Ed. Magazine, Winter 2014

Ed.

the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education winter 2014

Universal Design for Learning How a little idea started here decades ago is now becoming a worldwide education revolution.

early warning indicators | Karen Brennan | school on the move

U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce

the appian way

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• winter 2014 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

September 10, 2013 Bridget Terry Long, the school’s new academic dean, spends a lot of time working and sharing her research around the country, including in Washington, D.C. This past September, for example, Long testified before the Education and the Workforce Committee, a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that has been around, in some form or another (and with varying names), since 1867. Along with New York University Professor James Kemple, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D.’89 (second from right), Long talked about the important role of the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Long is the presidentially appointed chair of the institute. “To have an informed populace and clarity on how best to educate our children and ourselves,” she told the committee, “there must be a robust foundation of high-quality data; rigorous, objective research; and strong communication of evidence on what works and what does not.” Two months later, Long was back in D.C. testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions on college access.

To read a full transcript of Long’s testimony, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras Harvard Graduate School of Education

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contents winter 2014

A look at how one middle school in Lawrence, Mass., run by alums, figured out how to add two hours of physical activity to every school day.

22

When Lecturer David Rose,

Ed.D.’76, and his colleagues came up with a new idea called Universal Design for Learning to help all learners, he had no idea just how big it would one day become.

34

Assistant Professor Karen Brennan doesn’t want everyone to become a computer programmer, but she believes that it’s important for everyone, especially students, to be creators of technology and their learning, not just consumers.

10

He takes sailor showers, dives in dumpsters, and helps fund awesome ideas. Meet master’s student Brandon Geller.

28

16

Can we really identify potential school dropouts as early as first grade? A few districts and states think this is not only possible, but also necessary.

19

Find out why former Baltimore superintendent Andrés Alonso, Ed.M.’99, Ed.D.’06, now a professor at the Ed School, spent decades looking for a book.

a l s o of i n t e r e s t 4 6 40 48 49

Letters Appian Way Alumni News and Notes Recess Investing

If stories in alumni magazines competed for popularity contests, the winner — at least in the last issue of Ed. — would have to be the feature “What’s the Big Idea?” After working hard to pull together 30 different ideas about education that are worth spreading, it was gratifying to receive so many positive comments. After the issue came out, people in the hallways here stopped staff members to say how the variety of ideas were creative and imaginative. On our website, in our letters email account, and on Facebook, we read comments like “Great collection” and “Yes!!!!!!!” (That would be seven exclamation points.) On Twitter, we tweeted a few of the ideas, which were retweeted 585 times and “favorited” 208 times. The most “favorited” pieces were, interestingly, the one about saying goodbye to homework (28) and the one about embracing failure (25) by our very own Assistant Professor Karen Brennan, who is featured in this issue. Brennan’s piece was also the most retweeted (65), followed by mandatory coding in schools (57). The best part? Readers sent their own ideas, including one from @allegrateacher that just may generate a few new comments: Let parents pay teachers directly.

The Very Idea!

Kudos to Nikhil Goyal for recommending that we get rid of compulsory schooling (“What’s the Big Idea?” fall 2013). I thought I was the only one who was opposed to it. One of the arguments in favor of compulsory schooling is to provide a basis for everyone to vote intelligently, but we don’t have compulsory voting, and many of us don’t vote intelligently anyhow.

— Tom Knapp, Ed.D.’59 I enjoyed the recent “What’s the Big Idea?” article and believe that there is one more big idea that merits attention: 4

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Unleash the power of national service. Here at City Year, we are working to leverage the power and idealism of young adults engaged in a year of full-time national service as a strategy to achieve large-scale impact on our nation’s high school dropout crisis. Our whole school, whole child school-service model empowers teams of young adults to deliver the additional supports and interventions that research has made clear are effective, but that schools are so often unable to provide without this additional infusion of human capital. It’s an innovative, collaborative approach that is both high-impact and cost effective, and it’s more than just a big idea — it’s already generating results in 25 U.S. cities as well as in the U.K. — Max Klau, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’05, vice president of leadership development, City Year I really love getting my copy of Ed. as it (re)connects me with HGSE, where I spent such a wonderful year in 2008/09. I particularly loved this edition and the Big Ideas section. I’m about to pin it up in the staff room of the Tasmanian eSchool, where I am

principal, and will ask staff to react/ play/discuss with annotations and drawings. The ideas are fresh, interesting, and provocative. We are in for a lively time. Such a perfect way to get the professional thinking juices flowing!

— Lyn Dunn, Ed.M.’09 Great ideas. Enjoyed reading all of them. I will humbly add one more suggestion: teach handwriting. If not for penmanship, then for the meditative quality of this practice. Giving kids time to create words and sentences through pencil and paper can help them disconnect from our increasingly connected world. When I walk into my classrooms while kids are practicing this “ancient art,” you can hear a pin drop.

I think they appreciate this time to clear their heads and focus on this presentevoking practice.

— Matt Renwick Really enjoy the section about teacher talk reducing stress: so true! The Responsive Classroom model has lots to say about the power of teacher language.

— Joshua Jenkins A brilliant idea in action that I recently observed was a school on wheels — a mobile classroom for children of migrant laborers in India.

— Alfred Devaprasad

letters Yes to Books

martha stewart

BookMentors (“Buy the Book,” fall 2013) is a wonderful way for those of us outside the school system to contribute to education. The website bookmentors.org gave me the opportunity not only to choose a book I loved, but also to communicate with the teacher I gave it to. He wrote me right back to thank me and say how excited his class was to read it. I felt so involved!

Thank you, BookMentors!

— Katherine

Lynette

Congratulations, Lyn. Excellent article (“Education For All?” fall 2103).

Your compassion and empathy have given these prisoners a ray of hope.

As educators, we must remember to channel the needs of all our students in positive ways. Celebrating diversity is the goal.

— cindym

editor in chief Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu production manager/editor Marin Jorgensen marin_jorgensen@harvard.edu Senior designer Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu designer Angelina Berardi angelina_berardi@harvard.edu

As a young child, you knew one day you wanted to ensure that disadvantaged children received a quality education. God is now allowing you to be their voice by letting the world know that all our children deserve to be educated.

— Little Shot Every human being has value. We must not let our prejudices and stereotypes limit our potential to serve and share our wisdom with others, especially those experiencing a vulnerability context. We never know where great innovation will come from to enhance the quality of life for society. If more young people had access to quality education and life skills, they would make smarter life choices.

— Jose Bright Very touching and eyeopening article. I’m so glad that God has given you a burden for these children. May he continue to lead and guide you always. Keep keeping on!

— Dad and Mom

assistant dean of communications Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu

photographers Lisa Abitbol Jill Anderson Martha Stewart

contributing writers Katie Bacon Francesca Grossman, Ed.L.D.’13 Christine Junge Jonathan Sapers Beth Schueler Mary Tamer, Ed.M.’13

copyeditor Abigail Mieko Vargus

illustrators Daniel Vasconcellos Peter Horvath Killer Infographics James Steinberg

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138

© 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Ed. magazine is published three times a year.

In Case You Missed It...

We know you can’t keep up with everything, so we’re spotlighting a few stories, videos, and interviews that appeared on the school’s homepage that you may have missed.

Jill Anderson writes about Assistant Professor Gigi Luk’s B.E.E. Lab (officially called the Brain.Experience.

Education Lab), a space for her students to work out research ideas related to psychology, neuroscience, and education.

Curious what Professor Howard Gardner, a self-described digital immigrant, thinks of today’s app generation? Watch the Askwith Forum.

Listen to Matt Weber’s EdCast with Elizabeth Kandel Englander as she dives into her new book, Bullying and Cyberbullying: What Every Educator Needs to Know.

Students apple picking? Growing beards? Worried about missing out?

