SUMMER 2015
keep it simple.
It was an emotional Saturday on campus when family, friends, and colleagues gathered to honor Professor Kurt Fischer, who is retiring after nearly three decades at the Ed School. The Fischer fans, including his wife, Jane Haltiwanger, Ed.M.’75, and one of his sons, Lucas (pictured here), gathered for a symposium and reception to celebrate Fischer’s enormous contributions to the field of education, in particular, his research that shows how neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology impact emotional and cognitive development and learning throughout our lives. At the Ed School, Fischer spearheaded the school’s degree focus in neuroscience and education, including the creation of the Mind, Brain, and Education master’s program in 2002 — a program that has since become a model for similar programs at other universities.
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MATT WEBER
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keep it simple.
EDITOR IN CHIEF Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu SENIOR DESIGNER Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu DESIGNER Angelina Berardi angelina_berardi@harvard.edu ASSISTANT DEAN OF COMMUNICATIONS Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Brigham Fay Mike Unger CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER Emalie Parkhurst ILLUSTRATOR Daniel Vasconcellos PHOTOGRAPHERS Jill Anderson Ryan Smith Martha Stewart Matt Weber COPYEDITING Marin Jorgensen Abigail Mieko Vargus POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138 Š 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Harvard Ed. Magazine is published three times a year.
SUMMER 2015
Education, especially education reform, isn’t easy. Yet, does it always have to be so complex? With the help of members of the Ed School community, we found that the answer sometimes is a simple no.
At the beginning of the school year, we reached out to a bunch of firstyear students and asked what they wanted to do in the field of education. At the end of the school year, we reached out again and asked: What has changed?
Former high school teacher. Professor. Resident scholar. Blogger. Master book writer. And of course, the go-to guy for the media on education stories. A look at Rick Hess, Ed.M.’90.
Back in the 1960s, then-Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John W. Gardner pointed out that “we have designed our society in such a way that most of the possibilities open to young people today are either bookish or frivolous.” Gardner went on to suggest that we engage young people in what he called “the great tasks of our times.” This might be a great place to begin our discussion of what’s worth learning in school (“What’s Worth Learning in Schools?” winter 2015). What must students learn so that they can effectively engage in the great tasks of our times and how can we rescue students from the merely bookish and frivolous? — michael connolly, former teacher and principal A more serious concern for me — and one I have yet to read about — is that testing has become an alternative to curriculum. Instead of exams flowing organically out of the curriculum or “body of knowledge,” the test has often become the standard for what is taught. The praxis of teaching is increasingly to prepare students for the (Big) test, and thus ignore themes and facts unlikely to appear on the test. In New York City’s high schools, for example, questions about the American transcendentalists are never included in the New York State Regents, which is a built-in disincentive for teachers to devote class time to that important subject. More concerning to me is Perkins’ emphasis on usefulness. He is quoted as saying, “The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives.” Here he sounds like a reincarnation of John Dewey. All that’s missing is the word “instrumentalism.” Usefulness is important, and Dewey’s emphasis upon usefulness at the time he wrote was probably needed to counterbalance the “great books” approach. It is my view that nowadays the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of usefulness. — e. jeffrey ludwig, m.a.t.’64, adjunct lecturer, city university of new york 4
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I totally agree with this article; however, as an educator, I am required to teach statemandated standards. Failure to so can result in termination of my contract. What am I to do? — julie hamon lumpkin Most of what MCAS, PARCC, and other highstakes testing proves is that we can train kids’ long-term memories well enough to spit back a body of knowledge and a way of looking competent at certain skills. But this kind of content-driven teaching, in which we “cover” topics in a scope and sequence a mile wide and an inch deep does little to engage natural curiosity or to create agency in our students’ lives. It’s time for change, indeed. — susan balogh, ed.m.’93 Of course, this article brings up critically important questions with regard to what we are doing in the classroom and that we should focus on things that will be relevant. But what is scary about that, even in its wisdom, is the fact that we are talking about teaching things that will be relevant for the lives they are “likely” to live. How do we know what’s likely? I am not advocating that we continue cramming information into students’ heads, but how do we know when exposure to new ideas, sometimes for their own sake, won’t inspire students to pursue a life that would be “unlikely?” — millie rey
I find it difficult to articulate my vision of pedagogy that stresses skills over content because the emphasis in many a mind is that I am cutting something out rather than adding critically needed skill acquisition in. I’ve long known that the vast majority of my students will not recall the specifics of Bacon’s Rebellion, or even get the century in which it occurred right, a few years after attending my class. I do not blame them. If Bacon’s Rebellion has no significance to their lives, then why should they waste brain cells remembering it? There are far more useful materials to hold on to. Historical thinking skills, critical thinking skills, the ability to analyze sources, corroborate or refute the veracity of data, connect learning from one realm to another — these are the skills I seek to impart. I just need a way of articulating this vision that is inviting, even enticing. This article points, I believe, in the same direction. If K–12 education is to be relevant, then we must teach what is useful to know. — christopher carter, teacher, concordia international school, shanghai
I think a big part of what is missing in our classrooms is metacognition and reflection about one’s personal connections to meaning. We need to teach students how to apply knowledge to their own lives. — robyn hill
DANIEL VASCONCELLOS
OK, so mitosis is not useful to most of us. How about the world being round? How does that affect our everyday life? Do we care? Come to think of it, astronomy is irrelevant to most of us. It’s not like the average Joe or Jane will be working for NASA. Then we’ve established that most of geography and history are pointless. Biology? Keep it at sex ed, maybe add nutrition, and I think we’re done. Chemistry? What is chemistry, anyway? Why the heck do we even care? … I’m being factitious, obviously, and I do understand the author’s point. But isn’t this a slippery slope? Where do we draw the line? — katherine mantzaris
It’s a name we should have included in our piece on Margot Stern Strom (“Facing History, Facing Herself,” winter 2015), as pointed out by a reader, Stephen Feinberg. Parsons co-founded Facing History with Stern Strom in 1976 when they were both teachers in the Brookline Public Schools.
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@loryh Reading your article on “What's worth learning in school?” gse.harvard. edu/news/ed/15/01/. Thanks for making me think on this snowy morning! @lcarroll94 HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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DANIEL VASCONCELLOS
For years, working as the principal at the Mather Elementary School in Boston, Kim Marshall, Ed.M.’81, tried to stay on top of the latest education news and research. He subscribed to publications like Education Week and The Reading Teacher, but hectic days would get the better of his time. “It was difficult to keep up,” he says. “I’d catch up over a vacation, but even then wasn’t entirely successful.” He thought if only someone — a designated reader — was reading all of the relevant publications and writing short summaries. Little did he know that after leaving Mather a handful of years later, that designated reader would be him. “I finally had the time to read,” Marshall says, especially when he started traveling back and forth to New York, where he was recruiting and coaching urban principals for the nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools. His idea was to create an online newsletter with short summaries of about 10 articles that he would distribute once a week to busy teachers, principals, and other education leaders. Starting in August 2003, with about 100 people on his distribution list, Marshall launched the first edition of the Marshall Memo. Initially he was pulling from about 20 publications, but over time, that number jumped to more than 200 after getting suggestions from readers and browsing the periodical stacks at Gutman Library. He says his readers, now in the thousands, have come to rely on three things: his judgment to find the right pieces, his ability to write user-friendly summaries that can be read in about 20 minutes, and his diligence to getting it to them on the same day every week — Tuesdays, with the exception of a two-week period during the summer when he goes on vacation. (His weekly routine never strays: He spends about eight hours on Sundays reading, almost all hard copy, then writes the text on Mondays. “Monday is hell,” he says. His wife helps with proofreading.) Over the years, he’s included summaries on just about every topic in education, from expected education publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Education Next to the less obvious like Harvard Business Review and The London Daily Telegraph. “One of my biggest takeaways from doing this is that the good stuff is widely spread, and so I’ve cast my net as widely as possible,” he says of his varied reading list. What hasn’t varied much is his newsletter format: a pretty simple email with a Word attachment — no art, no fancy formatting, other than bolding the headlines and including hyperlinks to original sources and helpful research mentioned in the summaries. Subscribers can read it on a tablet or smartphone in HTML format and also listen to a podcast recording of the memo. Marshall encourages readers to copy and share individual pieces they read with coworkers and friends. Now, more than 550 issues later, is the Marshall Memo what Marshall was looking for when he was a busy elementary school principal? Without a doubt, he says. “I would have picked it up in a heartbeat.” — Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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Growing up during civil war in Kabul, there are things that Zohal Atif doesn’t want to remember, but she does. Like autumn 1992. She was six years old, in first grade. One morning, a group of militia attacked her school, setting it on fire. “I didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “It was chaos.” Two older siblings — a brother in third grade, a sister in second — grabbed her and ran home. She never knew who survived and who didn’t. Now a student in the Language and Literacy Program, Atif talks about leaving Afghanistan and helping a new generation back home. There was a ceasefire. We had to evacuate. My uncle showed up on his bicycle and said, “Let’s go.” My mom, dad, and uncle walked. Us four kids were settled on two bicycles. We took the back roads to avoid check posts set up by different militia groups. We only took essentials and locked the rest. Eventually it got so bad we had to leave the country, to Pakistan. My parents knew that if we had stayed in Afghanistan and later the Taliban took over, there would be no education. That’s why we moved around. No excuses. We had to keep learning. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was running a program to settle Afghan refugees. There was no hope for us in Pakistan as refugees because they have their own challenges of educating their population. On August 30, 2001, my family, along with 12 other families, flew out of Islamabad. Six of those families, including my own, continued on to Boston. Last summer, I went back to Afghanistan with my mom and dad for the first time since fleeing. We walked through our old neighborhood. I was happy to see the school was rebuilt, but I was disappointed to see the quality of education. The curriculum is focused on memorization and imparting blind obedience; there is no focus on critical thinking. I knew then that I wanted to work in education. People are so motivated to learn, and each day children and youth, despite many challenges, head to schools and colleges. There’s hope.
JILL ANDERSON
Education through books is important, but there are other ways to improve literacy. Technology is improving in Afghanistan rapidly and we can use that to improve literacy. I want to develop ways that the school can go to its students. For example, if a girl can’t leave home because of security issues, if you have the school come to her, that will help. Also, education should empower communities to develop solutions that make sense for them. That will not happen overnight, but as we say in Afghanistan, drop by drop a river is formed. — Lory Hough
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When Leah Waldo saw Garth Brooks glance over at his guitar and smile after he asked her what instrument she played, she had a sneaking feeling. Then when he asked her what kind of music she played and she said country, she — and the audience — knew it was all over. “Well, Miss Leah, this is what we call being baptized by fire,” Brooks said, urging the Arts in Education student to the stage in Askwith Hall, where he and Trisha Yearwood had been fielding questions about their careers, their family life, and their public service. So Waldo, a graduate of Berklee College of Music, did what she had to: She walked on stage and took the guitar. “I really didn’t have a choice at that point,” she says. “If Garth Brooks asks you to play a song, you play a song. So I did.” For Waldo, the surprise didn’t end there. Before the country
Why do some children thrive, despite adversity? Is the key ingredient having strong adult relationships? A new video series, Why It Matters, features Professor Nancy Hill on why she focuses on helping parents, teens, and teachers engage with one another. A white paper by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education looks at better supporting faculty with their research, with expectations for outside funding, and with ongoing mentorship. check out these and other pieces:
uknow.gse.harvard.edu.
