your Child’s Mind is published by Little, Brown and Company.

Fulbright Specialist Returns from Thailand with Powerful Lessons

Posted on January 27, 2010April 20, 2016 by

Xae Reyes with students in Thailand — During her Fulbright Specialist trip to Thailand, Xae Reyes, associate professor of Bilingual-Multicultural Education (in pink) poses for a photo with her students at a university just outside of Bangkok.

Thailand’s reverence for teachers took a little getting used to for Neag professor Xae Alicia Reyes, who spent six weeks in the southeast Asian nation as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. The experience, says Reyes, reinforced her strong belief in education as a bridge between cultures.

Reyes, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and interim director of UConn’s Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center, served at Burapha University in Chon Buri last summer, not far from Bangkok. Her students were Thai and Chinese.

“I took my teaching style, based on Paulo Freire’s dialogical model, to Thailand,” Reyes says, “and I validated my approach of bringing people together to explore their cultural differences.”

It was also eye-opening for Reyes to experience the deferential treatment of teachers, including the traditional “wai,” the Thai greeting made by placing the hands together and bowing. The teacher returns the greeting, but never initiates it, a sign of his or her high standing in the culture; but, adds Reyes, “it can be a bit uncomfortable at times for those of us who come from societies where equality is a core value and deference to certain individuals is not promoted.”

The university also has many religious altars throughout the campus where students place offerings and “wai” in passing, she says, “showing the integration of the spiritual with the secular.”

Another striking difference is the use of uniforms by students at all universities throughout the country.

In addition to teaching courses in multi-cultural communication for students in management, marketing, and human resources development, Reyes’s work involved mentoring her teaching assistant, who had been hired as an instructor at Burapha for the fall semester. The TA’s only job during Reyes’s six-week term, however, was to shadow her and learn how to teach. She and Reyes conducted “de-briefing” sessions after every class. The mentorship, according to Reyes, was the most memorable aspect of her visit.

“Now there’s an induction process for you,” she says. “We have teaching assistants in our universities, of course, but I have never seen a new faculty member so embedded in the process. I’ve never seen it done with such detail and care. It’s a model we should embrace, both to help new faculty and to encourage respect for those who are experienced faculty.”

Since community service is an important part of Thai student life, there were frequent field trips that allowed Reyes to see the country up close. At an orphanage and at a school for the blind, she and her students helped give out snack packages to the children while watching them create handmade crafts and use computers to produce printouts of their writings in Braille. She calls it “a powerful experience” for all involved and another aspect of Thai culture that she would like to see more American college students emulate.

“Although we have increased service learning requirements in many of our schools,” Reyes says, “this commitment to give back needs to be integrated in all learning.”

The Fulbright program in Thailand also maximized the opportunity for faculty dialogue by arranging for Reyes to visit Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Rai, where she presented on her work at Burapha to the Deans Council.

Reyes’s enthusiasm for both Thailand and the Fulbright program remains strong, and she is hopeful of another posting in the future, though she would consider a return to Burapha with or without a Fulbright.

She had been told, she says, that the Thai people are sometimes called “the Latinos of Asia; they are so outgoing and expressive. I found them a wonderfully warm people with a joy for living that reminded me very much of life in the Caribbean.”

Education’s Top Honor Goes to Neag Professor Joseph Renzulli!

Posted on January 27, 2010April 20, 2016 by

At a ceremony at the New York City Library last fall, Neag Professor for Gifted Education and Talent Development Joseph Renzulli (right) is presented with the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education by Terry McGraw III, president and CEO of the McGraw Hill Publishing Company.

When the telephone rang in Joseph Renzulli’s office one day last summer, and the voice on the other end asked if he would take a call from Terry McGraw, the Neag professor’s first reaction was, “Who’s Terry McGraw?”

Not only is McGraw the chairman, president and chief executive officer of The McGraw-Hill Companies, he also had the pleasant task that day of informing Renzulli that his groundbreaking work in gifted and talented education had earned him the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education.