Follow the school’s student bloggers to read more.

v visit gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

aclickaway HGSE gse.harvard.edu events gse.harvard.edu/news_events/events twitter twitter.com/hgse facebook facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube youtube.com/harvardeducation issuu issuu.com/harvardeducation foursquare foursquare.com/hgse tumblr harvardeducation.tumbler.com instagram instagram.com/harvardeducation Harvard Graduate School of Education

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lisa abitbol

appian way lecturehall Dean James Ryan

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The first 100 days. Coined in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s a term usually reserved for a newly elected president, a way to look at the first few months of the commander in chief’s administration. What about our new commander in chief, James Ryan? Last September, Ryan officially started as dean at the Ed School after teaching law for 15 years at the University of Virginia.

As he approached his first 100 days in Longfellow’s corner office, Ryan spoke with Ed. about what he has been learning, what has surprised him about the school, and, perhaps most importantly, how this New Jersey native is dealing with being a Yankees fan in Red Sox Nation.

What has impressed you the most about what’s happening at the school?

The strong sense of mission that faculty, students, and staff all share. It really is palpable. Everyone here is committed to improving education, whether through research or practice. That has been not only impressive, but also inspiring.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned so far?

I have been surprised by how many individuals and institutions are interested in partnering with the Ed School. Nearly every day, I get emails or phone calls suggesting some kind of joint venture, a number of which are genuinely intriguing and promising.

In some ways, the offers to partner are symbolic of the general challenge facing the Ed School. It is not coming up with good ideas; those abound. It’s figuring which of the host of good ideas makes the most sense for us, an institution that is committed to having a genuine and significant impact on the field.

How can the school really increase the connection between research, policy, and practice?

I think there are a number of ways, many of which are already being pur-

sued. I will just cite three examples.

One is through partnerships with schools and school systems. Another is through greater efforts to disseminate the amazing research being conducted here, so that it gets into the hands of those in the field and in a manner that is most useful to them. The third has to do with the way we train students and ensure that students who are going into practice or into policymaking positions understand the importance of research and the real value of basing decisions and policy on solid evidence.

What is the biggest difference between working at a law school and an education school?

There are actually more similarities than I would have thought, as both law schools and education schools — like all professional schools within a research university — strive to hit the right balance between a connection to the arts and sciences and a connection to the field. That is a constant discussion, and it ought to be. The biggest difference is the sense of mission I described earlier. Even though education schools are as interdisciplinary as law schools, if not more so, there is more of a shared sense of mission working at an ed school.

Do you miss teaching?

Very much so. Luckily, I’ve had the opportunity to guest lecture in some classes here and in a class at the law school. I plan to continue that this year and hopefully get back to teaching a full class next year.

Does it feel odd to be called “dean?”

It did feel odd, until I started insisting that my kids also call me dean, so now it feels pretty normal. I am kidding. It is definitely a bit strange, which is one of the reasons why I have been insisting, except to my kids, that people call me Jim.

Have you found a favorite lunch spot here in the Square yet?

Honestly, my favorite lunch spot is the Gutman cafe. I am a huge fan of the sauté bar in particular. Matt serves up not only delicious food, but also a great sense of humor.

As a Yankees fan living here now, what was it like watching the Red Sox win the World Series?

I was happy for Red Sox fans, including my wife, Katie, who is a lifelong Sox fan. As I’ve told many people, and this is the truth, the Red Sox are my second favorite team, so given that the Yankees were not in the series, I was happy to root for the Red Sox. I will say that one heartening discovery I have had is how many Yankees fans there are at the Ed School! After I sent an email encouraging everyone at the school to wear their Red Sox gear going into the last game of the World Series, I got a dozen emails from people saying, “I’m so glad to hear you’re a Yankees fan, too!”

— Lory Hough

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Survey Says?

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• winter 2014 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

and I interviewed diverse groups of parents about their relationships with their children’s schools. We then created items to represent the central facets of each scale by combining what we found in the literature with our focus group data. After long discussions about precisely how to word items, we asked academic experts and parents to provide us with additional feedback.

After administering the survey this past school year, Garland Independent School District is already uncovering interesting ways to improve their schools. At one campus, many parents reported that their children have trouble getting organized for school. The principal now plans to address this by having teachers create better classroom routines around organization and working with parents to implement these techniques at home. Going forward, the district can continue using the survey to track progress after the new strategies are in place.

Garland is not alone. More than 1,000 schools in 300 public school districts have now deployed the survey. Thus, the relationship with SurveyMonkey has been valuable in multiple ways. As researchers, we have been able to gather evidence of the scales’ validity with large samples of parents and explore new ways to help improve parent–school relationships. These scales are freely available to other scholars as well. Schools, districts, and other organizations can now administer the survey tools in both English and Spanish to easily assess the current state of their parent– school relationships or test whether their efforts to improve these relationships are working.

— Beth Schueler is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice concentration. ­­ To learn more, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

istockphoto.com

Last fall, as part of its broader efforts to maximize student achievement, Garland Independent School District in Texas wanted to learn more about students’ home lives and what the district could do to help parents better support learning outside of school. To this end, the district administered the Harvard Graduate School of Education PreK–12 Parent Survey to thousands of its parents. This survey, created in collaboration with SurveyMonkey, the online survey company, is composed of a set of “scales” — groups of related questions that are analyzed as a whole to improve measurement precision — to assess family–school relationships. Jonathan Armstrong, the district’s Title I parent involvement facilitator, remembers why they chose the Ed School’s survey.

“We discussed creating a new survey that addressed our concerns,” he says, “but when I was introduced to the [HGSE] PreK–12 Parent Survey, I knew we wouldn’t be able to duplicate the amount of research and evaluation that had gone into developing it.”

Associate Professor Hunter Gehlbach led the development process for the parent survey, guiding a team of researchers, including myself, in designing these scales. Senior Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, and Lecturer Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, served as content experts, ensuring our scales captured the essential aspects of family–school relations, such as family–school engagement and parent perceptions of the overall climate of the school, as well as their own abilities to support learning.

The survey design process was unique in that it incorporated feedback from scholars, practitioners, and parents from the outset. After reviewing the literature, current doctoral students Sofia Bahena, Ed.M.’13; Lauren Capotosto, Ed.M.’13; James Noonan, Ed.M.’10; Soojin Oh, Ed.M.’10;

appian way

— February 12, 2011, story about Ganz in The Nation by Sarah Abramsky I like to hear young people tell their stories. Again and again, in my work in high school, in college, and in graduate school, I have witnessed, encouraged, and helped students find their voices and tell their stories through the process of learning to write.

I came to the Ed.L.D. Program in 2010 to help change the American education system from within. I imagined developing new and exciting programs and classroom curriculum to answer some of the nation’s most pressing educational problems. After much debate and learning, however, I graduated from the program assured that while there is plenty to do from within the traditional system, there is also much to do working from outside of it. And that’s where I headed.

But the path was winding and circuitous.

While at the Ed School, I had the good fortune to take Adjunct Lecturer Nancy Sommers’ writing workshop.

Sommers’ charismatic teaching, love of writing, and unique insights into the writing process not only connected with my own desire to write, but also reminded me of why teaching writing can be so gratifying. I realized again how learning to write enables identity to grow and flourish. At first, I was Sommers’ student; then I returned the following year as her teaching fellow (TF), once more encountering the truth of any committed writer: There’s always more to learn. I came away from this experience understanding that I am both a

To learn more go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

jill anderson

“The story of self, [Marshall Ganz] calls it. Tell that story well enough, he urges his students, and other people will come to care about these things too.

And that’s how change occurs, that’s how the story of now develops.”

student of writing and a teacher of writing; these two roles flip-flop, vacillate, compete, and nourish each other.

While I was a TF, I met a group of Harvard graduates, including David Weinstein, who had just finished a fellowship at the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, Junaid Mubeen, Ed.M.’12, and Billie Fitzpatrick, Ed.M.’12.

The group had formed Write the World, an organization that supports high school writers online. The platform offers students an opportunity to submit short written drafts in response to engaging prompts and then to receive expert review with the chance to resubmit. This platform can be used for tutoring, as supplemental writing support within a class setting, and in a public writing competition format.