music power couple left the Ed School to give two concerts that night at TD Garden in Boston, they posed for pictures with students and staff. When Waldo walked up for her picture, Brooks handed her the guitar, a Takamine that he had been touring with. It was a gift. “I was absolutely floored. An older musician giving a young musician his guitar is a longstanding tradition in country music, and I felt incredibly honored,” she says. “When he gave it to me, my first words were, ‘I can’t.’ Trisha said, ‘You HAVE to.’” Since then, Waldo says she has been playing the guitar nonstop. “It’s a beautiful instrument, and it has the gouges in the wood from where Garth played it. It’s hard not to feel inspired when I run my fingers along those scratches.” — Lory Hough
After the non-indictments in the Ferguson and Staten Island cases, Jessica Lander, Ed.M.’15, took part in the student-sponsored die-in and participated in conversations that were happening around campus on race, justice, and equality. But Lander wanted to do more — she wanted to, as she says, take action. Using an HGSE Dean’s Equity Fellowship grant, she teamed up with Jean Dany Joachim, a former poet populist in Cambridge, to create a poetry reflection project called the Many Voices Project (manyvoicescambridge.wix.com/manyvoices). “We asked people all across Cambridge to write their reflections in the form of haiku poems, challenging them to condense their thoughts, feelings, questions, and ideas into 17 syllables,” Lander says. They held poetry workshops in schools, senior centers, and at gatherings like the annual Martin Luther King Day of Service in neighboring Central Square. They also created a website so that people could add haikus online and then compiled them into a chapbook, which they distributed across the city, including to Cambridge Mayor David Maher and members of the Cambridge City Council at a meeting in January. When they first launched the project, Lander says she hoped people would respond. When so many did — more than 200 in the first couple of weeks, including many of her classmates at the Ed School — she was touched. “I have been moved by how many people wanted to share their voice, their worries, and their hopes,” she says, “and I have been struck by the power that can be captured in 17 syllables.” — Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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KATHERINE C. COHEN/BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
He has an uncommon title for a faculty member at an education school: professor of pediatrics. Even the hallway outside his office, with the big wooden play castle and floor-to-ceiling mural of a jungle, looks more like the waiting room of a doctor who works with children than that of an academic. But Charles Nelson is not a pediatrician — he’s a researcher, one whose work here at the Ed School is growing. And it makes perfect sense: He studies the brain and behavioral development of young children, including how they learn. Most recently, he has been looking at infants with autism and their unaffected siblings. Based at Boston Children’s Hospital, Nelson’s initial connection to the Ed School began in 2005, after he arrived at Harvard from the University of Minnesota. He guest-lectured in a few Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) classes and collaborated with the Center on the Developing Child. He also started advising students, including his first, Adrienne Tierney, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’11, now a faculty member at the Harvard Writing Program. He invited several Ed School students to work in his lab at Children’s. But Nelson wanted a deeper connection to the Ed School. “I really wanted to have more of a footprint here,” he says. “I really wanted to feel like I was part of the faculty.” Last year, Nelson was officially named an Ed School professor. Nelson also missed teaching, something he wasn’t doing at Harvard Medical School, where he was also affiliated. This past fall, he taught his first Ed School course, Typical and Atypical Neurodevelopment. He’s now on the MBE admissions committee, mentors 10 master’s students in the MBE Program, and continues to advise doctoral students, including his first from the new Ph.D. Program — April Boin Choi, Ed.M.’13, who started working with him on the infant sibling project when she was in the MBE Program. Choi says that despite Nelson’s busierthan-ever workload, he has remained a committed mentor. “Even with all of the demands on his time, Chuck always gives his best effort to offer advice and wisdom,” she says. “He has provided numerous learning opportunities for me to advance my goals as a researcher.” Tierney met Nelson when she was in her second year of the doctoral program. 10
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He was guest-lecturing in a core MBE class and talked about his projects. She was hooked. “His work was stunning,” she says, specifically about the infant sibling project, which was just starting up, and the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, his groundbreaking examination of the effect of early institutionalization and foster care on orphans in Bucharest, Romania. “His work touched on so many interesting elements of developmental science. … I had been trying to find a way to combine my background in neuroscience with the developmental components of learning and cognition that I was learning about in the first few years at the Ed School. His infant sibling project seemed to be doing just that — using measures of brain activity to understand the emergence of the disorder. I started working in his lab shortly after that.” Tierney says she was lucky to have had Nelson as her adviser, not only for the reasons one would expect — he was supportive and always interested in her work — but also another, perhaps more important reason: He allowed her to have wings. “Throughout my time in the Ed.D. Program, he gave me a lot of independence, which for me is the way I work best,” she says. “This may seem like a clichéd thing, but he really trusted me to do good work, and having that combination of independence and responsibility for my project allowed me to become a more confident researcher.” — Lory Hough
Nelson distracts a baby wearing an EEG cap at Boston Children’s Hospital.
RANDY FARMER, ED.M.’93
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Yo u ’
— My high school art teacher, Dean Barber
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r e Ev
WILEY BLEVINS, ED.M.’90
ROB FRASER, MAIL ROOM MANAGER, ED SCHOOL
Don’t open your mouth about any topic unless you have a mountain of research to back you up.
If you can’t find the time to do it right the first time, how will you find the time to do it right the second time?
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ADVICE
Set your goals high and work hard.
cei ved ?
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h t e BE s ’ t a S h
— Professor Jeanne Chall (I was very quiet in her class.)
— My boss from one of my first jobs
DOUG CHANNELL, ED.M.’95
Go back to school and get your education. — One of my bosses after I had been out of college for a while
TRUNG TRAN, ED.M.’14
MELISSA PEEPLES FULLMORE, ED.M.’14
Never settle.
Education is still a continuing experimentation. — Senior Lecturer Joe Blatt, Ed.M.’77, on Sesame Street, in one of his HT-500 lectures
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MARTY WEST
CLINT CALZINI, ED.M.’04
There’s no such thing as good writing. Only good rewriting. — Apparently it is something [poet] Robert Graves said, but it was shared with me by my dissertation adviser, Paul Peterson.
TAYLOR DAWNE BROWN, ED.M.’14
The lines in a coloring book are just a suggestion. — My mom
— My dad
MICHAEL SANDERS, ED.M.’14
Do what is difficult.
You alone are enough.
— Lecturer Lee Teitel
— Oprah Winfrey during her final show (I felt like she was speaking directly to me.)
DENISE TIOSECO ROEHL, ED.M.’02
A glass may be half full or half empty. What matters is who’s pouring it. — One of my fundraising prospects
DIANA MARIAN, ED.M.’15
There is no such thing as “I can’t,” only “I won’t.” Make an effort. — My dad
KIM WEBSTER, ED.M.’13
If it scares you, then that probably means you need to try it. — My best friend Emma when I was trying to decide about a career change to school leadership
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL
When you’re uncertain about what choice to make, make the choice that gives you the most options in the next round of choosing. — My mom on so many different kinds of occasions I can recall HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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A reminder of some of the memorable things that happened this year at the Ed School
The first-ever student hackathon was held at the Ed School in October, along with Google and edX. The three-day event let student teams propose, design, and test solutions to educational challenges in online learning.
AOCC is still going strong after 13 years. This year’s theme, “The other narrative: celebrating untold stories,” allowed participants to share untold stories and different voices. Keynote speakers included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and NPR reporter Michel Martin.
With back-to-back major snowstorms in just a couple of months, how much snow did the
D In December, students and community members staged a studentorganized die-in on the ground floor of Gutman. Wearing “I can’t breathe” surgical masks and carrying homemade signs, they were bringing attention to recent court decisions following the deaths of several black men.
Fulfilling the Promise of Diversity: It wasn’t
blizzards of 2015 dump on campus? A record-breaking 110.6 inches.
Gutman continued exhibiting amazing art and unique pieces from Special Collections, including stunning photos of the Berlin Wall taken over a period of 25 years by artist Kathryn Lloyd and a collection of reading textbooks that were used in the United States from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, before Dick and Jane was used.
E
Construction on the Longfellow building continued, and mostly finished, this year. You couldn’t miss it, as the fourth floor of the historic building was renovated, a fifth floor was added, and all of the other floors had work done.
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Goblins, ghosts, and scary witches. Halloween at HGSE is just about the best day to be on Appian Way.
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one lecture or one course. It was the school’s yearlong community conversation about diversity. It included regular discussions and panels hosted by the Office of Student Affairs, provocative Askwith speakers and topics, a doctoral colloquia focused on research related to diversity, discussions among faculty members, and new courses related to supporting diverse schools.
What was creative, collaborative, and innovative? HIVE: The Harvard GSE Innovation & Ventures in Education student group, designed to bring together students from across Harvard who are interested in education and innovation. In addition to hosting the PITCH competition, HIVE hosted mixers, workshops on being entrepreneurial, and a spring break study trek to visit companies and creative schools in Silicon Valley.
J
J-term continued to be popu-
lar this year, adding special topic seminars such as A Professor Goes to Washington, The (Potentially) Long Arm of Vergara, Nudging Students to Success, and Popular Entertainment and Education: The Power of Film for Learning.
Kindness was the key word with Making Caring Common, a new project run by Senior Lecturer Rick Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, and Associate Professor Stephanie Jones, that dominated the headlines, including multiple pieces in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME magazine, as well as segments on NPR, Good Morning America, and the Today Show. The project helps educators and parents raise children who are caring and kind.
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The new Ph.D. Program began, with the first crop of 24 students arriving on campus in August.
The Usable Knowledge project website relaunched, offering short, user-friendly, easy-to-digest stories, videos, and lists focused on education topics.
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The school adopted a new tagline — Learn to Change the World — as it also launched a capital campaign in September, complete with a kick-off block party and a day of “critical conversations and bold ideas” on Appian Way.
The idea was to invite inspiring teachers from across the university to teach a onetime class at the Ed School. The new series, called Master Class, wouldn’t be just a typical lecture, but a way to learn about craft from magnetic teachers and a way to celebrate good teaching around the university. This year’s masters included physics Professor Eric Mazur’s “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” and Professor Monica Higgins’ “Learning to Lead through Case Discussion.”
Very, very happy.
The 273 Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted because they wanted to pursue an education were remembered in Askwith Hall in October, in recognition of the International Day of the Girl Child.
The Office of Student Affairs continued to sponsor and support dozens of events for students, including the ever-popular Student Research Conference, where students showcased their research and got out the jitters as they honed their presentation skills.
HILARY TOWLE
The state that everyone in the Ed School community was in when the snow started melting, the sun began shining, and flowers started popping up on Appian Way.
QueerEd was one of the most active student organizations on campus this year. The org not only helped support the study of gender and sexuality, but it also offered lots of social outlets for members — dinners, happy hours, and fun nights at the bowling alley.
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One book? This past year, across campus, the community was urged to read Whistling Vivaldi:
R As you may have noticed, we redesigned the magazine, including a new name and larger size.
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Secretary General of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon, a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, met with Professor Fernando Reimers, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D.’88, in December to discuss global education.
#ThroughEducation Thursday was launched, featuring weekly postings of Ed School community members (including alumni) sharing how education has changed their lives.
And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude Steele, as part of the Fulfilling the Promise of Diversity initiative. Steele, a social scientist and executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California–Berkeley, visited campus in November to talk about the book and his “stereotype threat” theory. The theory examines how people from different groups, being threatened by different stereotypes, can have quite different experiences in the same situation. Okay, we’re cheating a bit on this one, but EdX courses were launched this past year, including Professor Richard Elmore’s Leaders of Learning and Unlocking the Immunity to Change by Professor Robert Kegan and Lecturer Lisa Lahey, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’86.
Yearwood and Brooks. As in Trisha and Garth, the country music duo who spoke in Askwith Hall on January 23 about their careers, what’s important in life, and public service.
Zippy is probably the best way to describe Dean Jim Ryan’s fifth time running the Boston Marathon, which he did this year while dedicating his race to teachers. Alumni and other members of the Ed School community sponsored each of Ryan’s 26.2 miles in honor of a special teacher. The names of those teachers were displayed on the shirt that Ryan wore during the race, which he finished in an impressive time: 3:18:38.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The year was 1918. Philander Claxton, the commissioner of education in the United States, reached out to students across the country — not about standardized tests or preschool for all, but about something he called “joyous” and “useful”: school gardens. Earlier in the year, Claxton had written a letter to Franklin Lane, secretary of the interior, and President Woodrow Wilson, to ask that young people, starting around age 9, be recruited to grow food so that more farm-grown products could be sent oversees to soldiers fighting in World War I, as well as to hungry allies in Western Europe. Based on the war garden movement started by Charles Lathrop Pack the year before, this new United States School Garden Army would recruit child “soil soldiers.” These soldiers would learn about horticulture and find space to grow crops anywhere they could — side yards, vacant lots, and school grounds. Students were given “obligation cards” to record daily gardening observations, which they would give to teachers, who were trained as supervisors. Wilson jumped on board the project, appropriating $250,000 from the National Security
and Defense Fund. In a letter to Lane, available in an original 1918 publication in Gutman Library’s Special Collections, Wilson wrote, “Every boy and girl who really sees what the home garden may mean, will, I am sure, enter into the purposes with high spirits, because I am sure they would all like to feel that they are in fact fighting in France by joining the home garden army.” This effort, Wilson said, “is just as real and patriotic an effort as the building of ships or the firing of cannon.” Within months, an estimated 20,000 acres were converted into productive land, with public places like the Boston Common serving as “demonstration gardens” where students and teachers could learn techniques and garden design. Civics groups like the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs provided funding and support. And the children responded: A million and a half students enlisted. As a 1919 government document stated, the garden army gave young students something to do — “something that helped to carry the burden of their country in the struggle for freedom, something that helped them to build character, and something that appealed to and developed their patriotism.” — Lory Hough listen to an edcast by citysprouts founding director jane hirschi. her new book,
ripe for change, by harvard education press, looks gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.
at the school garden movement:
read more about them:
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JILL ANDERSON
Saying he was excited to watch them bring teacher preparation to the forefront of the national conversation on education, Dean James Ryan announced the appointments of Eric Shed and Stephen Mahoney to head up the school’s new Harvard Teacher Fellows Program (gse.harvard.edu/htf). Shed, a lecturer at Brown University and former high school teacher in New York City, will take on the director’s role. Mahoney, the founding principal of the Springfield Renaissance School in Springfield, Massachusetts, will serve as assistant director.