The prestigious honor, first established in 1988, is given each year to those who, in the company’s words, “have dedicated themselves to enhancing learning and whose accomplishments are making a difference.”

In citing Renzulli for the award, Terry McGraw said, “His work has enriched the education of thousands of students. We’re proud to honor him and showcase his efforts, and we hope this award will inspire others to follow in his footsteps.”

“I was floored by it,” Renzulli says of the award, which includes a gift of $25,000. “This is my 44^th year at UConn, and it’s nice to know that somebody out there thinks I’m doing something worthwhile.”

Renzulli’s fellow honorees at the ceremony, held at the New York Public Library, were Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford University, and Sarita Brown, president of the not-for-profit group Excelencia in Education.

Renzulli is quick to credit his wife and partner at the UConn-based National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology Sally Reis, for her work with him in expanding the idea of what he calls the “g” word. “At some point a few years ago,” Renzulli says, “I realized that the kinds of things Sally and I were advocating for gifted students could also be good for all students, that they could help kids find school to be more challenging, more engaging and more joyful.”

That led to the creation of their Schoolwide Enrichment Model, now used in more than 2,500 schools nationwide, and to their new on-line enrichment program, Renzulli Learning, developed in connection with the UConn Research Development Corporation.

The McGraw Prize, while gratifying, also offers Renzulli a bigger stage, a chance to be heard and an opportunity to further the cause of getting beyond what he calls a “dark period” in education that placed far too much emphasis on test scores.

“We need another kind of trophy case in schools,” Renzulli says. “We need to value kids who’ve gotten things published, kids who’ve started a community action campaign, kids who’ve helped poor children in a hospital or day care.”

For Renzulli, that kind of thinking is, as he sees it, “not rocket science, just a whole lot of organized common sense.”

And while the McGraw-Hill honor was unexpected, he says, “I will darn well try to put it to good use in order to get the message out that schools can and should be places for talent development and enrichment.”

* Soon after this interview with Dr. Renzulli was conducted, he and his wife decided to use the financial award towards a scholarship fund they endowed several years ago. Find out more about that

Collaborations Result in Kraemer’s Career High

Posted on January 14, 2010April 20, 2016 by

The sports science world knows William Kraemer as an expert in the field of exercise science with special emphasis on the study of strength training. But the Neag professor sees himself simply as “the old coach,” giving credit to his colleagues for the many awards that have come his way over a long career in kinesiology.

William Kraemer, professor of exercise science in the Neag School's Department of Kinesiology, has been presented with two more impressive honors for his research. — William Kraemer, professor of exercise science in the Neag School’s Department of Kinesiology, has been presented with two more impressive honors for his research.

Two honors added to Kraemer’s mantel in the past year are a ceremonial medallion from Finland’s University of Jyvaskyla and the UConn Alumni Award for Research Excellence in Science.

They are gratifying affirmations of his research, says Kraemer, but he adds, “I can’t stress enough that it takes a lot of people to do this work. Research is a collaborative effort of ideas and creativity, and I think people underestimate how truly difficult it is.”

His colleagues in the Department of Kinesiology’s Human Performance Laboratory include Carl Maresh, Jeff Volek, Craig Denegar and Larry Armstrong.

In studies that range from muscle damage in Division I college football players to cellular changes in muscle fibers during space travel, Kraemer has always been motivated by an idea that goes well beyond the scope of highly trained athletes: “How do we get stronger? How do we improve function and performance? Our work has been a quest to better understand the physiology and blend it with biochemistry, genetic mechanisms and nutrition in order to understand human performance.”

The result, he says, is that Kraemer and his colleagues at the Neag School’s Human Performance Lab have published more applied science and sports science research than any other lab in the country.