This was a perfect situation for me — an opportunity to marry my passion for writing to my belief that online education platforms offer wide open space for young people, all of whom are digital natives, to improve and enhance their learning. Now I serve as education strategist for the organization, which includes directing two key parts of their agenda: creating an app that will work for a teacher distribution channel like EdModo, and deepening the feedback model that is a core part of the application and platform.

Since it started, Write the World has launched two pilot competitions, one with the Berkshire Technical and Arts Charter School in North Adams, Mass., and another with Zoo New England. We have been fortunate to have Ed School students help us review the entries, and we hope to continue that relationship. We are also developing ties to Boston-based schools and nonprofit organizations with strong educational missions, and creating other opportunities to build a buzz around supporting young people as they learn to write. We want to help them to tell their stories as they find their voices and learn who they are.

— Francesca Grossman, Ed.L.D.’13, is recruiting Ed School graduates or students interested in participating as student essay reviewers. Contact her at francesca@writetheworld.com.

istoc kphoto.co m

Write the Self and the World

Program: Higher Education Program Tool for Change: Greening Harvard and saving the earth

The tote he never shops without.

Hometown: Tulsa, Okla.

His traveling wooden utensils.

studybreak Brandon Geller

A

The plate, despite being broken, that he carries back and forth to lunch.

ma rt ha

st ewar

t

His way to bypass even recyclable cups.

s his Twitter account reads, he’s “one dude tryin’ to make Harvard a greener place.” That means spending time in less-than-savory places around campus. Like dumpsters. Sometimes for two or three hours a day. But Brandon Geller, a senior coordinator in Harvard’s Office for Sustainability, really doesn’t mind. “You can learn a lot from trash!”

It’s this trash that led him, in a circuitous way, to the Higher Education Program at the Ed School. When he first started working for Harvard, just after graduating from Harvard College, he oversaw undergraduate outreach with a staff of 20 student employees. “I discovered I really liked working with undergraduates,” he says. “I saw how I was helping them develop their skills.”

That increased a couple years later when he became a proctor for 28 freshmen in Holworthy Hall, giving academic and life advice. “Now I want to study higher education, with an eye toward student development and sustainability,” he says. “My hope is that I can get students to think about who they are in this world and then have that develop into how we keep this world going.”

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appian way

Elementary school. We didn’t have a scrap paper bin. I got one started.

I credit Nickelodeon. They had a drive about the ozone and encouraged kids to help.

One thing others don’t do for sustainability that drives you crazy. They: r don’t buy organic r don’t shut off lights r use Styrofoam cups

?

r 4 other: aren’t aware.

People walk through their lives unaware of what they’re doing. People need to make active choices. If you have a paper cup in your hand, when it’s empty, don’t just throw it anywhere. If you took the cup, it was your choice to take it. Now you’re responsible for it.

One of your best recycled finds: An ice cream maker.

I organize the freecycle events for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Last year, a student brought a working ice cream machine. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with different flavors.

Favorite experimental flavor?

Beer ice cream using an oatmeal stout.

How are you involved with the Awesome Foundation, which gives $1,000 grants to people with “crazy, brilliant” ideas?

I’m a trustee in Boston. I read applications and help decide which two ideas to fund each month.

All-time favorite funded idea: The Alley of Doom in Washington, D.C. They set up a human hamster ball, covered in cloth. People got to dress as Indiana Jones, grab a gold icon, run, and then have the giant “boulder” come toward them.

Your green hero: r Al Gore r Aldo Leopold r the Lorax r 4 other: Rob Gogan, head of recycling at Harvard. The whole recycling movement here at Harvard has flourished because of him.

Dream job: Dean of students or freshman dean.

What could you do better?

Best and hardest parts about being a live-in proctor:

I take fairly short showers, what’s called a sailor shower — you get wet, shut off the shower, soap up, then turn the water back on — but I could take colder showers. A warm shower is my one indulgence.

Best: The students. There’s a lot of energy and excitement.

Hardest: The unpredictability. If

a student shows up at your door crying, everything stops. You have to help. But it’s worth it. Luckily those moments are few and far between.

Andrew bossi

Earliest recycling effort:

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Jonathan Wall, Ed.M.’13, remembers the first time he really learned about the Ed School. He was a freshman studying sociology at the all-male, historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, which boasts famed graduates such as Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Spike Lee. Harvard wasn’t even on Wall’s radar. But then Shirley Greene, a member of the Ed School’s admissions department at the time, visited campus to speak to students. One of Wall’s professors suggested he meet with her.

“I did, and she talked about Professor [Charles] Willie, who taught at the Ed School, and all of the great Morehouse men that went to the Ed School,” he says. “She opened my eyes to coming here. She pushed me to stay on track, to keep my grades up. She also said that when the meeting ended, she wanted me to call my mom and tell her I was going to go to Harvard one day.”

He made the call. Three years later, he also made the move — to Cambridge. “I got here. It’s amazing.”

Dating back more than three decades, nearly two dozen Morehouse men have become Ed School alums, including Morehouse’s current president, John Silvanus Wilson Jr., Ed.M.’82. During the last academic year, that included three master’s students. Current Morehouse–Ed School students include Ed.D. candidate Marc Johnson, Ed.M.’99, and Ed.L.D. candidate Brian Barnes, Ed.M.’03.

Johnson isn’t surprised that there is such a stable Morehouse feed to the Ed School.

“Morehouse is a place that aims to create leaders, individuals that will make an impact,” he says. “That can translate into a lot of things, but certainly that would include men who will have an impact on education.”

William Hayes, Ed.M.’08, a principal at a preK–8 turnaround school in Cleveland, says the connection is a natural fit.

“At Morehouse College, it is expected that we utilize all that we have gained to give back to those in the generations that follow,” he says. “That institution, originally founded to educate future preachers and teachers, still holds on to many of these foundational principles dedicated to social justice and pursuit of knowledge. It’s not surprising that so many 12

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Philip McCollum

Maroon to Crimson

John Silvanus Wilson Jr. in his office

students find themselves pursuing careers in education and look to the best institutions for preparation.”

But, adds Johnson, it isn’t the prestige of Harvard alone that makes many students specifically pick the Ed School here over other graduate programs in education. The school’s mission is key.

“This idea of working at the nexus could be especially appealing if you want to make an impact,” he says. “HGSE is a place that produces men and women of note who see themselves as key decisionmakers or people who will make an impact in education.”

For many, like Wall, now a student at Harvard Law, the decision to come to the Ed School after Morehouse is heavily influenced by other people. As President Wilson says, “With three powerful words, I can easily summarize why I chose HGSE for graduate school back in 1981, and those three words say everything that needs to be said about the Morehouse–HGSE connection. Very simply, those three words are Charles Vert Willie!”

Johnson and Barnes also cited Willie as an influence.

For Marc Cole, Ed.M.’13, having President Wilson represent both Morehouse as president and the Ed School as a graduate has been inspiring.

“He’s like that principal touching thousands of students,” Cole, a senior adviser for veteran and military families in the U.S. Department of Education, says. “By extension, the Ed School is having that impact, too. It feels good to be a part of that, but it also gives me a huge sense of responsibility, not only to what I can be doing, but also to what I should be doing. At Morehouse, we often heard this phrase: With opportunity comes responsibility. The same is true here.”

— Lory Hough

PELP

appian way

The Austin Independent School District has participated

COACHE

in the Public Education Leadership Project for the past

The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher

four years. The project has also worked closely with Austin

Education is a research group that uses data

Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, Ed.M.’99, Ed.D.’02, and

to make the recruitment and management of

her leadership team. In Aldine, PELP faculty members have

faculty talent more effective for higher education

done extensive research for a forthcoming book (spring

institutions. Former participants include Texas Tech

2014) published by Harvard Education Press. Aldine was also

University, the University of Texas-Dallas, and

the subject of a case study, used extensively in the PELP

the University of North Texas. The University of

summer institute, called “Meeting New Challenges at the

Houston is a current participant.

Aldine Independent School District.”