Shed, Mahoney
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Professor PAUL HARRIS talking about the importance of imagination in child development and the role it plays in understanding reality, not just fantasy. (Ventures Africa)
Senior Lecturer MANDY SAVITZROMER discussing the staggering ratios of students in public schools to guidance counselors: 500 to 1, nationally. (The New York Times)
Professor HOWARD GARDNER writing that post-presidency, he thinks Barack and Michelle Obama should teach in “a typical urban public school in Chicago, Washington, or another metropolitan area.” (The Washington Post)
Senior Lecturer RICHARD WEISSBOURD, Ed.D.’87, on how it’s not enough to just urge people to talk to their children. Some parents, especially low-income parents working three jobs, come home exhausted and have to worry about laundry and cleaning. (The New Yorker)
Professor CATHERINE SNOW noting that families that talk a lot to their children also tend to use more grammatical variety in their sentences and more sophisticated vocabulary — they don’t just say, “That’s a teapot.” (The New Yorker)
Visiting Professor PASI SAHLBERG on the one answer you will hear most often when asked why students in Finland do so well in school compared with many other countries. (The Washington Post) HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
1969 1957
I was born in the small town of Jovellanos in Cuba on June 14. Both my parents had connections to education. My father and his best friend founded a night school that taught business to local students and merchants; my mother was a teacher at a local school before she married.
1960
An early signature of the Cuban Revolution was a campaign to end illiteracy. Local youth mobilized to go to the countryside to teach those older to read and write. The campaign was an early memory and an influence on my conception of how community and schools can function together in ways that were previously thought impossible.
1998
I had taken legal custody of one of my students earlier in the decade and became frustrated with the options available for him in Newark. I began to think about changing the system in which I was working and the way it served students, parents, and teachers. I went back to Harvard to become an urban superintendent at the Ed School’s Urban Superintendents Program.
2003
1986
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Entered formal schooling across the street from my house, and met some of the friends who are still among those closest to me today, thousands of miles and decades away from that first classroom.
After graduating from law school, and practicing law, I decided that I had to change direction. I could never really explain why, other than a sense of missing what mattered to me. I have never regretted the decision. I traveled and then started teaching at a Center School for classified emotionally disturbed adolescents in Newark, New Jersey, as a short-time project. I stayed in teaching for the next 12 years.
Moved to New York City to become chief of staff and then deputy chancellor for teaching and learning during Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Children First reforms of New York City public schools. In New York City I learned about a new pace of change, about the challenges of scale, and about the dilemmas of trying to change how schools worked across an enormous span of interests, understandings, and needs.
16
1963
2007
1979
Next was Harvard Law School. It was a step in line with the immigrant arc of achievement. I interned in law firms in Miami and New York during summers. It was during my Miami internship, which overlapped with the aftermath of the Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees in 1980, that I first sensed that practicing law might not be my eventual destiny. I was interested in the refugees’ lives and the dynamics of the communities welcoming them far more than the legal aspects of what was happening.
Thirsty to put the new learning to practice on my own, I left New York City to become CEO of the public school system in Baltimore. I thought the challenges of Baltimore reminded me of what I had experienced as a teacher in Newark. Baltimore quickly became home. I built a great team and with them helped create a sense of urgency on behalf of students, families, and schools.
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Emigrated to the United States, spoke no English. Settled in a Cuban enclave community in Union City, New Jersey along with my parents and siblings. My mother’s large family had left Cuba between 1961 and 1969. We were the last to leave, and they were all waiting. So it was not only loss, it meant reunion. I attended Thomas Jefferson Junior High School and Union Hill High School, where I met a new set of friends and mentors who became significant supports in my education. I have spoken often about how Union City schools provided for me a stream of high expectations during a time of transition from adolescent to young man, from a single, national, ethnic, and language identity to one far more complex and inclusive of those who now enlarged my experience in extraordinary and new ways.
2013
I came back to Harvard to teach others, hoping that some will become instruments of change and improvement in the public schools I have tried to improve. It’s been great to be able to look back, with a little detachment from the fray, and share my experiences with very passionate students.
1975
Started at Columbia University. The most salient thing I remember was the ambivalence of my parents and community. On one hand, their deep pride in their high-achieving son; on the other, fear that leaving the community would change him, socially, emotionally, and politically. Columbia and New York City were a feast!
2015
Today, almost two years later, I feel very optimistic about the future of American education, despite the constant drumbeat of conflict and criticism that dominates the public discourse about U.S. schools. There is a centrality in the national conversation, a sense of opening in the educational world, and an explosion of new forms of learning for teachers and students that I think create possibilities that were not there before.
After being in Mumbai, India, for four months on a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship this past fall, what does Paula Dominguez, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D.’98, miss? Her daughters, who came on the trip with her, miss the Bollywood music and dance numbers they learned from their classmates. She misses the sense of excitement and newness that comes from living in another country. And, of course, she misses “diving deep” into the research that brought her there — looking at the early implementation of community colleges modeled after community colleges in the United States. Dominguez, deputy director of policy for the Rhode Island Senate, says the research stemmed from the work in education policy she has been doing with state lawmakers at the Rhode Island General Assembly and through the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Over the past several years, largely because of the challenges facing Rhode Island, I have become increasingly interested in the central role played by community colleges in the U.S. public education system,” she says. “For Rhode Island, which faces a changing demographic of residents, a population of older workers that suddenly find their jobs are gone, and a soberingly high rate of unemployment, community college is a particularly important node for many learners.” And so while Dominguez’s research may help interested parties in India as they move forward with a new community college
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model, the hope is that it will also help inform education reform in the Ocean State. “Policymaking is always about creating a better set of conditions by reimagining the possible, and there is no better way to envision a whole new range of possibilities than by looking at another country’s policy context,” she says. “This is especially true when it comes to India, which relies on private institutions and private industry to a far larger extent in its system of higher education than does the United States. I hope that my findings provide state policymakers with an understanding of how private interests can contribute to our system of higher education, and decisionmakers in India with a sense of how their approach to community college might benefit from a stronger state role.” — Lory Hough
You know the Ed.M. and Ed.D. degrees, and, more recently, the Ed.L.D. and the Ph.D. But have you always wondered what the C.A.S. is all about? Here’s a quick breakdown of the degree, officially known as the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Counseling. The program started in 2004 because graduates of the Risk and Prevention (R&P) Program, now Prevention Science and Practice (PSP), needed to be licensed in Massachusetts so they could work in school-based settings. This one-year, full-time degree is available only to graduates of R&P and PSP. About a quarter of PSP students go on to take part in the C.A.S. Program. Students can receive training in two different school levels (say, elementary and high school) to increase their experience and job options. The C.A.S. is unique. It offers a prevention focus — something missing from many school-based counseling programs.
Graduates receive initial licensure in Massachusetts as either a school guidance counselor or school adjustment counselor. Students can transfer their licensure to other states. Graduates enter the field with master’s-plus-30 credits, which in many school districts earns them a higher pay rate. Students intern for 20 hours (or 3 days) per week in a school. This is in addition to a full-time course load. Students take a leadership role within PSP by leading a session during PSP’s pre-orientation, holding a lunch with incoming PSP students, and leading events for Ed.M. students. They often serve as teaching fellows. for more information:
gse.harvard.edu/masters/psp.
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As the semester winds down, many readers — especially graduating students who need a breather! — are looking for good summer reading options. We combed past issues of the magazine and pulled out suggestions from faculty members who were featured in the On My Bookshelf section. Happy reading.
The Checklist Manifesto BY ATUL GAWANDE
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders BY DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN
This nonfiction book looks at how lists can reduce error, in the author’s field of work — medicine — and beyond.
A collection of interconnected short stories that move between New York and rural and urban Pakistan. Recommended by Associate Professor Natasha Kumar Warikoo, Ed.M.’97
Recommended by Professor Andrew Ho
The Submission BY AMY WALDMAN
New England White BY STEPHEN CARTER
A novel that examines what happens after a jury in charge of selecting a ground zero-like memorial chooses a design created by a Muslim-American architect.
At nearly 600 pages, this isn’t a quick beach read but a literary thriller focused on wealth, race, politics, and a murder, set on the campus of the country’s most prestigious university. Recommended by Professor Nancy Hill
Recommended by Senior Lecturer Joe Blatt, Ed.M.’77
Freedom BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
The Last Life BY CLAIRE MESSUD
A novel, spanning several decades, about the complex relationships within a liberal, middle-class American family.
Narrated by a 15-year-old girl, the novel chronicles the lives of three generations of a French-Algerian family, framed around a tragic incident one summer.
Recommended by Associate Professor Meira Levinson
Recommended by Professor Howard Gardner
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie BY MURIEL SPARK
Red River BY LALITA TADEMY
Set in the 1930s, this novel is about a free-spirited teacher at a girl’s school in Scotland who ignores the conventional curriculum, bringing her into conflict with the school’s leadership.
This novel tells the story of former slaves living in Colfax, Louisiana, struggling to move forward with their lives under Reconstruction.
Recommended by Professor Paul Harris
The Lacuna BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER The fictional story of Harrison William Shepherd, beginning with his childhood through adulthood, when he begins cooking for the artists Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. Recommended by Lecturer Shari Tishman, Ed.D.’91
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Recommended by Senior Lecturer Pamela Mason, M.A.T.’70, Ed.D.’75
I tend to read a few books at a time depending on my mood. Right now, I’m finishing a novel by Sarah Waters called The Paying Guests. I’m in the middle of a graphic novel memoir, Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel, and recently started Daniel Siegel’s Brainstorm.
I think they all cluster around something interesting and psychological, although from very different vantage points. The Little Engine That Could
The Seven Silly Eaters by Mary Ann Hoberman and Suki’s Kimono by Chieri Uegaki
Proust
I would highly recommend Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon. It is a book that looks at difference and diversity primarily through a parent’s lens. It is a fascinating read that captures how complex and elusive identity can be and why it is so important to avoid simple categorizations and facile explanations for such a rich and complicated subject.
My absolute favorite place to read is in our antique bed under a wonderfully warm comforter, flanked by my two daughters. Heaven.
That just feels way too far away to even contemplate. — Lory Hough
Usually my reading starts in the wee hours of the night, once the kids are finally in bed.
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does it have to be so
COMPLICATED by lory hough
20
E
ducation isn’t easy. In fact, in its formal state, it’s probably one of the most complex, challenging things we do in our society, especially now, given the growing diversity of our student body and the greater amounts of information students are expected to know. As Diane Ravitch wrote a few years ago in the Los Angeles Times, “There are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems. Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers, and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.” Yet, does it always need to be so complex? Do our efforts — the big promises, the national commissions, the task force-created initiatives — always need to be so ambitious and lofty, filled with reams of jargon-laced documents and action plans? As Associate Professor Hunter Gehlbach wrote recently in Education Week, “Do we really need any more comprehensive, costly initiatives to fix our most challenging problems? If history forecasts the future, these large educational investments will pay minute dividends. As we race to the top after having left quite a number of children behind, we have to wonder why so many grand educational initiatives yield such limited benefits.” This isn’t to say that education reform can always be reduced to a few simple ideas. We do sometimes need big ideas. The creation of public school for all children — boys and girls, the rich and the poor — was, in itself, a big idea. But perhaps in order to make some big initiatives yield bigger benefits, educators need to look more often at simple ideas that have proven to help, even if for just one student or one school at any given time. Ideas that have clear intentions and doable goals. Ideas that have staying power. Take Steve Jobs and long-enduring Apple computers as a successful example of this thinking. As the authors of Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity point out, Jobs was the champion of simplicity. “While other companies complicated their gadgets with proliferating bells and whistles, Apple succeeded by anticipating users’ needs through streamlining and paring down — one button replacing three, and easy-to-understand icons in place of techie jargon.” As Jobs figured out, trying to address complex needs with equally complex bells and whistles was not the answer. As some of the educators in this story also learned, simple sometimes really is better.
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BE KIND
TEACH STUDENTS TO ASK THEIR OWN QUESTIONS
Instead of focusing just on making kids
It seems obvious, but it’s a valuable skill that’s rarely taught,
happy, Senior Lecturer Rick Weissbourd,
at least deliberately, says Dan Rothstein, Ed.D.’85. Yet, as
Ed.D.’87, and Associate Professor Stepha-
he writes in his book, Teaching Students to Ask Their Own
nie Jones at the Making Caring Common
Questions: One Small Change Can Yield Big Results, “When
Project report that it’s more important
students know how to ask their own questions, they take
for teachers and parents to help children
greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension,
become respectful and caring. For some
and make new connections and discoveries on their own.”
young people, this is intuitive, but for
Using a strategy called Question Formulation Technique, Rothstein, the co-director
many others, it’s not. While they may know
of the Right Question Institute, explains that teachers stop asking the questions and
what’s expected of them academically or
students start asking them — and asking them and asking them. It’s a powerful way
socially, they need guidance on what is
to learn, writes Rothstein. “In the absence of one simple, perfect solution, and given
expected of them ethically. The lack of this
the complexity and seeming intractability of the many problems facing our schools, we
understanding can lead to students being
should at least seriously consider Occam’s razor solution — a modest, simple ap-
at greater risk for many harmful behav-
proach that goes a long way to producing the optimal result we want.”
iors, including being mean and dishonest. What can educators and parents do? Give young people a chance to practice taking another’s perspective by playing charades, role-playing, and having “what would you do?” talks. Pair older students with younger students, allowing the older students to act as mentors. And, of course, practice what you preach.