One of his collaborations, dating back nearly 20 years, eventually led to Kraemer’s being awarded the Finnish medallion. He first met friend and fellow scientist Dr. Keijo Hakkinen in 1992 when Kraemer was on faculty at Penn State University and Hakkinen spent his sabbatical at Penn’s Center for Sports Medicine. Seventeen years later, Kraemer spent his sabbatical working with Hakkinen in Finland, producing major research involving the physiology of aging and resistance training. That work precipitated the University Medallion, making Kraemer the first non-Finnish citizen to be awarded the University of Jyvaskyla’s highest honor.

Perhaps his most important collaboration involves Maresh, who, in the early 1970s, took on the then-20-year-old Kraemer as an undergraduate lab assistant at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse. They worked together again at UConn in 1987. Kraemer then moved on to posts at Penn State and Ball State before returning to the Neag School’s Kinesiology Department in 2001. Maresh nominated Kraemer for the Alumni Association award last year.

The year before he received two honors recognizing the breadth and depth of his research contributions to the fields of sports medicine and exercise science. He was bestowed with the University’s highest research award, the Provost Research Excellence Medal. The National Strength and Conditioning Association, the leading authority on strength and conditioning worldwide, attached Kraemer’s name to its most prestigious research award. The William J. Kraemer Outstanding Sport Scientist Award is presented each year during the association’s annual meeting held in July.

Distinguished Educator Takes on a New Challenge

Posted on January 12, 2010November 25, 2024 by

Herman “Bud” Meyers ’68 MA ’71 Ph.D.

With his new Ph.D. from UConn’s Neag School of Education securely in hand, Herman “Bud” Meyers arrived on the University of Vermont (UVM) campus in 1971, eager to begin what would turn out to be a distinguished career that has included the chairmanship of UVM’s Department of Education.

Almost 40 years later, Meyers is once again eagerly beginning a new chapter at the school, as the first director of UVM’s James M. Jeffords Center for public policy research. The center, which opened in March of 2009 and was named for the former Vermont senator and attorney teneral, is devoted to addressing what the university calls “complex and challenging issues.” It will offer a Ph.D. in social policy, and the U.S. Department of Education has invested $3 million to get the center started. But its goal is to be self-sustaining in four years.

For Meyers, the Jeffords Center represents an opportunity to bring many voices together. “Ours will be an interdisciplinary approach,” he says. “We’ll be multi-purpose, with a major focus in health, environmental and education policies. I want to bring as many different experts as I can to the table.” Priority one, though, is health care for senior citizens. “Over the next five years,” Meyers says, “I hope the center will look at long-term community care alternatives. How can we keep more seniors at home instead of in nursing homes?”

But there is no talk of “golden years” for Meyers himself. At 67, he admits he has contemplated retirement, but the Jeffords Center offered a stimulating challenge that was too good to pass up. It will also allow him to continue his busy life as a consultant.

“UVM understood my need to keep my evaluation and research work going,” he says. “The university agreed to a commitment that allows for the hiring of an associate director to assume the center’s operational responsibilities. Plus, I’m still running an eight-minute mile and log about 25 miles per week, so I’m in pretty good shape.”

While the Jeffords Center will be a major career highlight for Meyers, he also takes pride in the creation of the New England Common Assessment Program, known as NECAP. From 2000 to 2004, while on leave from UVM, Meyers served as Vermont’s ceputy commissioner of education and spearheaded NECAP, a series of reading, writing, math and science tests developed in response to the No Child Left Behind Act, and now the official state assessments for Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine.

Meyers, who earned both a master’s and doctorate at UConn, credits his graduate work with helping him map out the program and avoid some bumps in the road. “My UConn experience taught me to understand, and be very careful with, the structure and mechanics of standardized tests,” he says. “It also taught me to strive for curriculum and instruction that promotes creativity and problem-solving.”

Creative problem-solving will continue for him at the Jeffords Center where the words of the former lawmaker guide its mission. “Public opinion is not based on dogma or on simplistic formulas,” Jeffords once said. “It is based on serious examination of individual issues.” To which Meyers adds, “My hope for the center is that we will reach out to all those who share the values of that mission in order to develop and preserve humanity.”