DATA WISE

Faculty

In 2013, a four-member team from the Aldine Independent

HEPG

School District enrolled in the

Harvard Education Publishing

in partnership with the Lubbock

Group published a case study and companion teacher notes

by Lecturer Kathy Boudett called “Data Wise at Poe Middle School in San Antonio, Texas.”

Using data from the Texas Schools Project for a research project, Assistant Professor David

Data Wise Institute. Data Wise,

Deming is examining the impact of high-stakes testing on outcomes other than test scores. This

Independent School District,

past summer, the Garland Independent School

produced a video case study

District administered the Harvard Graduate School

of Wester Elementary School’s

of Education PreK–12 Parent Survey to thousands

implementation of Data Wise.

of its parents. This survey, in partnership with SurveyMonkey, was developed by Associate Professor Hunter Gehlbach and his team of students, with content input from Senior Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, and Lecturer Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87. (See page 8.)

SDP The Strategic Data Project (SDP) partnered with the Fort

ALUMS/STUDENTS

Worth Independent School District from 2010 to 2012,

For their recent “summer melt” project, Lindsay Page, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’11,

placing several fellows in the district. The project also produced

and current doctoral student Ben Castleman focused much of their

the College-Going Diagnostic Report for the district, which

research in Dallas, Austin, and surrounding districts. They are currently

influenced Fort Worth’s new strategic plan issued in May

working on a related book with Harvard Education Press. Other key Texas

2013. In addition, SDP partnered with the College Readiness

graduates include Austin superintendent Meria Carstarphen, Ed.M.’99,

Indicator System, based at Brown University, to find a fellow

Ed.D.’02, and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board staff members

from the Dallas Independent School District.

Lee Holcombe, Ed.M.’97, Ed.D.’02, and Julie Eklund, Ed.M.’86. Rich Reddick, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’07, is an assistant professor at the University of Texas–Austin. Ben Mackey, Ed.M.’13, is principal of the School for Talented and Gifted, ranked as the no. 1 public high school in the United States for six of the last eight years by Newsweek or U.S. News and World Report.

PPE For the past five years, the nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas has sent more than 600 principals from across the state to summer institutes with the Programs in Professional Education. The nonprofit also worked closely with the Ed School, including with more than a dozen faculty, on followup alumni conferences. Raise Your Hand Texas has also hired Ed School graduate students to work with school teams in Lubbock. The chair of the Principal Center advisory board is Walter Kelly, the principal of Highland Park High School in Dallas. Board member David Kaufman is principal of the Perez Elementary School in Austin.

ontheground Texas In this issue of On the Ground, we look at the state of Texas, the Lone Star State, home of the Alamo, Dr Pepper, rodeos, oil wells, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and some of the fastest-growing cities in the country (all deep in the heart of Texas). Here’s a look at a few ways that the Ed School is making an impact in the state where everything is bigger.

BetterLessons for Teacher When Jason Colombino, Ed.M.’05, decided to sign on to the Master Teacher Project, the one thing he didn’t have was much free time for something new. Not only was Colombino working full time as an algebra teacher at Salem High School in Salem, Mass., but he was also enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Boston College and a few months away from welcoming a second baby. But, he says, the motto of BetterLesson, the organization sponsoring the project, resonated with him: Share what works.

“That idea of teacher-to-teacher development and sharing rigorous and relevant lessons can make a significant impact on how educators approach teaching,” he says. “The opportunity to make a contribution to a shared body of knowledge around effective curriculum and instruction, all aligned to the Common Core, was something I couldn’t pass up.”

The project began last March. It’s run by BetterLesson, an organization that was started by a group of public school teachers from Boston and Atlanta who were frustrated that it was so hard to find and share great curriculum with other educators. Their Master Teacher Project drafts some of the best classroom teachers in the country to document and share for one year what they know about teaching,

aligned with the Common Core. This includes the “how” (tips, strategies) and the “what” (full lesson plans, all the materials needed for a complete course). The pilot cohort is made up of math teachers in grades six through 12. In addition to Colombino, the group includes three other Ed School graduates: Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.’06; Andrea Palmer, Ed.M.’12; and Amanda Hathaway, Ed.M.’06. A separate group covers both K–5 math and K–12 English and includes Maricela Rodriguez, Ed.M.’00. In addition to sharing tips and material, master teachers also open up their classrooms for a film crew to visually capture what their teaching looks like.

Colombino says he hopes the project provides high-quality material to teachers from a variety of backgrounds around the country.

“The project has the potential to impact all teachers,” he says, “from a novice teacher in a rural setting looking for advice on how to set up classroom routines, to a veteran teacher in an urban school looking for a new spin to teach a concept.”

To read from one of Colombino’s lessons, ­— Lory Hough go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

your turn

“‘Shut the laptop. I’m going to cut the wireless off.’”

— MIT Professor Anant Agarwal at an Askwith Forum last fall, repeating what he says he hears in classrooms all the time as educators struggle to accept online technology that students, particularly those in the millennial generation, fully embrace. Instead of fighting, Agarwal suggested educators find ways to use online technology to make learning even better.

v

what do you think of students using

technology in class? let us know by commenting at

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gse.harvard.edu/ed/yourturn

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter, which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.

angelina berardi

appian way

problemsolving problem

solution

For many students, understanding

Four 2013 Ed School master’s graduates think they may have found the answer:

what they read isn’t easy. Improving

repeated exposure and meaningful context. Frank Freeman, Lauren Gould, and Emily

vocabulary is a huge help. Research

Schu, realized this last fall in Innovation by Design, taught by Adjunct Lecturer David

study after research study has

Dockterman, Ed.D.’88. The result? They created Propagate Vocabulary, a tool that al-

found that vocabulary is critical to a

lows learners, using a Google Chrome browser extension, to practice vocabulary in the

student’s success and to closing the

context of what they are already reading digitally. “We personalize the vocabulary learn-

reading gap. Efforts to expand the

ing experience in ways that traditional classroom instruction and existing digital solu-

words a student knows and under-

tions do not,” Freeman says. This is particularly helpful for teachers because “it allows

stands must start early. However,

them to differentiate their teaching,” says Hannah Lesk, a fourth graduate who later

commonly practiced techniques often

joined the group. Students can interact with words, bookmark them, and continue to

used to teach and improve vocabulary,

practice later. On the companion web-based dashboard, students can also play games

such as flashcards or rote memoriza-

with their words and track progress. This fall,

tion activities, often fail.

the group will add the extension for other browsers and make the tool mobile-friendly.

To learn more about Propagate Vocabulary, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

15

A School on the Move — Literally When two Ed School alums, Thomas Bean, Ed.M.’81, and A. Kevin Qazilbash, Ed.M.’98, met in 2010, you could say that sparks flew. After all, a few short years later, the two educators and a third partner in the project, Sarah Peteraf, started Spark Academy, a middle school that is gradually replacing one of the worst-performing middle schools in Lawrence, Mass., a city with such low-performing schools that they were placed in receivership in 2012.

The school is not a charter school; it is just a normal, public middle school for students in fifth and sixth grades who live in South Lawrence.

(It will add another grade each year until it serves fifth- through eighthgraders.) But Spark Academy differs from a typical public middle school in a big way: Each day, students get three physical activity periods for a total of about two hours of gym.

Bean, a lawyer who says his passion is education, serves as an adviser and fundraiser for the school. He says that having kids run around in between periods of learning just makes sense.

“It’s so counterintuitive that 11-year-olds are sitting at desks all day,” he says. “Here, kids are doing what kids are supposed to be doing — running and learning, playing hard, and working hard.”

Not surprisingly, Qazilbash, or “Principal Q ,” as the students call him, agrees. He paraphrases a common notion that modern Americans are urban dwellers stuck in hunter/ gatherer bodies, meaning the way people live doesn’t allow them to get the exercise their bodies crave, particularly teens.

“People should be at their most active as teenagers. The physiology of most people aligns with that,” he says.

Research supports this idea. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published a report on school-based exercise and academic performance. The authors wrote that, overall, the results of 46 articles published between 1985 and October 2008 found that “there is substantial evidence that physical activity can help improve academic achievement, including grades and standardized test scores. … The articles in this review suggest that physical activity can have an impact on cognitive skills and attitudes and academic behavior, all of which are important components of improved academic performance.”