SIMPLIFY THE FINANCIAL AID FORM For years, Professor Bridget Terry Long has been fighting to help low-income families better navigate the path to college. When her research revealed that too many students weren’t going because they felt they couldn’t afford it, or were going but not taking advantage of financial aid, even when they qualified, she decided to try something new: simplify the arduously long and complex FAFSA form that families fill out in order to apply for federal and state financial aid. She did it by partnering with H&R Block, which was able to transfer to the FAFSA a fair amount of tax data collected after families filed their taxes. Extra help was offered to fill in the rest, with the entire process
START THE HIGH SCHOOL DAY LATER
lasting about eight minutes, on average. What Long and her team found was that this
The science is
Ed School lecture, “Small things can make a big difference. We know this is true with
there. As a recent New York Times
easy intervention actually helped. Those eight minutes increased college enrollment by 7 percentage points. Three years later, those students were 8 percentage points more likely to be enrolled for two consecutive years. Long told an audience at a recent barriers, and we know that is true with interventions.”
article noted, “Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a health professional, a sleep scientist, or educator who would defend starting high school in the 7 a.m. hour, now the norm for many U.S. high schools, as good for physical or mental health, safety, or learning.” Experts say teens need about nine hours of sleep a night — and they’re not getting it. A 2006 poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that fewer than 20 percent of teens get that much, while 60 percent of children under the age of 18 complained of being tired during the day. Research shows that better syncing school start times with student body clocks decreases depression, sleepy driving, dropout rates, and poor academic performance.
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HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE
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SLOW DOWN What could be simpler than this? As Lecturer Shari Tishman, Ed.D.’91, wrote in Ed. in 2013, maybe we should slow things down in school. Schools, she says, are in the business of teaching complex knowledge, but knowledge develops slowly. “Slow learning involves radically expanding the typical timeframe devoted to learning about complex things,” she wrote. “It might mean spending a few hours looking at a painting rather than a few minutes, or spending an entire afternoon examining the pattern of weeds growing at the edge of the playground. … It might mean taking weeks or even months to explore a historical event from a wide variety of perspectives. It might mean spending an entire year exploring a problem in the community and designing and testing a solution.” This doesn’t mean learning has to be done at a snail’s pace, but rather, at the right pace. As one blogger noted in a piece about slow learning, “It’s about savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them.”
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MAKE MEETINGS MORE USEFUL
GREET PEOPLE WARMLY
In their book, Meeting Wise, lecturers Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04,
This action may actually be the simplest — ever — and it’s one that
Ed.D.’07, and Kathryn Parker Boudett make the case for some-
Chris McEnroe, Ed.M.’12, has made a daily goal at Tabor Academy,
thing obvious: If educators are going to have to spend time in
where he teaches English and supervises a resident dormitory. “As a
meetings, the meetings should at least be useful. Says Boudett,
teacher I carry an implicit authority and responsibility within the learn-
“One simple thing educators can do is to start every meeting
ing space,” he says. “If we hold that teaching and learning is a social
by clarifying the objectives of the meeting and then dive right
interaction, and that the most substantive learning is afforded by an
into tacking the most important objective early in the meeting,”
engaging and personalized context, then the best way I can meet my
rather than loading the beginning of the meeting with “easy”
goals as a teacher is to be engaged and to be engag-
agenda items that we believe — often mistakenly — that we can
ing with as many students in my community as
get through quickly. City says simply having an agenda is also
possible. The learning space exists at all times and
key. “Even if it’s an informal list, that’s better than showing up
with all people.” The impact so far? “The impact is
with no agenda at all,” she says.
that learning feels good all around.”
USE CHECKLISTS
LET STUDENTS MOVE
Surgeon and Harvard Medical School
Imagine asking an adult to spend seven straight hours in
Professor Atul Gawande made the
meetings and then be productive. “This is what we often
checklist famous. After studying the
ask of our children,” says A. Kevin Qazilbash, Ed.M.’98,
extensive and successful use of check-
principal of Spark Academy in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
lists by pilots before takeoff, Gawande
His school’s simple idea: Align the school day to natural
wondered if his own extremely complex
human physiology. “In our school day, we build in two
field of medicine could also benefit from
full movement classes during the day along with short
checklists. It did. In his own practice,
movement bursts, what we call brain boosts, to break up
as he writes in The Checklist Manifesto,
classes and get kids active rather than having them sit
he has not gotten through a week of
for hours and hours straight.” They are seeing progress.
surgery where the checklist has not
In the first two years, in both fifth and sixth grades,
caught a problem. Using checklists in
Spark students showed the highest achievement in the
education might not save lives, but it
history of the building in math and ELA on the annual state MCAS test. And from one of
could free teacher and principal brain
their periodic student surveys, they also learned something more telling: Kids at Spark
power for more creative things or even
like school. From the survey, 86 percent said they feel successful while 85 percent said
save time. End-of-day checklists for
they feel like Spark is a good place for them to learn. Even more, 91 percent said that
students, especially young students who
they work hard on their schoolwork.
often “forget” homework or important notices in their desks, can prevent later frustration and get them started on becoming more organized. At meetings, as
REVAMP THE OPEN HOUSE
City and Boudett write in Meeting Wise,
Senior Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, has
using checklists can bring simplicity to
made it her mission to revamp the school open house.
the process of planning or facilitating
“There are 15,000 of these open houses on any given
meetings. “It takes people less than
night in the United States” in the fall, she told an audi-
five minutes to look through the check-
ence at the Ed School, “and we blow it.” At most open
list as they are
houses, Mapp says, parents file into the auditorium to
planning an
hear the principal talk for a half hour about rules and
agenda and
then they file to their classroom to hear about more
see if it sparks
rules. “It’s not linked to learning.” Instead, the author
any ideas for
of Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family/
how to make
School Partnerships, says open houses should be opportunities to share with families
the meeting
specific grade-level learning goals that have been identified for students. They should also
better,” says
“have time built in where families can share with staff what they know about their chil-
Boudett. “That
dren’s challenges and strengths as well as strategies they may be using at home and in
is pretty easy!”
the community to support children’s learning.”
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REPLACE TIMEOUT WITH A SAFE PLACE
HELP WITH TRANSPORTATION
In her work with schools around the world as part of the new Research Schools International Initiative, Adjunct Lecturer Christina Hinton, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’12, has seen many simple, successful classroom practices including one for preschoolers: games that help them develop emotional regulation skills. “In many preschool classrooms, children who are disruptive are put in ‘timeout,’ which is an empty chair that is perceived by them as punishment,” Hinton says. “At one preschool, children who are feeling overwhelmed by emotions are invited to go to a ‘safe place,’ which is a warm, colorful area with a few games they can play to help them regulate their emotions.” In a simple balloon game, children fill up their bellies like a big balloon and then let all the air out in one big gust. In the faucet game, children put their arms above their head, and then drop them down while making the shhhh sound of running water. “With this simple strategy,” Hinton says, the preschool “is teaching these young children that emotions should not be suppressed, but rather experienced and dealt with in constructive ways.”
Sometimes simply realizing that a student is having trouble getting to school can make all the difference. In Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, the GirlUp nonprofit discovered that a huge barrier for girls going to school was the commute — often a 20mile walk round trip. Last December, with the United Nations, they donated 550 bikes to girls in the country, what they called “wheels
FIND SIMILARITIES “Take a group of students who are arbitrarily assigned to spend a year with a particular teacher, who probably had no choice in selecting the students, and make them get along well,” says Associate Professor Hunter Gehlbach. “That is a complex challenge to say the least.” So Gehlbach and his research team designed something that helps: a get-to-know-you survey, which they gave to 315 ninth-graders and 25 of their teachers. The survey asked personal questions such as favorite hobby and what they think are characteristics of a good friend. The research was based on a simple theory: We tend to like those who are like us. The research team also randomly assigned some students and teachers to discover things they have in common. They found that when teachers realized they shared commonalities with students, they rated their relationships as more positive and those students tended to earn higher grades. Gehlbach says that while this relatively simple exercise is easy to do at the
of progress.” Closer to home, Barbara Carletta Chen was volunteering at a free, private middle school serving first-generation students in San Diego. One of her eighth-grade mentees was struggling academically. Chen discovered that it was due to absenteeism. The school was far from her home, and the county did not provide free bus service. Chen helped get the paperwork started for a fee waiver for the bus, and the student got back on track. “She will graduate this spring and is headed to her local community college,” says Chen, “the first in her family.”
beginning of a school year, he doesn’t recommend that teachers do their own survey. “The rationale is that the do-it-yourself model would allow teachers and students to see their differences,” he says, “rather than our intervention, which only highlights what they have in common.”
INCLUDE DADS In Boston, the Edward Monroe Trotter School, run by Principal Mairead Nolan, Ed.M.’97, offers a weekly book club called Dads Read, primarily for the men in students’ lives. Each
USE TEXTING TO KEEP COLLEGE-BOUND STUDENTS ON TRACK
24
session includes dinner, and the students get
We’ve written about this before, but it bears
to take home a free book. Teachers and co-
repeating. Even when students are accepted
ordinators read stories, too, modeling how to
to college, as many as 40 percent (particu-
read for understanding. Says Heather Weiss,
larly students from low-income families) fail to
founder and director of the Harvard Family
matriculate to any postsecondary institution,
Research Project, “Dads Read is a powerful
a phenomenon referred to as summer melt.
twist on a book club. It is a small intervention
Benjamin Castleman, Ed.D.’13, and Lindsay
addressing a big, important question: How can
Page, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’11, authors of Summer
schools successfully engage dads to support
Melt, found that something as simple (and low
their children’s learning and literacy and make
cost) as sending a handful of personalized text messages over the summer to these
the learning fun?” It’s one small but effective
students, reminding them of important dates and tasks they need to complete in
example, Weiss says, of how a school can
order to matriculate, helps a large number of them stay on track. In one study in
build relationships with families and support
Dallas, for example, matriculation increased by up to 4 percentage points.
learning at home.
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What simple ideas have you found that work? Link to this article on Facebook or Twitter and post your thoughts!
INSTALL A BUDDY BENCH It’s a simple way to make sure that no students on the playground are left out. More schools around the world are installing a bench on the playground designated as a “buddy bench,” where students can sit if they’re feeling lonely or even bored. Other students can go up to that student and invite him or her to play. The hope is not only will the bench help kids feel more welcome in the moment, but it could also help prevent bullying down the road. According to the National Association of School Psychologists, as many as 30 percent of U.S. students have been bullied or have been a bully.
ASK OUTSIDE GROUPS FOR HELP One of the first things Darienne Driver, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’14, noticed as the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools was that the fine arts and athletics in the district were disappearing. “We’ve lost some of the things that make a well-rounded experience for kids. But when we talk about channeling student energy? Wow!” she says. “So we are now working on expanding the arts across the district. That’s what makes kids come to school.” The district has reached out to dance and theater companies in the community, as well as local arts teachers. She told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “We cannot improve schools in isolation.”
CREATE STUDENT CREWS
USE PERSONAL STORIES TO MOTIVATE STUDENTS
It certainly doesn’t have to be called a crew, but
A couple of years ago, while working with high school students, Chris
as headmaster Meg Campbell, C.A.S.’97, found at
Hulleman at the University of Virginia and Judy Harackiewicz at the
Codman Academy, a public charter school in Boston,
University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered that asking the students to
creating student-led advisory groups for high school-
write short essays relating the content of their science classes to their
ers that are single gender and multi-age has had a
personal lives did something important: It motivated them to become
huge impact on students feeling like school is home.
more interested in science, which in turn improved their grades by about
“At Codman our ‘crews’ are composed of all girls or all
three-quarters of a letter grade.
boys, in grades 9–12,” she says. “This means every ninth-grader has a big sister or big brother in each of the other classes. This vertical integration, as opposed to horizontal integration of grouping students in
MAKE SPACE FLEXIBLE
grade levels by age, fosters deep friendships across
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement in the United
grades and promotes a feeling of family in our school
States toward redesigning schools to be more open so that students
community. When alumni return to visit, they always
and teachers weren’t so boxed-in. Some schools tried this, but it didn’t
go to their crew first.” Why divide by gender? “It gives
stick, in part because the rooms were too open. Today, new schools
students a break from what I
embracing this decades-old ethos are still looking at open spaces, but
call hormone display behavior,”
with a twist: They have dedicated quiet “zones” or nooks, or they can
Campbell jokes. It’s also why
easily be reconfigured, such as the new class space on the third floor of
the school made uniforms uni-
the Longfellow building that has moving walls that allow the room to be
sex: all pants, no skirts. “Solves
divided or opened as needed. And the cool part? The lime-green chairs
a million problems.”
swivel and glide around the room.
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Their First Year
photography by martha stewart
At the beginning of the fall semester, we asked a handful of first-year students to tell us what they hoped to do in the world of education. At the end of the school year, we went back to the same students and asked how they, or their hopes for making a difference, had changed. Here is what they said.