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daniel vasconcellos

To get more specific, “one study that we often cite has shown that running for 20 minutes allows people to learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster,” Peteraf, the school’s vice principal, writes in an email. “Another showed that students in Cambridge who passed more fitness tests performed better both on standardized testing as well as in their grades, holding all other variables constant.”

Of course, all this exercise should also have a positive effect on the “not-so-small problem with childhood obesity,” as Bean calls it. According to a report by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health published in 2010, Lawrence needs help in this area; the city has the highest rate of obesity in Massachusetts. However, all that time devoted to exercise won’t help kids if they won’t participate. What happens to the kids who just say no to joining in at the gym? So far, that hasn’t been a problem. Qazilbash has a few thoughts for why this potential stumbling block hasn’t tripped them up at Spark.

“We survey kids and ask them what is fun, and they get things they want. Also, we get them when they are fifthgraders, when they will try anything,” he says. “They don’t question it. They think of themselves as athletes, people who move.”

Qazilbash also credits the physical education staff, whom he calls “vivacious” and “energetic,” and he notes that there are about 12 kids to every one P.E. teacher or associate

appian way

teacher-coach, so the teachers can spend the time motivating any reluctant exercisers.

Activity isn’t just for the gym, either. Teachers have the students do “sparks” throughout the day, where the students get up in the middle of the class and take movement breaks. Teachers and administrators think these are particularly important since academic class periods can last an hour and 20 minutes, and the school day is an extended one, running for eight hours Monday through Thursday and six and a half hours on Fridays. Sometimes the sparks are built into the lessons, such as a science class one morning where the students stood up and those representing gas particles vibrated with a lot of intensity, those representing liquids moved a little, and those representing solids basically stood still. In another class, an English teacher, Maggie Simeone, Ed.M.’13, had the students imitate her morning routine, making them run in place as she ran to make coffee.

Just as the gym comes into the classroom, once a week the academic teachers go into the gym, participating in the activities with their students. Simeone enjoys her time in the gym, saying it allows the students to “see a sillier side of me and lets me see a different side of them, too. Plus it’s just fun to play soccer in the gym.”

Another way the classroom and the gym meet is that the school’s principles are prevalent in both places. For example, one principle, “always try,” helps the students and the teachers take on assignments or sports that may be tough for them. Simeone thinks that “always try” is what gets students who might be reluctant about sports out onto the court or field. Plus, having consistent principles that are applied by every teacher and administrator throughout the school makes for a positive work environment.

“The kids seem really happy. There’s a peacefulness throughout the day that I did not feel in the other school system I taught in,” Simeone says, referring to time she spent teaching in Houston.

Whether that peacefulness comes from students getting energy out in the gym, or from having consistent principles to count on, something is working. Teachers like Simeone notice it, and test results show it, too. In the fall, a month into the school year, only the preliminary MCAS scores were public, but Qazilbash says that the fifth-graders scored higher in math and science than any fifth-grade class that came before them in what was then South Lawrence East Middle School.

“That being said, we still have a long way to go to help all of our students reach their true academic potential,” he says. Though that may be true, he and the rest of the Spark Academy staff are certainly getting off on the right (sneakered) foot.

— Christine Junge is a freelance writer and a writing specialist at Emmanuel College. She wishes she had gone to a school like Spark Academy.

Seeing Green (Mountains) Current doctoral student Rebecca Holcombe, Ed.M.’90, was named education secretary for the state of Vermont by Governor Peter Shumlin to begin in January. Holcombe is a lecturer and director of the Dartmouth Teacher Education Program at Dartmouth College, and prior to that, she served as a principal in Vermont and a teacher in New Hampshire.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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followup

Financial Gain This past fall, the Ed School’s Financial Aid Office began offering students, staff, and alumni access to an online financial literacy tool called iGrad. Assistant Director Valeria Harris says Ed School users will be directed to a customized website that includes free, 30-minute courses on topics such as money management, student loans, investing, and identify theft. The site also offers related articles, videos, and a way to test your financial literacy.

, v http://www.igrad.com/ to sign up go to

schools/HGSE

Homework Policy Still Going Strong It’s become one of those stories that has legs. Two years after we ran a feature story on whether schools should assign homework, we’re still receiving letters to the editor and new tweets. On the Ed. site, the story has consistently been one of the most shared.

“Are You Down With or Done With Homework?” featured Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., who got rid of nightly homework in exchange for nightly reading and longer projects. At the time, Brant was just a few months into the homework change. Since the story in Ed. continues to spark so much interest among readers, we asked Brant if the policy was still in place, how it was going, and whether she had been approached by other media.

“Absolutely,” she says, noting that The Washington Post, Family magazine, msn living, and The Huffington Post contacted her, as did several principals and school boards, asking if they could visit the school.

And the policy continues. “What’s changed is the culture and community that we created,” she says. “We’ve really built a culture of reading, at school and at home.” Of course, some parents, especially new parents, still ask questions. “They ask, ‘My child isn’t doing math homework?’ And I get it. I’m a parent, too.”

But now, instead of reassuring them with talk of what she hopes will happen, she can tell them what has happened — students are making progress.

“The majority of our kids don’t go to preschool. Now, since the policy, the majority of them leave kindergarten reading,” she says. “At the end of the last school year, we looked at every student who started reading below grade level. Every one of them has risen at least 1.2 levels in growth. We’ve also had kids who grew 10 and 11 grade levels in one year.”

Brant has made it easy for kids to embrace the new reading culture. Not only does she give them the time at home to read by not assigning other homework, but she also makes books readily available: Around school, there are book baskets in the halls.

During the summer, in her gray Acura RDX, she becomes a one-woman bookmobile, driving around the city twice a week, giving out free books to kids — some donated, many that she paid for herself.

It’s exactly what Brant wanted when she changed the homework policy.

“Reading here has become the norm,” she says. “My hope when I started this was to make reading a habit. Students who read become adults who read.” — Lory Hough

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to read more, visit

www.gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras/homework

onmybookshelf

Professor Andrés Alonso of School Reform as some kind of crazy puzzle where the parts eventually fit.

First impressions: I love the Sarason book without reservation. Jal has ideas that resonate with me. Ravitch is the [film critic] Pauline Kael of education writing — same polarizing energy, but about schools rather than movies. I love schools and I love movies, so I see the connection.

Favorite book from childhood: The Three Musketeers ruled my imagination. My father bought me four books before I started school that were meant for a much older kid, and over time they became my other favorite books. One, Hombrecitos by R.P. Garrold — a long-forgotten writer — I found in a used book store in Toledo, Spain, through the web three years ago, after four decades searching for it. As an adolescent I fell in love with Tolstoy — War and Peace and the field scene from Anna Karenina, of course.

Reading rituals: I dog-ear pages, even when the book is borrowed. Some people have gotten very annoyed by it, but I can’t break the habit.

Favorite spot to curl up with a good book: The Outer Banks! Barnegat Light in the Jersey Shore is a close second. I like porches.

How you find the time: I think I have a lot of time now, maybe because reading is built into what I do for a living. Try being an urban superintendent for a day, and you’ll understand how my sense of time for reading has changed.

— Marin Jorgensen

jill anderson

Currently reading: I’m planning a course about urban school reform in the spring, so I am reading a lot of books on education reform. I’m an impatient reader and like the sense of different perspectives talking to each other, so I end up reading chapters from different open books at the same time, rather than concentrating on one book at a time. Right now, I’m reading Jal Mehta’s The Allure of Order, Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, and Seymour Sarason’s The Predictable Failure

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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books

20

The App Generation

Leading Educational Change

Private Enterprise and Public Education

Howard Gardner and Katie Davis

Helen Janc Malone

Frederick Hess and Michael Horn

From Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and YouTube, it is hard to deny that today’s youth are deeply involved with digital media. In The App Generation, Professor Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’11, examine the impact of new technologies on adolescent identity, intimacy, and imagination, uncovering both disturbing drawbacks and striking benefits.

In Leading Educational Change, Helen Janc Malone, Ed.D.’13, collects original essays on educational reform from leading minds in the field of educational change. Drawing on the latest knowledge in the areas of research, policy, and practice, the volume provides insight into contemporary challenges, misconceptions, and failed strategies while offering solutions and ideas for policymakers and educators.

Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90, and Michael Horn take a neutral position as they examine the role that private enterprise can play in American education in their new book, Private Enterprise and Public Education.

Bringing together viewpoints from a variety of contributors in the field, this volume analyzes how for-profit innovation and investment currently serve students.

Ed.

• winter 2014 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

Restoring Opportunity

School-Based Instructional Rounds

Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane

Lee Teitel

Is the American Dream of upward mobility fading? Greg Duncan and Professor Richard Murnane fear that it is. Restoring Opportunity examines how increasing income inequality has reduced opportunities for many children to thrive in a changing economy and offers evidence for how intervention through childhood, school, and family support can be used to increase the life chances of low-income children.

In School-Based Instructional Rounds, Lecturer Lee Teitel, Ed.D.’88, examines how the practice of “instructional rounds” can be adapted and applied within schools, rather than just across schools and districts. Looking closely at case studies of five models of school-based rounds, Teitel examines critical lessons from each and provides a resource for instructors and administrators across the nation.

To read the full list of books featured in this issue, as well as related EdCasts and Askwith videos, visit gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

v if you’re part of the ed school community and you’ve recently published a book, mail us a copy or let us know at

booknotes@gse.harvard.edu

— Briefs by Rachael Apfel Harvard Graduate School of Education

21

When it comes to “improving” schools, students, and teachers, there’s no shortage of opinions out there on what won’t work. We wanted to know, what could work? For several months, we asked people to tell us one tangible education idea they had that was worth spreading. Some writers are connected to the Ed School, others aren’t. Yes, there’s even an idea from a Muppet. As you’ll see, a few ideas are slight twists on thoughts we’ve heard before; others are quirky and curious. All, we hope, will get you thinking.

All Along How a little idea called Universal Design for Learning has grown to become a big idea — elastic enough to fit every kid.

By Katie Bacon Illustrations by James Steinberg

L

ecturer David Rose, Ed.D.’76, hopes and believes that he and his colleagues are part of a revolution — a revolution called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which is increasingly taking hold in schools and school districts across the country and seeks to design curriculum from the outset that can accommodate all types of learners, rather than retrofitting existing curriculums on an ad hoc, asneeded basis. Rose and his colleagues at CAST, a nonprofit education research and development organization, started articulating the idea in the early 1990s. It’s a concept borrowed from the world of architecture and product design — that if you design a building, for instance, in a way that is accessible to all from the outset, it will end up being more elegant, more efficient, and more useful while being less expensive than if you have to go back in and add features after the fact. And many of the features you add for those with disabilities will benefit others too — think of the automatic doors that help those in wheelchairs, yet also make things easier for those pushing strollers or carrying shopping bags.

Rose defines the philosophy of UDL as “tight goals, flexible means, as opposed to the tight goals and tight means that schools tend to have.” Key to UDL is the idea of engaging students by presenting information in multiple ways, so it can be accessed by people with many different learning styles.

Giving students multiple ways to show they understand information is also essential.

Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’07, one of many Ed School graduates who now work at CAST, explains it this way: “We want every kid to have that personalized ‘just right’ experience, so they can grow as a learner no matter what they bring to the table. Most education has been designed for a middle that doesn’t exist. We don’t want there to be any categories; all learners are on a continuum.” To go back to the building analogy, with UDL, all students will arrive at the second floor, but some may choose the elevator, others the escalator, still others the stairs, to get there.

Over the years, while teaching at the Ed School and helping to lead CAST (originally the Center for Applied Special Technology), Rose has become the most prominent public face of UDL. Professor Howard Gardner, who has taught with Rose since 1986, points out Rose’s unusual double trick of teaching while helping to create and move forward a field that has taken hold on both the state and federal levels.

“Few, if any, of us have had the impact he has had on national policy. He’s very well connected in Washington; he testifies; he affects legislation. We’re in an ivory tower; we don’t have impact on legislation — it’s very hard to do,” Gardner says.

When Rose made the decision to go to Harvard to get his doctorate in education, he couldn’t have imagined the confluence of technology and ideas that would lead to the creation of UDL. In fact, he returned to school out of anger, not out of a desire to learn how to reshape school curriculum.

After getting a master’s in education at Reed College, Rose chose to teach English at an inner-city high school in Boston.

There, he and an art teacher joined forces to work with their students on creating books of poetry. After they’d created the books, Rose recalls that he was called into an administrator’s office and grilled about them.

“What made you think your students actually wrote these poems?” the administrator asked Rose. Rose continues, “His expectation was so low for these kids that he didn’t believe they’d written the poems. But I had worked with them. I knew every word. I just looked at him.” At that moment, Rose determined he would get his doctorate, so he could come back and fire that administrator. Of course, life and work took him in another direction.

At Harvard, in the 1970s, long before MRIs could give a precise view of brain activity, Rose became fascinated by the emerging science of psychophysiology, based partly on trying to understand electrical activity in the brain through skin conduction tests.

“I wanted to understand how kids’ brains are developing and how we can measure it. It was shocking how little we knew at that point,” he says.

For his thesis, Rose posited, based on animal studies and slides of the human brain, that between ages 5 and 7, when children in most cultures start schooling, new cells are being developed in the hippocampus.

“The absolute orthodoxy was that in humans there is no postnatal neurogenesis. I was bucking that, saying that I thought new cells were being born,” he says. His thesis created a small stir, and he was given an advance to write a book on the subject. But he found himself hesitating. “One of my advisers said to me, ‘David, you have to decide whether this is going to become your career. This will upset the applecart; you are going to have to get into wet science and prove this. Is that what you want?’ But it wasn’t. This was a vehicle for me.

I wanted to work with the kids that I used to teach; I didn’t want to be a lab scientist.” (Decades later the first study came out proving Rose’s hypothesis.) Rose’s decision to work with students rather than in the lab was another turning point.

Soon he found a job combining his interest in neuropsychology with his interest in working with children. He became a neuropsychologist at North Shore Children’s Hospital

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in Salem, Mass., evaluating students who were having trouble at school. It was there, among his fellow clinicians, that he met the people with whom he would create UDL. At the clinic, Rose and his colleagues would evaluate students and give them a diagnosis. Sometimes the students would then start to receive services. Yet when Rose or one of his colleagues would visit the school six months later, they’d find that not much had changed. Discouraged, a group of them — Rose; Anne Meyer, Ed.M.’75, Ed.D.’83; Grace Meo; Skip Stahl; and Linda Mensing — met outside of work, at a pizza parlor, to talk about ways to make their interventions more effective. It was during the early days of the personal computer, when Apple Macintoshes, with their graphical user interfaces, were first released. What if students with disabilities could use computer programs as tools in the classroom? The clinicians started asking students to stay after their evaluations to test out new computer programs, and they added a section to their evaluations suggesting programs teachers could use to help students build particular skills.

The group decided to create CAST as a way to research and develop the best ways that computers could be used as tools to help students with different disabilities. (Rose and Meyer served as codirectors until last year, when Meyer retired.)

Early on, the team had dramatic success with a young boy named Matt who had cerebral palsy and could only communicate by blinking his eyes and opening and closing his mouth. The school system assumed he was profoundly mentally disabled and was going to pay to have him institutionalized. But his mother believed her son was intelligent — he just couldn’t communicate it. The team decided to teach him Morse code and gave him a switch connected to a computer that he could direct with his chin.

“He learned Morse code in about 10 minutes,” Rose remembers. Then they taught him the alphabet, and he was able to type out to his mother that he loved her. Eventually, Meyer digitized some books for him, setting up a program where he could have the book read aloud and could turn pages by clicking with his chin. “He was so excited to be enabled in this way.