Sterling Higa, Ed.M.’15
26
(Arts In Education)
FALL
SPRING
I arrived at the Ed School knowing I wanted to either continue working in education nonprofits, teach in a classroom, or branch out into education policy. After a month of being here, I found the classroom calling louder than the other avenues. I'd like to teach for a few years, and with that experience, I want to see how I can help in the reform of the education system in my home state, Hawai’i. I could see myself as a principal or even a superintendent one day, and I don't think I had anticipated either of those possibilities before I arrived.
If I learned one thing this year, it’s that I look good in a suit. In class, I considered ways public policy could be influenced to improve educational outcomes for students. I learned this year that most educational inequity is rooted in structural economic inequity. Addressing one alone will not be enough to achieve the results that students need back home in Hawai’i. This month, I was recommended for admission to a Ph.D. in education program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. I hope to spend the next five years refining my understanding of the social and political context for education in an effort to design and implement better policy.
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Daphne Penn, Ph.D. FALL
SPRING
My experiences as a high-achieving student in an underperforming high school, a struggling African American student in a top-20 university, and a classroom teacher in a Title I elementary school, profoundly shaped my interest in positively impacting the field of education. Upon leaving my career as a teacher to begin my path to academia, I struggled to figure out how I could contribute both to the academy and the students who inspired me to pursue graduate-level studies. After a month or so of being here, what I want to do is become a university professor and conduct research that bridges the gap between the academy, policymakers, and the population(s) that I research. Substantive course work highlighting racial, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities across the life course combined with my yearlong participatory action research course has provided me with a framework for conducting rigorous research while simultaneously empowering others to make impactful change within their respective communities. Additionally, given the severe and longstanding underrepresentation of minorities in the American professoriate, I want to mentor and prepare students from underrepresented backgrounds for careers in university-level teaching and research.
My first year as a Ph.D. student has transformed my thinking about education, the possible futures of marginalized youth, and my role in building capacity within underserved communities. Coursework has helped me to reflect on how my educational experiences have largely been detached from my social reality as a black woman from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background. Although I have successfully navigated culturally nonresponsive schooling environments, millions of students continue to struggle under the status quo. The social reproduction of inequality cannot end until we move past deficit models of schooling that require students to abandon their culture in order to become a success. Education should extend beyond the classroom and into communities. Additionally, we must reject overly deterministic attitudes about the roles of structure, culture, and agency in promoting or undermining success. Finally, I believe that neither research nor activism alone will eradicate inequality. Instead, research as activism is the key to solving educational inequality and empowering marginalized youth. As a future university professor, I plan to leverage my knowledge and privilege to do good work and impact positive change within the academy, marginalized communities, and the field of education.
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Merete Kropp, Ed.M.’15
28
(Human Development and Psychology)
FALL
SPRING
I want to support children and families who are living overseas who may not have immediate and convenient access to educational, developmental, and health services in their primary language. Up until this point in my career, I have taught young children in international schools. My students and their families are global nomads who weave different cultures and languages into their lives on a daily basis while living and working overseas. For the past five years, I was teaching at the Early Learning Center of the American School in Japan. I came to HGSE to learn more about how children learn and develop within the context of multiple languages and cultures and how moving from one country to another throughout their childhoods effects their development and identity formation. I also hope to learn more about two-generation programs that mentor and coach parents as well as provide educational services for children in order to perhaps someday implement such a program for internationally mobile families.
As I finish up my year at HGSE, I believe that I have gained new insights into both early childhood development and program implementation that helps to clarify the path I would like to take going forward. I plan to launch an interactive online parent education platform aimed at parents who are raising children internationally. Through this platform, parents will have access to personalized information and resources on child development, as well as the opportunity to connect with a mentor or coach who can respond to the individualized needs of each family within their context through the use of video and other technologies. Although I am sad to see this invigorating year at HGSE come to an end, I am excited about new possibilities going forward and grateful for the opportunity to have learned from and been guided by the faculty here, as well as my classmates.
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Cornelius Lee, Ed.M.’15
(School Leadership)
FALL
SPRING
After a month or so of being here at HGSE, I want to begin examining the external factors — poverty, unemployment, and crime — that impact urban neighborhoods. The historical context that underpins our country’s educational framework is deeply rooted in societal factors that affect schools. In essence, schools reflect society, and as a result, attenuating external policies that influence minority populated urban centers could potentially mitigate long-lasting, harmful affects to these communities. I came in wanting to be a principal, but I soon realized I was much more interested in the issues a principal has to juggle that are completely outside the purview of a school’s jurisdiction. Unfortunately, these peripheral elements largely affect how students perform in schools. I’m unsure where this discovery will take me after HGSE, but I’m leaning towards education policy or pursuing a law degree.
As my time at Harvard comes to an end, I’m 100 percent certain the primary civil rights issue of contemporary society is education. Education is the bedrock of our country’s political, economic, and social development. However, gross injustices continue to plague our country’s classrooms and school buildings at astronomical rates. Resources are unfairly allocated and opportunities are carelessly truncated at the cost of children’s livelihoods and to the benefit of political ambition and social elitism. Schools were originally created as incubators for American idealism and democracy. Yet, democracy during this time was only afforded to the white and mostly elite of society. Schools still reflect a fractured and highly stratified reality. However, there are dedicated individuals who are relentlessly combating the nefarious blight of classism and racism that stymies children’s trajectory for success. These people have been the colleagues, professors, and Boston educators I’ve been blessed to work with at HGSE. I’m ready to get back in the trenches next year and continue the fight for equity and justice in Chicago Public Schools as a resident principal.
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Irteza Binte-Farid, Ed.M.’15
30
(International Education Policy)
FALL
SPRING
Coming in as a student, I thought I would be learning a great deal about education policy and preparing myself to become a candidate for a policy position on the regional level in order to tackle issues such as the achievement gap and unequal college access for low-income, first-generation students. However, after arriving, I realized that instead of simply learning about information, I want to learn how to create that information to answer my questions. I have immersed myself in research courses in order to understand two things: how to become a critical consumer of research and how to create sound research. Instead of simply viewing research as a process removed from social events, I hope that my research can be applied to the field of education in the future. I have been learning about methods, such as action research, which engage researchers with the community to answer questions that arise from local needs. While my interest in educational access for low-income, first-generation students still remains, it has simply taken a new form. I can only imagine how my interests may change in the future.
Every moment at HGSE has been a learning experience. Having entered with little background in the education field, I am now feeling like I have a broader and deeper understanding of the different currents of research, thought, and direction that educational pedagogy and policy can take. I am a novice — there is a great deal I still want to learn — but what I can do is continue to learn about the field of education in as much depth and breadth that I can manage. It is in pursuit of this goal that I will be starting a Ph.D. program at UPenn’s Graduate School of Education this coming fall. My research will be in the Education, Culture, and Society Department, where I can continue to explore how education serves as a tool for social mobility, especially in the lives of underrepresented minorities. I can learn how to produce qualitative research that can potentially affect scholarship and/or policy, and continue to articulate how it is that education can serve as the tool for social change and mobility in our current society.
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Joshua Jenkins, Ed.M.’15
(Language and Literacy)
FALL
SPRING
What I want to do in education is help. I want to help kids learn to read and write. I want to help teachers teach reading and writing. I want to help parents know what they can do at home to help their children’s literacy development. For the last few years, I was helping students at a public school in New Orleans. At times (okay, most of the time) I felt like I was taking a stab in the dark. Trying this, trying that. I was reading so many things to figure out a “right” way to teach reading and writing. Luckily, I had great mentors who really helped me be more strategic and were willing to “talk shop.” I was also fortunate to get my feet wet helping teachers with literacy in their classrooms. Working with families is my next frontier; it’s something I did occasionally in my practice (phone calls, occasional letters, report card conferences), but am just now beginning to realize is fundamental if we want sustainable change. I’m embarrassed I wasn’t working with families more — but I’m relieved I’m realizing this early in my career instead of at my retirement party.
As the end of semester two approaches, I’m lucky to have found a role that so closely matches what I love and want to do. On September 1, I will be a literacy specialist for a small, public elementary school in Newton, Massachusetts, at a school with students almost entirely from the very nearby community (the principal says nearly all of them walk to school). I will connect with teachers and parents around literacy and getting kids to LOVE BOOKS and writing. The added bonus and asset is that there are around 20 languages spoken by students in this school! For all of us, the cross-cultural conversation is an exciting opportunity to learn about different perspectives, customs, and languages. I will also have the joy of working with parents of children from Boston who come to the school through the METCO Program. I am thrilled, terrified, and humbled to take on this new role and help make an impact for the children and community at this school. New beginnings mean lots of butterflies in this guy’s stomach!
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Clint Smith, Ph.D.
32
FALL
SPRING
As a high school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, my students and I used literature as a lens through which we explored the realities of the world around us. We read Richard Wright’s Native Son to frame conversations around the prison industrial complex. We used Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents to explore socio-historical policies around immigration, and used William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to tackle issues around political dissent. As I begin my Ph.D. here, I’m interested in researching the manifestations and implications of critical pedagogy in secondary school classrooms. It is essential for students to use education as a means to both recognize and push back against the oppressive forces that pervade our society. The question is how can teachers, schools, and communities work with students to understand that the world is a social construction, and thus can be reconstructed to better serve the needs of their communities? I’m interested in how, as educators, we can use the curriculum to push our students to imagine a new world, a better world.
Over the course of the past year, amid the swelling “Black Lives Matter” protests across the country, my desire to understand how young people develop a social, political, and civic identity has been reaffirmed and reinvigorated. The ongoing protests have also, however, brought renewed attention to our nation’s criminal justice system. In an effort to better understand what is happening in these spaces, I have spent a significant amount of time researching the socio-historical context that has shaped our contemporary policing policies and prison system. Additionally, I began serving as a writing instructor at Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk, Massachusetts. The experience has been transformative. I work with a group of men who are simultaneously some of the most brilliant and misunderstood people in the world. I bear witness as they use writing and literature as a means to take back a sense of humanity that has largely been stripped from them. The experience has pushed me to decouple what it means to be “well-schooled” as compared to “welleducated,” and made undoubtedly clear that this is a population I want to continue to work with.
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Tarin Griggs, Ed.M.’15
(Arts In Education)
FALL
SPRING
I want to bring quality arts programming to urban school districts. I am a dancer and a poet, and I grew up in the thriving San Francisco Bay Area arts scene. So many of the Bay Area schools are under resourced, and arts programming can be considered an afterthought, if it is present at all. I was fortunate enough to have access to dance classes in my public high school, and that experience allowed me to gain personal strength, tenacity, and discipline. Far too often, the only students that are able to partake in arts classes are the ones that are able to afford lessons through studios. For many families, this is not an option. Having the opportunity to express yourself in a creative way is one of the most empowering tools we can give young people. I consider this an issue of equity. I am open to many career paths, but I would love to bring nonprofits together to collaborate and identify the most effective ways to provide services for young people. I am open to working with arts and education nonprofits, foundations, and school districts.
I went through a period of time where I feared that comprehensive education reform might be too big of a challenge to execute well. However, I have learned about deeper learning initiatives, project-based learning, and community-focused efforts that may be steps in the right direction, given the proper support and resources. I want tomorrow’s students to be engaged and to have an intrinsic love for learning that continues after leaving the classroom. I plan to return to my work in the nonprofit sector, but I hope to remain involved in promising new initiatives for student learning. I am interested in issues of educational equity and college access, in addition to the work I have done in the arts sector. I have gone through an immense amount of intellectual and emotional growth while here. In addition to the invaluable experiences I have shared with my colleagues and professors, I have realized that my personal experiences hold value, that we do not have to accept flawed systems as immutable entities, and that we have the power to create the opportunities we want — both for students and for ourselves!
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Gregory Taylor, Ed.M.’15
34
(Special Studies)
FALL
SPRING
Before coming to HGSE, I was a special education major at the University of Cincinnati. I plan on heading back to Cincinnati after I finish my year to teach special education through Teach For America, where I deferred my placement for a year. As an undergraduate, I conducted research addressing the unique educational needs of students with learning disabilities included in general education science classrooms. I am able to continue this research here under the guidance of great faculty members. My interest in special education stems from my younger brother Anthony. Anthony has multiple disabilities that affect his daily life. Growing up in a household with a child with disabilities has given me a unique perspective that set me up for success in the field of special education. My courses at HGSE are helping me become a better teacher with a greater breadth of knowledge in the field of education. I am also taking research methods courses to develop my educational research skills. Next year, I expect to continue my research while teaching.
As I wrap up my time at HGSE, my immediate plans after graduation have not changed. I am heading back to Southwest Ohio to reunite with my fiance Caitlin and be an intervention specialist at Thurgood Marshall High School in Dayton Public Schools. I am grateful for the experiences I have had and the people I have met at Harvard. This year, I have learned a great deal about education policy and the implications for students with disabilities. In the classroom, I can make more informed decisions rooted in education policy. I was also able to continue my research independently and under the guidance of HGSE faculty this year. After I teach for several years, I still plan on pursuing a doctorate in special education to develop interventions for students with learning disabilities in the science classroom. However, for now, I am looking forward to pairing what I have learned this year with my personal experience and prior education to create more meaningful learning experiences for students with disabilities in Dayton Public Schools.