Sweat was just pouring off him as he was reading.” Matt was a very dramatic case, but he showed Rose and his colleagues how powerful an intervention computers could be. “That kind of transformation was what we were after — something that could make everything change,” Rose says.

They built a strong business with referrals from schools.

Yet they still weren’t satisfied with the extent to which the computers were helping the students at the margins. As Rose

recalls it, the schools tended to view these students as “broken,” and they paid CAST to help them use the powerful assistive tools of a computer to “unbreak” them. But the team at CAST started thinking that the problem was not with the students but with the school curriculums and the barriers they placed in front of anyone who didn’t learn in a certain way. Most schools were asking students to adjust themselves, whatever kind of students they were, to a rigid system; CAST wanted the system to be elastic enough to fit all the kids.

“Maybe the other way to look at it is that the curriculum was broken. That it was never good enough to handle the variability of the kids who are in our schools,” says Rose.

Rather than providing different tools on an as-needed basis so that each child at the margin could access the curriculum, why not rethink the curriculum so that all children could access it, even those with different learning styles? With the help of computers, a literacy curriculum, for example, could by design include audiobooks for those with difficulties reading text, dictionaries where ESL learners could look up words along the way, and extra questions for those students ready to go on to the next level.

“Teachers used to think, ‘Oh, I have this problem kid.’

We wanted to change the thinking to, ‘How do we make this curriculum so that it helps whoever walks in the door?’” says Meyer.

This was the fundamental shift in thinking that led to the creation of UDL, and it led to some difficult times for CAST. Referrals from schools plummeted as CAST began shifting from recommending ways to provide assistive technology geared towards individual children to recommending ways for schools to rethink their curricula to address a variety of learning styles. CAST started seeking out federal grants to replace the lost funding, but it took seven years of trying to get their first one.

“I think that’s the period that we’re proudest of. There was a choice point there of, are we going to be a successful organization, meaning that we grow and thrive through these school referrals, or are we primarily a mission-driven one where we’re going to pursue what needs to be done, even if it’s not working for us financially? There are a ton of people who have been here 30 years, 20 years, 15 years because they’re here for the mission-driven part of it. It’s not just a job,” says Rose.

These days, CAST headquarters, in Wakefield, Mass., is a hive of activity, housing more than 40 staff. Rose and Meyer set out to create a work environment both collaborative and egalitarian. Rose describes the layout as similar to a New

England farmhouse, with parlors in the front where people can meet, and an area in the back where the work gets done.

The workspace is open, with desk placement determined not by seniority but by an NBA-style draft.

Rappolt-Schlichtmann, now CAST’s research director, sees the working atmosphere at CAST as fitting tightly with its philosophy that UDL is a discipline that can always — must always — be made better.

“Our big idea is that UDL is a continuously improving framework. And we work in this incredibly intense collaboration; it’s a very horizontal organization. Everyone is expected to question everything and contribute big ideas. Everyone’s thinking is considered at the same level,” RappoltSchlichtmann says.

She first learned about UDL when she took a class on it from Rose at the Ed School in 1999. Rappolt-Schlichtmann is dyslexic, and as a young student she experienced firsthand the stigmatization that can happen for children with learning issues.

“I had a terrible time growing up in a system where if you’re different in any way, it tries to put you in a corner and give you less. I just had this ‘aha’ moment when I took his class. I thought, ‘That’s the way education should be.’ No one should experience public schools the way I did.”

Rose has always had two jobs: working at CAST and teaching at the Ed School. For a while, he taught a class on neuroscience and reading, but about 15 years ago it became clear that what students really wanted to learn about from him was UDL. When Rappolt-Schlichtmann took Rose’s UDL course, it was one of perhaps just a few in the country.

“Students were desperate to take that class,” she says, “both because of the force of David’s personality and the convincingness of the work itself.”

Now, many education schools in the country offer a course on UDL, and some offer whole master’s programs. Each summer, the Ed School offers a professional development course for educators, taught by Rose and Professor Tom Hehir, Ed.D.’90. Several other factors have come together to raise UDL’s profile substantially within the education community over the past half-decade or so. In 2008, for the first time, a definition of UDL was included in federal law, in the Higher Education Opportunity Act. It stated: “The term ‘universal design for learning’ means a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that A) provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and B) reduces barriers in

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instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient.”

UDL was also included in the National Education Technology Plan, written in part by Rose and presented to Congress in 2010 as a means to boost the learning of all students, particularly those at the margins. Once UDL was defined in federal law, it opened the door for school systems to apply for UDL grants. Finally, UDL, with its attention to scaffolding concepts for different types

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of learners, is being seen as a way to help schools achieve the Common Core standards, which have been adopted in all but five states. While UDL was originally thought of as a way to help students with learning difficulties, today it is used as a way to tailor curriculum for all students, including, say, a student with dyslexia who may be talented at math but has trouble with word problems, or a student who needs an extra level of challenge to stay engaged.

Implementation of UDL is growing, but it varies school to school, district to district, and state to state. In 2013 the state of Maryland passed a bill that teachers must integrate UDL into their teaching practices. The previous year, the Gates Foundation funded a project helping four school districts implement UDL — two in Maryland, one in Massachusetts, and one in Indiana. And individual schools and teachers are figuring out ways to rethink their curricula using the UDL lens.

One of those teachers is Jon Mundorf, who teaches fifth grade in Naples, Fla. He first took a class on UDL from CAST in 2006 and went into it skeptically, looking for some solution, any solution, to the one-sizefits-all curriculum he was struggling to apply in his classroom.

“I was a teacher in a classroom with all kinds of different learners and was frustrated and having a tough time of it,” Mundorf says. “The standard approach to the curriculum just wasn’t working.”

These days, he presents information to students in a variety of ways and lets them present what they’ve learned in ways that fit their learning preferences. For example, during the unit he teaches on the U.S. Constitution, he gives his students a choice of reading or listening to an audio recording from the textbook, watching an explanation that he has prerecorded, viewing a video on BrainPop.com, or listening to a musical explanation of the

Constitution on Flocabulary.com. The difference in his classroom has been stark. Discipline problems are “almost nonexistent” because, as Mundorf sees it, each student is engaged with learning. “Once you think about it, a one-size-fits-all approach to the curriculum becomes kind of silly,” he says. “We need to help students understand their own learning and give kids their own path to explore. I have no control over the standardized curriculum, or who’s assigned to my classroom. What I can control is the flexibility of my goals, my methods, my materials, and my assessments.”

Katie Novak is the districtwide coordinator for reading and ELL in the Chelmsford, Mass., public schools. For 11 years she was a classroom teacher. Five years ago she did a weeklong training in UDL at CAST and has been a passionate advocate ever since. “There is no teacher in the world who doesn’t believe we have kids who are tremendously different, whom you can’t reach using these standardized methods,” she says.

As an example of how UDL is applied in the real world, she described an assignment she gave to seventh-graders to see if they understood the way point of view is used in the book The Outsiders.

While traditionally all students would have been asked to write a paper on point of view, in Novak’s UDL classroom, they were given a choice of how to do the assignment. Some chose to do a video, others did a painting, others did various tweets showing a shift in point of view. Of course students need to learn to become proficient in writing, but Novak’s point, and one of the points of UDL, is that separate skills — in this case, writing and demonstrating an understanding of the concept of point of view — should not be lumped together. In her observation, students do better if they’re allowed to break these two skills into parts and choose the means for demonstrating that they understand a concept.

“This is very different from how teachers are taught to teach,” Novak says. Giving the students different options for learning can “look messy,” she continues, but “within the chaos is real engagement.” (An added bonus: Novak saw a measurable leap in her students’ standardized test scores after she started teaching using UDL.) Adam Deleidi, assistant principal at the Susan B. Anthony Middle School in Revere, Mass., is working to help teachers use UDL in all aspects of their teaching, partly through a tool CAST created called UDL Studio. In his view, it’s a way to shift lesson planning from aiming at the middle to targeting the specific needs of all the students in the class.