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Gerardo Ochoa, Ed.M.’15
(Higher Education)
FALL
SPRING
I want to go to college, but I can’t afford it. College sounds good, but it’s too expensive. These, among countless other stories, have been entrusted to me concerning student doubts about their college futures. As the cost of college continues to increase, so too will students’ financial struggles. I want to work in higher education to make an impact on how families pay for college. As a first-generation college student from an immigrant family from Michoacán, Mexico, I know too well the financial obstacles many of our young people face today. As a higher education professional, my life purpose is to serve students and eliminate the financial barriers to a higher education. Money should not be the reason a student does not go to college. We have a long ways to go, but I’m up for the challenge.
My interest in student access and affordability has been solidified while here at HGSE. I envision working with student-centered organizations where student success is at the core of their missions. More specifically, colleges, foundations, businesses, and nonprofit organizations. To improve our college-going, our retention rates, and our graduation rates, multiple stakeholders need to be involved in finding the solution that best suits students. For this reason, I want to create policy, increase resources, and develop programs that serve all students generally, but first-generation students, in particular. Regardless of where my career takes me, I am committed to carrying out my life purpose: to serve all students and provide opportunities for students to persist towards a college education.
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Meredith Dreman, Ed.M.’15
36
(Prevention Science and Practice)
FALL
SPRING
I want to create media and technology that promotes wellbeing. I come from a psychology background, and am interested in motivation, emotion, and critical thinking strategies. Two main questions are arising at my start here: 1) What are the psychological factors present in the development of a healthy mind? 2) How can we design tools that will encourage the development of resilient practices? Currently, technological advances are outpacing student engagement. There are more education and health products available to students of all ages than could possibly be used. However, even when students want to use them, the odds are against follow through. I’m investigating this issue by trying to understand the cognitive and emotional processes that guide behavior. Engaging students and encouraging their healthy development are broad aims that show how many unruly ideas are generated in the first few months of HGSE. Now comes the hard part: figuring out what it means and how to move ideas into action.
The past nine months have been a whirlwind crammed with ideas and stories I will be unraveling for the rest of my life. We share something special at HGSE. Yes, many of us use the word “scaffold” heavily and expect events to start 10 minutes after the posted time. But we also share a state of wonder — wonder about why education is what we see today and how we can design it in the future. If education is a Rube Goldberg contraption, the professors here have given me a lens to focus on the intricacies of building an individual component while appreciating the complexity in which it exists. I am still interested in designing media to promote resilience. In the fall I wasn’t sure how to turn that lofty statement into real products, but during my time at HGSE, I built an app to help college students adjust to campus life, a website that delivers messages from loved ones during “rainy days,” and a cognitive reframing worksheet to help adolescents cope with stress. I am extremely grateful for this education and am passionate to pay it forward after graduation.
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Dwight Rhodes, Ed.L.D. FALL
SPRING
During my nearly 20 years in education, I’ve had incredible opportunities to serve students in several roles ranging from teacher to principal to chief academic officer. I’d like to think that I’ve had a positive impact in the lives of students. However, after being at HGSE for only a few months, I am reminded by tragic events involving young black men that there is a tremendous amount of work ahead to radically improve the educational experiences of all students regardless of their race, socioeconomic status, geography, and gender. I find myself urgently standing at a crossroad. What path do I embark upon here and beyond that will enable me to continue serving students in a leading role, that will create an effectively functioning educational system for all students? Honestly, I’m not absolutely sure. However, I do know that having this opportunity to marry my years of practical work experience with the immense resources of Harvard and the incredible talents of HGSE faculty and fellow Ed.L.D. cohort members, is a step in the right direction — a step closer to providing every student in America with the education he or she deserves.
I knew I wanted to impact the educational system in a way that would enable the most academically behind students to catch up or surpass the academic performance of their peers. That goal has not changed. However, my path to achieving that goal has changed, or at least, that path has become clearer than it was nine months ago. I’ve begun to develop a new lens for discovering how to advance my travels along the pathway of improving student achievement through improved teacher quality. That developing lens is centered on not just knowing the effects of having a “growth mindset,” but realizing the power of its implementation in the work in which I engage. For example, by applying a growth mindset, I am now able to imagine an unlikely ally, teacher unions, as my partner in improving student outcomes. Instead of regarding teacher unions as an obstacle to reform, a perspective I vehemently held for many years, I imagine teacher unions serving as a partner to improve teacher quality, thus, improving student learning. Someone could not have paid me enough money to think that way several months ago.
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ad he stuck with it, Rick Hess, Ed.M.’90, would have been one incredibly cool teacher. Would he have been an extraordinarily effective one? Who knows. But spend even a few minutes with one of America’s most influential and respected, yet unpretentious, education policy experts, and it’s clear that being a teenager in a Rick Hess classroom would have been a blast. For two years, 9th- and 10th-graders in his world geography, civics, and free enterprise classes at Scotlandville High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had that opportunity. But a high school in bayou country proved too small for Hess, who’s become one of the biggest wonks in the onetime (and sometimes still) swamp that is Washington, D.C. “Whereas a lot of [teachers] are much more concerned about the social mission of schooling and battle through their frustrations, my attitude was, screw it,” Hess says. “If you’ve taught 20 years, almost every contribution you have to a conversation is going to grow from that experience. I don’t think about my time in schools that way. It was last century. It was a very limited part of my career. I don’t imagine that it should give me some authority or that I have any deep insights from it. But from a personal level, the thing that struck me was how fundamental the act of 38
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learning and teaching is, and how natural it should be for learning to be an exciting, engaging activity. Not because anybody’s evil, but just because of the way the world works, we’ve made it really hard for teachers and kids to have that kind of joyous, wondrous, liberating experience in a lot of schools and classrooms. And that pisses me off.” On his Education Week blog “Straight Up,” to his 6,155 Twitter followers (@rickhess99), to the tens of thousands of people who read his books, or to a single reporter sitting in his office at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on this cold January afternoon, Hess doesn’t mince words. Yet over the course of his career he’s managed to craft controversial arguments, challenge conventional thought, and make his strong opinions known without, well, angering too many people. “I have never seen him call someone a name to make his point,” says Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, an organization that has about as much love for the conservative think tank AEI as the Red Sox do for the Yankees. “Even if he agreed with you, he would sneer at someone who has to reduce themselves to name-calling. He’d say it’s obvious that they can’t actually use reason and evidence to make their point. I would say that Rick is the noble opposition. Out of 10 issues, we’re probably going to disagree on eight of them, but that’s okay. He’s not my enemy, and I’m not his.”
by mike unger
STRAIGHT UP photography by ryan smith
Hess, 46, is tipping back in a chair that’s off to the side of — not behind — his desk, which is crowded not just with piles of papers and books, but with knickknacks from vacations to various islands, a wooden pencil case from a recent trip to the Republic of Georgia (“My translator looked a lot like Stalin,” he says), and a Cartman squeeze doll from one of his favorite TV shows, South Park. He’s wearing sneakers, dark blue jeans, and a pullover fleece, which is about as dressed up as he gets. “He’s not going to put on a suit unless he has to,” Eskelsen García says. “I think it’s in his contract that he doesn’t have to wear a tie to work.” It would be easy to confuse Hess’ friendly demeanor and casual manner for a lack of seriousness. It would also be a mistake.
rederick Hess was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His family moved to New Jersey before settling in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia, when he was in fifth grade. His father, Milton, was a systems analyst, and his mother, Sheila, was a librarian. They eventually separated, and Hess spent most of his childhood living with his dad and brother. School never interested him much until he joined the newspaper at W.T. Woodson High. He was more Robert Novak than Bob Woodward, and one op-ed he penned on the federal deficit caught the eye of his local congressman, who entered it into the congressional record.
Sporting a sub-3.0 GPA but solid test scores, Hess applied to nine northeast colleges including Bucknell, Swarthmore, and Brown. Brandeis was the only school that admitted him. He took classes he enjoyed, like social sciences and history, and also picked up work as a substitute teacher in the public school district. He pocketed $50 a day, which usually went toward pizza and beer. “Between substitute teaching and actually doing well in college, I started getting really interested in this question of what is it that makes people either turn on or shut down,” says Hess, speaking with his hands as much as his voice. “A lot of people get into education, especially nowadays, because it’s a cause. For me it was always more that I found I can’t think of a more fundamental human act than the act of learning or the act of teaching. It’s what we do with our kids; it’s what we do with our friends. Why did I like learning stuff now, and I didn’t like learning stuff then?” Armed with a political science degree but no desire to teach in a private school, he enrolled at the Ed School, where he earned his teaching certification and master’s in 1990. A few months before graduating, he mailed 130 letters to school districts inquiring about jobs. “I could have taken those letters to the Tobin Bridge, set the bag on fire, and thrown it off,” he says. “The reason, which I didn’t learn until later, was that’s not how school districts hire.” It was one of his first glimpses into the often illogical behavior of the American educational system. “Districts don’t even worry about hiring until after they know how many slots they have to fill, which is the craziest strategy for recruiting talent you’ve ever heard of,” he says, still dumbfounded. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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At a job fair, he landed an interview with East Baton Rouge Parish, which hired him to teach high school. When he arrived down South, he was reassigned to a middle school, only to be switched back two days before school started. After two years that were simultaneously thrilling and unbearably frustrating, he quit. The experience provided an up-closeand-personal look at the joys of educating young people and the minefields teachers must negotiate. “I learned a lot. None of it is a surprise to anyone who’s ever seen Office Space,” Hess says. “Almost everybody in education is trying to do good stuff for kids. Some people get tired and get frustrated, but if you’re a ‘bad person,’ K–12 education is just not that fun a place to go. There are just lots of rules and norms and regulations in schoolhouses. There can be a real reticence for people to make judgment calls because they’re worried that somebody’s going to second-guess them or they’re going to run afoul of some rule. There was very little upside for doing things out of the norm. It’s not like it would get recognized in your file. But if you did that stuff and it went wrong, there was a lot of risk of getting grief. “Far and away the best job I’ve ever had was walking [into a room] to spend the day talking to a bunch of 15-year-olds about the U.S. Constitution or supply-and-demand curves,” he says. “But I’m not a good enough person to do that. I was making 18 grand a year. I have enormous respect for people who are willing to make those sacrifices.” At the end of the day, Hess wasn’t one of them. So he returned to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in political science in 1997. While in Cambridge he supervised student-teachers and was struck by the ways in which so many seemingly disparate school systems actually were similar. His dissertation, which became Spinning Wheels, one of his nine books (he’s also co-authored two and edited dozens more), examined school reforms implemented by 57 cities. His findings — specifically that much of what afflicts K–12 schools actually is the result of continuous reform, not the reforms themselves — caused people to take note. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where for five years he discovered that his views often didn’t mesh with those of his colleagues. “I’m a conservative because I am hugely skeptical of human foresight. I’m hugely skeptical that we can design big, complicated policies that do what we want them to do,” he says. “I have huge concerns that we tend to create lots of unanticipated consequences, which don’t work. This way of thinking about the world makes me something of a minority in education space, but you know, that’s cool. It’s a free country.” After he published “Tear Down This Wall,” a controversial paper that argued teacher certification in this country is flawed, Hess and Virginia mutually agreed to part ways (the paper was
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just one reason for the divorce, he says). AEI, which hadn’t had an education program since the ’80s, was looking to get back in the game, and Hess was now a free agent. He was recommended to then-AEI president Chris DeMuth by former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn, M.A.T.’67, Ed.D.’70. “He was establishing quite a reputation as a bit of an education renegade and gadfly,” says Finn, now distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “I was impressed by both: what I read and him personally.” So was DeMuth, who hired him. AEI was back in the education policy arena, and Rick Hess was heading back home to Washington.
o horns protrude from Hess’ head. No tail pokes out the back of his jeans. This may come as a surprise to some on the other side of the ideological divide when they first meet him. “When you talk ed reform, things are very polarized,” says Maddie Fennell, a literacy coach at Miller Park Elementary in Omaha, Nebraska, where she was state teacher of the year in 2007. “There’s very little gray. There are some times when I’ve gotten really miffed at him. We were somewhere once, and there was a prominent speaker saying, all teachers are so great, yada yada, and Rick just started in. It was like sitting next to a seventh-grader who got mad at a teacher. He started saying, ‘This is a bunch of crap.’ I said, ‘What? Teachers are great.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but not every teacher is great. When you say every teacher is great, you devalue the ones that truly are great.’ I couldn’t disagree with him. He was right. “When you argue with Rick, you have to be reasoned, and you have to see both sides,” continues Fennell, who serves as a classroom teaching ambassador fellow for the U.S. Department of Education. “I think he’s an ally of great teachers, but he’s not the kind of ally who’s going to sugarcoat things.” Hess’ latest book, The Cage-Busting Teacher, might be a surprising read for those who assume that because he works for AEI, he unflinchingly toes the conservative company line. Based on interviews with hundreds of teachers, it “uncovers the many ways in which teachers can break out of familiar constraints in order to influence school and classroom practice, education policy, and school reform,” write Hess’ editors at Harvard Education Press. It even garnered a blurb of praise from Eskelsen García, who says she couldn’t have offered one for some of his other books.
Often a go-to source for education reporters, Hess has worked hard to ensure that he’s not pigeonholed as a predictable conservative talking head. “Part of being successful when you’re a writer or a public voice is you want to do a good job of communicating your thoughts, so people are reacting to you rather than some stereotype of you,” he says. “I think today as opposed to 10 years ago, many people have a sharper image in their minds of who they think I am and what they think I’m for and against. So I think they’re much less likely to use AEI to fill in the blank.” Diane Ravitch is one of the nation’s most well-known education policy scholars. A former U.S. assistant secretary of education, she’s now a research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. In 2010, Hess invited her to introduce her latest book at AEI, despite the fact it essentially renounced many of the education principles conservatives believe in. “We’re on different sides of the fence because of my own political and ideological transformation,” Ravitch says. “Rick is working at a free-market institute, and he shares the freemarket approach. What sets him apart from a lot of the other free-market people is that he is not dogmatic. He has strong opinions, but he’s respectful of people who disagree with him. In the polarized world that we live in, it enables him to be heard across the political spectrum.” One of Hess’ core beliefs is that government is at its best when it gets out the way and helps only around the edges. For all the limitations of state and local governments, he would prefer to see education policy made at that level rather than in Washington. He points to No Child Left Behind as an example of a law that’s heart was in the right place but probably did more harm than good because of the way it was constructed. “That’s what happens when you do these big policy compromises,” he says. “I think it really wound up narrowing the scope of instruction and placed too much emphasis on reading and math tests. I’m not sure that reading and math scores are always a good proxy for what I think is going to be a great place of learning. They tell us something, but I think we put too much weight on them.”
A staunch advocate for charter schools, he serves on the review board for the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools and the boards of directors of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and 4.0 SCHOOLS. “I think charter schools are an opportunity to create great, wondrous learning environments,” he says. “There are many district schools that do that. The reality is that district schools are required to abide by state teacher evaluation systems that I think are highly limited because they have to be one-size-fits-all. That’s how laws get written. State systems are going to restrict what schools can do in terms of the school day, the school year. “Charters create an opportunity for people, whether it’s entrepreneurs or educators, to start schools from scratch and let those schools keep going if they deliver on the promise. Do I think that charter schools on average do a better job moving reading and math scores? Very marginally. Do I think charter schools are better schools on average? It’s not clear. But I think charter schools open a door that creates hugely empowering opportunities.” Perhaps one day Hess’ son, Grayson, will attend a charter. Perhaps not. There’s plenty of time to decide — he turned 1 this past April. Maybe by then his daddy will have ditched his office on 17th Street, about a mile from the White House, in exchange for a high school classroom somewhere in the actual America. “Just the act of teaching is so real,” Hess says before flying to Boston to teach a six-class J-term session at the Ed School. “You’re actually connecting with other people. It’s just so much more fun than sitting around writing treatises or sitting on committees. I absolutely could see at one point going back [to a high school classroom]. If anyone ever wanted me and I could teach something I like, I think that would be cool as hell.” — Mike Unger is a D.C.-based writer at American University and senior contributing writer for Baltimore magazine. Ed.
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news & notes Stephen Willoughby, M.A.T., published Textbooks Testing Training: How We Discourage Thinking, a series of stories based on Willoughby’s 59 years of teaching mathematics, casting light on what he says “is wrong with American education” and what we might do to improve it.
Joe Levinson, Ed.D., has written four books, with an additional nine manuscripts awaiting publication. Published books include: The Secret Silence of Moses, The Monotheism of Moses, Chanukah: A Light to the Future, and The Hidden Face of Purim.
Cathy Weisman Topal, M.A.T., is a studio art teacher and lecturer at Smith College. She is the author of five books, including most recently Explorations in Art: Kindergarten, which is currently being used in Cambridge Public Schools, and Creative Minds Out of School, a visual arts afterschool curriculum aimed at young people with limited arts experience that was commissioned by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Massachusetts Afterschool Programs.
Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M., CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, was awarded the Bowdoin Prize from Bowdoin College, his alma mater. The prize is awarded to a graduate who is “recognized as having won national and not merely local distinction” in “any field human endeavor.”
Canada
of
Robert Page, Ed.M., a clinical psychologist, recently published The Monster We Defied, a memoir spanning the eight years that his mother struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.
Jon Price, Ed.M., recently published ICT in Education in Global Context, which addresses information and communications technology in a global context. Tim Seeley, Ed.M., was named head of school at George Stevens Academy, an independent school in Blue Hill, Maine, starting in July 2015. Prior, Seeley was director of summer programs at Portsmouth Abbey School, an independent Catholic boarding school.
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Abby Weiss, Ed.M., former associate director of the Education Redesign Lab at the Ed School, was named the new chief program officer at Jumpstart, beginning this past January. In this new role, Weiss is responsible for the overall strategy and implementation of Jumpstart’s education research and policy agendas in addition to working closely with Jumpstart’s National Early Education Council and national board members.
Liz Arney, Ed.M., recently published Go Blended!, a handbook for how schools can bring blended learning into their classrooms. The book includes lessons learned and best practices based on Arney’s experience as director of innovative learning at Aspire Public Schools, based in California and Tennessee.
Linda Duevel, Ed.M., was named International Superintendent of the Year by the Association for Advancement in International Education, which annually recognizes an international school head. Duevel has been head of the International School of Stavanger in Norway for 40 years.
Dana Burde, Ed.M., is an assistant professor of international education at New York University. Her book, Schools for Conflict or Peace in Afghanistan, was published last fall. danaburde.com
Alissar Nasr, Ed.M., has been the chief academic officer at Academia Management Solutions International in Dubai since 2007. She writes that she is “raising three kids while running six schools and loving every minute of it!”
Pamela Rollins, Ed.D., founding director of the Early Communication, Language & Social Skills Preschool at the University of Texas–Dallas, released her new book, Facilitating Early Communication, Language & Social Skills: From Theory to Practice, this past fall.
Claudia Stack, Ed.M., is currently working on a film that documents the experiences of families who were involved in sharecrop-
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ping during the segregation era. In November 2014, her film Carrie Mae: An American Life, about an African American teacher who attended and taught in Rosenwald schools, premiered at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Timothy Lee, Ed.M., was named superintendent of Lenox Public Schools in Massachusetts, starting in July 2014. For the past 19 years, he served as a school leader in public and private schools in Madison, Wisconsin; Norfolk, Connecticut; and since 2008, as principal of Morris Elementary School in Lenox. He lives with his family in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Mona Abo-Zena, Ed.M., published Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality: Making-Meaning in an Age of Transition. Abo-Zena is currently a visiting assistant professor of education at Brown University.
Brenda Leach, Ed.D., a conductor, recently published Looking and Listening, a book about conversations between art and music.
LeManuel Bitsoi, Ed.M., was appointed by Rush University in Chicago, as their first director of the Office of Student Diversity and Multicultural Affairs. Previously, he was an education strategy consultant with the College Board and the Institute for Higher Education Policy. One of six children in a family raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, Bitsoi is a first-generation college graduate. Rhea Suh, Ed.M., was named president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has pushed the Obama administration for carbon dioxide limits on coal plants. Prior, Suh served as
They asked us to create engaging lesson plans and/or activities that were related to the Interstellar film. We viewed an early screening of the film on the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood and then brainstormed lesson ideas. We knew these lessons would be available online for free for educators and students to use in classrooms. Many of the lesson plans that were created covered numerous educational genres, stretching beyond mathematics and science. Marcos’ Plan, How Far Away?, helps students determine how far it is to the nearest black hole, then allows them to create scale representations to visualize the distance (interstellar.withgoogle.com/for-educators/how-far-away). @mathtrain
assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Kenneth Lim, Ed.M., is a research scientist at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The institute develops curriculum and the accreditation process for teachers in conjunction with the Ministry of Education. Lim recently co-edited several new books, including Disciplinary Institutions and the Design of Learning Environments and Adaptivity as a Transformative Disposition.
Debbie Carter, Ed.M., retired from her curriculum and assessment coordinator position at the Marion Cross School in Norwich, Vermont, but still does some substitute teaching, acts as a “simulated patient” for the Geisel Medical School at Dartmouth, and volunteers for Child and Family Services of New Hampshire. Last summer, she says she put on her daughter’s wedding, complete with an Indian Nalagu and blessing ceremony one day and a full Western outdoor wedding the next. Two weeks later, she and her husband traveled to China for three weeks.
, Ed.M., teaches middle school mathematics at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California. He says, “We are now using the same textbook we used when I was a student teacher during HGSE at McCormack.” Recently, he was invited to create a lesson plan for Paramount Pictures and Google for the 2014 space movie Interstellar. Joseph Ricca, Ed.M., is superintendent of schools at Elmsford Union Free School District in New York. He and Victoria Ricca celebrated the first birthday of their son, Harrison Robert, on September 15, 2014. He writes, “Harrison was happy to get his hands around his first birthday cake!” Harrison
David Greene, Ed.M.’91, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D., took office in July 2014 as the new president of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Prior, he was at the University of Chicago, where he served as executive vice president. He has also held leadership posts at Brown University and Smith College. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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Massachusetts. Kiernan Mathews, Ed.M., received the 2014 Robert J. Menges Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Development at this year’s annual Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network conference for his proposal The Faculty You Don’t Know: Characteristics of Faculty Survey Nonresponse. Mathews is currently director and principal investigator of COACHE at the Ed School. His POD proposal was one of only three chosen by the Menges Award subcommittee this year.
Kim
Eric Toshalis, Ed.D., recently published Make Me!, a book that explores student resistance and is dedicated to “all the troublemakers — for everyone who has ever been in a classroom, imagined it differently, and tried to do something about it.” He is an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark University in Portland, Oregon.
Leanna Work Conant, Ed.M., and Jonathan Conant announced the birth of their twins, Bradley and Lucas, on July 30, 2014. She writes, “Bradley and Lucas enjoy listening to stories, music, and wearing Harvard onesies!” Lucas, Work Conant, and Bradley
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Sarah Fish-Pedonti, Ed.M., was named the state disabilities education coordinator for Migrant Head Start of North Carolina. In her new role, she develops and provides program training, mentors teachers, educates parents, and advocates for and coordinates services for preschoolers with disabilities. Fish-Pedonti was a Title 1 preschool teacher for five years with Wake County Public Schools. She was a recipient of an NEA Student Achievement grant for innovative technology in the classroom. Omar Lopez, Ed.M., is celebrating his one-year anniversary as manager of development at Relay Graduate School of Education, a nonprofit graduate school that started in New York City focused on training teachers.
Joanna Christodoulou, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D, is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the MGH Institute of Health Professions at Massachusetts General Hospital. In December, she was awarded the seventh annual Transforming Education through Neuroscience Award, established by the Learning & the Brain Foundation and the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society.
Inny (Hu) Kim, Ed.M., was the first-place winner of the 2015 Ms. United States America Woman of Achievement Pageant, held this past November. She is the first Asian American to win the title. In 2006, she started IvyEGG, a college consulting company.
Natalie Perry, Ed.M., was named in the fall by then-Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick as a member of the inaugural class of Massachusetts Women’s Leadership Fellows. Perry was the only African American to receive this honor and the only fellow to have earned a Ph.D. In September, she began as a project manager for MassDevelopment, which works with businesses, nonprofits, and government officials and agencies to strengthen the economy in
Vajra Watson, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D., is director of research and policy for equity in the School of Education at the University of California– Davis. She also founded Sacramento Area Youth Speaks in 2009 as a way for young people to use words and hip-hop to better understand and articulate their lives. In 2012, she published Learning to Liberate: Community-Based Solutions to the Crisis in Urban Education.
Ashley Hensel-Browling, Ed.M., is currently a dance teacher at the Dance Factory in Springfield, Vermont. She also conducts movement outreach with the Opera Theatre of Weston, in Vermont, and coaches the Springfield High School dance team.
, Ed.M., a former class marshal for the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program, moved back to Peru and is head of teacher training at Colegios Peruanos, which runs a network of schools known as Innova Schools. Through Innova, she is also collaborating with Peru Champs, a nonprofit that gets people to sponsor (fund) low-income, highpotential students, so they can attend a Colegios school.
In Memory
Melissa Duphily, Ed.M., began a new job in the fall as a teacher education program coordinator at the University of San Francisco. Prior, she was director of arts learning at Young Audiences of Northern California, an organization that brings community-based artists to schools throughout the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area. Lenin Grajo, Ed.M., is pursuing a Ph.D. in occupational therapy at Texas Woman’s College in the College of Health Sciences. His dissertation focuses on developing an assessment tool that measure’s children’s reading engagement. In February, he received one of four Virginia Chandler Dykes Scholarship given by the college. A Filipino native, Grajo is also an occupational therapist and assistant professor in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at Saint Louis University. @leningrajo Erica Mosca, Ed.M., is the founder and executive director of Leaders in Training (leaders-in-training.org), a nonprofit working to empower first-generation college graduates in east Las Vegas. Mosca and her students
Eric Oberstein, Ed.M., won a Latin Grammy Award for the best instrumental album: Final Night at Birdland. Oberstein served as the producer for the live album, which featured Arturo O’Farrill and the Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra’s final performance at Birdland in New York City following a 15-year Sunday night residency. ericoberstein.com.
Becky Fisher, Ed.M., founder of Beyond Business, joined Fullbridge, Inc., as managing director of their West Coast office, based in San Francisco. Fullbridge provides students with real-world experience prior to joining the work world. Jennifer Price, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D., a principal at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, for nine years, was named superintendent of North Andover (Massachusetts) Public Schools, beginning July 1, 2015.
Alexander Smith, Ed.L.D., joined Bridge International Academies as curriculum director for early childhood. Smith writes, “Bridge is a chain of low-cost, high-quality private schools serving families making one to two dollars a day in Kenya.” Smith’s first task was to create a new curriculum for 4-year-olds. He says that at graduation, Associate Professor Jal Mehta “memorably called my job ‘the coolest in the world.’ And if by ‘coolest,’ he meant both extraordinarily challenging and extremely rewarding for me, I would have to agree.”
Peru Champs (peruchamps.org/en) works in partnership with us, sponsoring students who do not have the income to study in one of our schools. I’ve collaborated with them on some of their kick-starting campaigns, as well as coaching mentors based on my experience being a big sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City program. Their goal for 2015 is sponsoring 1,000 kids. Every day there are families coming in and applying to see if they have a chance to have their children be “champs.” @jennifercottle
C. James Herrick, GSE’45 Ann Huckaba, M.A.T.’47 Lucille Sisson, Ed.M.’48 Richmond Mayo-Smith, M.A.T.’50 Marianne Coleman, M.A.T.’51 Roioli Feemster-Schweiker, M.A.T.’52 Faith Mary Halfyard, Ed.M.’52 Janet Townsley, Ed.M.’53 Edith Millward, Ed.M.’54 Richard Ouellette, M.A.T.’54 Charles Compton, Ed.M.’55 Thomas Given, M.A.T.’55 Elisabeth “Betty” Taylor, Ed.M.’56 James Coffee, Ed.D.’57 Lawrence Fitch Jr., M.A.T.’57 Marc Ross, M.A.T.’57 Mona Schwartz, M.A.T.’57 Kathryn Bowman, M.A.T.’58 Kenneth Justin, M.A.T.’58 Robert Shultz, Ed.D.’58 Barbara Beinhocker, Ed.M.’61 Melvin Ezer, Ed.D.’61 Nancy Rader, Ed.M.’61 Allen Cook, Ed.M.’62 R. Kirkland Gable, Ed.M.’60, Ed.D.’62 David Mesirow, M.A.T.’62 Shirley Thorne, C.A.S.’62 Fredric Branfman, Ed.M.’65 Joseph Chiaravalloti, M.A.T.’65 Cynthia Cole, Ed.M.’65 Jean Mortensen, Ed.M.’65 Dale Salm, Ed.M.’65 Carroll McGary, Ed.D.’66 Anne Yondorf, Ed.M.’66 Timothy Daniels, M.A.T.’68 William Oates, Ed.D.’68 Richard LaBrie, Ed.M.’62, Ed.D.’69 Faye Levine, Ed.M.’70 Richard Lee, GSE’74 Arthur Blackman, Ed.D.’75 Lynn Marcellino, Ed.M.’76 Ann Watson, Ed.M.’77 Kristine Dever, Ed.M.’79 Frances Wellins, Ed.M.’79 Barbara Kittredge, Ed.M.’80 Esther Feier, Ed.M.’82 Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, Ed.M.’82 Nancy Nyhan, Ed.M.’82 Kenneth Richards, Ed.M.’83 Mary Murphy, Ed.D.’84 Patton Tabors, Ed.D.’87 Cynthia Worrall-Timmons, Ed.M.’89 George Hargan, Ed.M.’90 Mary Schmitt, Ed.M.’98 Viviana Coriat, Ed.M.’99 T.J. Martinez, Ed.M.’08 Sioux Hall, Ed.M.’09, C.A.S.’10 Reed Marshall Hollett, Ed.M.’11 HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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Class Correspondents Wanted!
Have you always wanted to be a detective? A reporter? A pithy writer? You can be all of these as a class correspondent for the classnotes section of Ed. magazine. As a correspondent for your class, you’ll gather news about your classmates and compile a short summary, three times a year (once per issue). If you’re interested, contact lory_hough@harvard.edu.
Cevin Soling, Ed.M., recently published The Student Resistance Handbook. Soling is the director of the documentary The War on Kids. @cevinsoling
Sofia Bahena, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D., recently became an education associate at the nonprofit education-based Intercultural Development Research Association in San Antonio. Jeron Campbell, Ed.L.D., a Detroit native, joined the staff of Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’12, in Hartford, Connecticut, as the district’s new chief data and accountability officer. Lauren Capotosto, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D., became an assistant professor last summer at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. North Cooc, Ed.M.’07, Ed.D., is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas–Austin. He teaches a course called Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Special Education. Leigh Dale, Ed.M., is the youth and family programs coordinator for the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida.
, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D., recently became the first woman and one of the youngest individuals to be named superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. She had been working as interim superintendent since June 2014. She began her career with the school district in 2012 as the first chief innovation officer.
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Andrew Frishman, Ed.L.D., director of program development at Big Picture Learning in Providence, Rhode Island, was recently recognized as an “emerging leader” by PDK International, a global association of education professionals. He reports that “my family loves living in Cambridge, where my wife, Leigh, a neuroscientist at Harvard, can walk a few blocks to work; our children, Jordan and Lundy, continue to thrive. We’re thrilled that Jordan is attending Escuela Amigos School (bilingual immersion) in Cambridge as a junior kindergartener, and Lundy continues at Peabody Terrace Children’s Center.” @andrewfrishman Gislaine Ngounou, Ed.L.D., joined the staff of Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’12, in Hartford, Connecticut. Ngounou is a native of Cameroon. Paul Perry, Ed.L.D., says he is excited to continue working with the Reset Foundation as he transitions into the role of executive director of their California campus. Reset offers a residential education and careerfocused alternative to incarceration for court-involved youth ages 18–24. Their first residential campus will launch in summer 2015 in Oakland, California. “As I ramp up for this role, I am also supporting the design and launch of a new competencybased high school in Denver, Colorado,
alongside my colleague and fellow cohort 2 member Katherine Casey, Ed.L.D. I am looking forward to the work ahead in 2015.” Carol Stoll, Ed.M., was awarded a five-year teaching fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, which awards fellowships to early-career science and math teachers. Stoll is a science teacher at People’s Preparatory Charter School in Newark, New Jersey. Jennifer Wallace Jacoby, Ed.M.’11, Ed.D., became an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, this past summer. Wallace Jacoby is in the Department of Psychology and Education.
Correction: In our winter 2015 issue, Terry Cobb Wall, M.A.T.’71, was incorrectly identified as a volunteer tutor at North Carolina State University. She is actually a volunteer tutor with the Wake County Public Schools in Raleigh, North Carolina.
It’s mission critical. I believe in the concept of the village. My success is tied to the success of my students and the community. This work can’t be done in isolation. It’s about having a united commitment to the children of our city. At the end of the day, we’re all here because we care about our kids. That changes the conversation. It would be misleading to think you can do this job on your own. @DrDriverMPS
NEW ONLINE PROGRAM
Including Ourselves in the Change Equation Begins September 2015 Discover how creating change in education starts with our own growth. Use the Immunity to Change Process, a research-based approach from HGSE faculty Robert Kegan, and Lisa Lahey, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’86, to achieve the personal and collective goals that will further your success as educators.
Connect. Learn. Recharge.
SIGN UP NOW gse.harvard.edu/ppe/ioce
Upcoming On-Campus Programs
The Principals’ Center Upcoming Programs
The Arts and Passion-Driven Learning August 3–5, 2015 Steve Seidel, Ed.M.’89, Ed.D.’95 Faculty Chair
Improving Schools: The Art of Leadership June 21–27, 2015 Pamela Mason, M.A.T.’70, Ed.D.’75 Faculty Chair
Harvard Seminar for Experienced Presidents November 15–17, 2015 Judith Block McLaughlin, M.A.T.’71, Ed.D.’83 Faculty Chair
National Institute for Urban School Leaders July 6–11, 2015 Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’95 Faculty Chair
Leadership: An Evolving Vision July 12–18, 2015 Joseph Blatt, Ed.M.’77 Faculty Chair Harvard Graduate School of Education 800-545-1849 ppe@gse.harvard.edu
gse.harvard.edu/ppe/2015 HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
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the campaign for hgse Momentum for the campaign continues to build as we surpass the halfway point toward our $250 million goal. We have received tremendous support for Dean Ryan’s vision for the Ed School, which is organized around three main strategies — cultivate, collaborate, and communicate — to maximize our impact on the field of education. Together, these three priorities serve as our road map for transforming lives and improving outcomes. Here is a closer look at what the campaign will enable HGSE to do.
Campaign Priorities 1. Cultivate Leaders and Innovators For every student we graduate, we can influence the lives of thousands of others whether that graduate works as a teacher, principal, policymaker, scholar, or entrepreneur. We will: • Draw the best talent to education through fellowships and financial aid for our master’s and doctoral students. • Create a powerful pathway for undergraduates to pursue and sustain teaching careers through Harvard Teacher Fellows (HTF). • Support student opportunities in entrepreneurship and help new ventures scale up.
3. Communicate with the Field By communicating effectively with the field, we can ensure, by listening, that our research remains relevant, and we can ensure, by reaching out, that the knowledge we generate is converted to action. We will: • Expand our new project, Usable Knowledge, making research and best practices accessible and easily digestible through a website, email, and social media. • Invest in convening spaces to host more of education’s leading thinkers and actors.
• Invest in digital learning with a focus on preparing new and aspiring education leaders.
2. Collaborate on Questions That Matter By supporting our faculty as they collaborate and focus their collective attention on the most important questions in education, we can bring the expertise needed to not only identify problems, but solve them. We will: • Shape the future of the school by creating new endowed faculty chairs. • Provide seed funding to launch collaborative research projects. • Support the cutting-edge work of the Center for Education Policy Research and the Center on the Developing Child.
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Join us as we pursue our vision of changing the world through education. Learn more at gse.harvard.edu/campaign.
The Campaign for HGSE
A Snapshot
$250 million goal $145 million raised
Here is a quick look at our campaign progress and some highlights of what generous support has enabled HGSE to do so far.
Honorary Campaign Co-Chairs: Paul Finnegan, A.B.’75, M.B.A.’82 Joseph O’Donnell, A.B.’67, M.B.A.’72
(as of 3/31/15)
10,000+ gifts made to the campaign
88%
of all gifts made by HGSE alumni
Dean’s Venture Fund
1,200
people attended the September campaign launch
Ed.L.D. Program
Critical unrestricted funds allow HGSE to seize opportunities for impact, including providing seed funding to jumpstart collaborative research projects and other new programs.
9 new initiatives launched so far
Campaign Co-Chair: Ralph James, executive director, External Relations, Harvard Business School
$18.8 million in gifts received to help Dean Ryan pursue top strategic priorities
Usable Knowledge
$5 million
grant from the Walton Family Foundation created three new Ed.L.D. fellowships and will support the alumni network
HGSE is launching an online certificate for current and aspiring system-level leaders, drawing on the Ed.L.D. curriculum.
Harvard Teacher Fellows Program
This new website and e-newsletter takes the latest HGSE research and best practices and translates it into usable tools for educators, policymakers, foundations, parents, and reporters.
HGSE announced this innovative new pathway for Harvard College undergraduates to enter teaching careers. HTF will offer free, world-class teacher preparation for Harvard seniors to become middle school and high school mathematics, science, history, and English teachers.
uknow.gse.harvard.edu
gse.harvard.edu/htf
The September 2014 launch of Usable Knowledge was made possible by support from the Dean’s Venture Fund. TIME magazine featured Usable Knowledge in its January 2015 article “What College Professors Can Learn From Alan Alda.”
$10 million
lead gift from two Harvard grads helped launch HTF
recruiting the first cohort now for
SPRING 2016 enrollment
Eric Shed and Stephen Mahoney named director and associate director
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Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Holliston, MA Permit No. 20
Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138
Lucky for us, when country music megastars Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks visited the Ed School in January to talk about life, doing what they love, and being on Sesame Street, their set list also included plenty of time to sign autographs and pose for pictures with members of the audience, including one of their biggest fans, Ed. Check out the story on page 9 about how Brooks left one of his guitars behind. ed. using the #wheresED hashtag. using email? send them to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.
MATT WEBER
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