Rose is the first to admit that implementation is an issue.

Learning how to implement a UDL curriculum takes time — and it often takes a whole rethinking of both curriculum and teaching philosophy. Some potential users of UDL would like CAST to box up UDL, create a short and specific set of steps for teach-

ers to follow, and, voila, there you have a UDL classroom. This clashes with CAST’s philosophy that great teaching can’t be ritualized and imposed from the outside. For UDL to work the way it’s supposed to, teachers have to understand it in a holistic way, understand their students, and then figure out how to implement it themselves.

“We are wrestling with how can we support people with implementing UDL without turning it into a cookbook. We want teachers to be cooks, not recipe-followers,” says Rose.

Yet while CAST created the concept of UDL, it has now grown much bigger than the organization, and other groups are putting out their own instruction manuals and checklists for how to implement UDL in ways that CAST would never do. Rose and the rest of CAST considered trademarking UDL, but in the end they decided this wasn’t the right approach.

“Our job is not to fight bad things because you could spend your whole life doing it. Our job is to continue to create better and better tools that will win out in the war of ideas,” Rose says. CAST approaches the issue of implementation from many directions, including by teaching workshops and institutes at their headquarters or onsite at schools or state departments of education, by creating online courses, by publishing books on the policy, research, and implementation of UDL; and by making guidelines and teaching tools freely available on their website.

While UDL has become much more visible over the past half-decade, Rose argues that much work remains, in terms of expanding its reach and improving the framework and the scientific grounding behind it.

“We’re in the hard part. Often revolutions falter when going from early adopters to really systemic change,” he says.

Meyer, Rose’s longtime colleague, says that CAST has been built with the future in mind.

“David has always wanted to hire people who are smarter than himself and distribute the credit. The next generation is coming along and is going to take this to the next level,” she says. Those hires are the ones who will try to carry on the revolution that Rose, Meyer, and their colleagues started. They share an ambitious vision, one that began 30 years ago in the computer lab of a hospital clinic.

“We want to see education changed,” Meyer says. “We want to see this approach be the norm, we want these tools available to everyone. We want to see UDL as a reform initiative, one that we hope will really take hold nationwide and worldwide.”

— Katie Bacon is a freelance writer and editor based in Boston who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other publications. Ed.

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g n i p p o Dr uO t:

Is Your ader r G t s Fir ? k s i R t A

Sapers cs n a h t a graphi n o f o n J I r y B lle s By Ki n o i t a r Illust

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n January 2013, Joshua Starr, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’01, the superintendent of Montgomery County [Md.] Public Schools, was walking through New York City’s Central Park when the idea hit him.

“I was actually walking with another Harvard grad, Brian Osborne, and I was talking about the Seven Keys,” he says, referring to an approach that the county is known for, which uses data to highlight a path to college persistence. Osborne, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’11, is superintendent of schools in South Orange-Maplewood, N.J. “I thought, wait a second. We’ve got to do this for kids who’ve dropped out. We actually don’t know what’s happened with them. Montgomery County has always been organized around the experience of successful kids. I was thinking, what about the opposite? I want to understand what the experience is of our kids at the youngest grades and the kids who are most vulnerable.”

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So Starr directed his staff to prepare a report on the question, and they looked at the experience of the class of 2011, dropouts and non-dropouts, from all of the county’s 26 high schools, to see what they could learn. They looked in particular at behavior, attendance, and aspects of academic performance.

Initially, the researchers came back with results as far back as middle school, but Starr says he sent them back to look further. “The first draft they gave me was down to sixth grade, and I said I wanted to go down as early as possible. Frankly I’d like to get down to preK.” The final report, titled “Just the Right Mix: Identifying Potential Dropouts in Montgomery County Public Schools Using an Early Warning Indicators Approach,” goes back to first grade and identifies “cut points” that are related to an increased likelihood of students dropping out of school. The findings were compared with the class of 2012.

The earliest findings: First-graders are considered to be at risk of disengaging from school (and potentially becoming fully disengaged and dropping out in the future) if by the third marking period they’re absent from school nine or more times, are below grade level in reading and/or mathematics, and/ or have a calculated grade point average below 1.2 in the third marking period.

The notion that children who may not even be able to tie their shoes, nor are entirely clear what it means to share, can already be showing signs of disengagement may seem hard to comprehend, yet for those familiar with the literature, intervening early makes sense. The earlier, the better, in fact.

“There’s a sense of surprise for first grade,” says Nicholas Morgan, executive director of the Ed School-based Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and its Strategic Data Project. “One of the biggest things that’s talked about nationally is third-grade reading. If a child is off track in third-grade reading, then the chances of recouping that are much more challenging. I think you still see a lot of school districts nationally thinking about high school graduation as a high school problem. The problem is when you think about it that way, you simply don’t have enough days to catch up.”

Starr and other Montgomery County officials are adamant that being designated as high risk for dropping out is not intended to be used to label or marginalize kids, but rather to make their issues less opaque and more personal and to serve as a starting point for possible intervention.

“I have two mantras about data, and I’m a former accountability guy,” Starr says. “One is, at best, data helps you ask better questions. The other is use the data to name names. So if a first-grader’s on track to be absent nine times, who is that kid? What is his story? What else do we need to know about him? Use the early warning indicators to identify kids and families. But you’re not going to draw conclusions unless you get in there and work with the family and the kid and figure out solutions. So it’s a starting point.”

In June, 10 Montgomery County Schools were chosen to do just that — to become a kind of incubator network that would begin to refine the data and test possible ways to help at-risk kids. Known as the Interventions Network and featuring their own acronym, EPIC (for Early warning indicators, Personalized learning plan, Implementation, and Culture of high expectations), the schools applied for and were chosen, according to Kimberly Statham, deputy superintendent for teaching, learning, and programs, based on how interested and engaged the faculty, PTA, and parents were in working to keep students from disengaging and dropping out. The end result of the incubating work, as well as continued work on the data, will be to test and build an early warning indicator system founded on the Montgomery-specific experience.

For Starr, responding to the earliest early warning indicators may require more players than just schools. “If a first-grader has nine absences, that is not a six-year-old’s problem; that’s a family issue,” he says. “We’ve got to develop systems that coordinate collaborative actions amongst the various agencies that touch kids’ and families’ lives. If a family is not able to get their kids to school, that family may be working with other agencies: Health and Human Services, the police department, juvenile justice, whatever it may be. And we’ve got to organize ourselves to work with those groups.”

Statham says this coordination will be part of the Interventions Network’s responsibilities.

“We have our pupil personnel workers (PPWs), whom we would ask to keep an eye on this family,” she says. “If that PPW finds out that the family is struggling, mom or dad lost a job and they’re short on resources, the Office of Community Engagement and Partnerships can provide wraparound services. Connect them to our agency partners in the system. This is not just academic support for students in these 10 schools.

We definitely are taking a more holistic view. And so with each child having a personalized learning plan, it will customize the support that we provide.”

Statham says the short-term goal is to develop personalized learning plans for students in the Intervention Network schools who are showing signs of needing extra support, but that, long term, all children will have one.

Starr sees one key advantage of personalizing the data, of “naming names,” is potentially moving administrators beyond demographic assumptions in assessing kids’ issues.

“It’s not just about, here are black kids, here are Latino kids, what are we doing overall? It’s, wait a second, Josh has been absent six times this month, what’s going on? Let’s do something. Not, Josh is a black kid, so we’ve got to do something different. It creates a degree of accountability and opportunity to say there are real-time indicators and real actions we can take every day to reverse the potential that some of our kids aren’t going to graduate.”

The idea of taking assertive action in the face of early warning indicators appeals to Janette Gilman, president of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs. “If I take a test and find out I’m prone to early Alzheimer’s, what do I do? There’s no intervention,” Gilman says. “But in this case, if the data is good and it shows a strong correlation — it’s not predictive, but it’s an indicator — if I step in and try to do the best for that child, then at the end of the 12 years of school, at least the system and the families can feel like we did the best we could to let every child achieve.”

Montgomery County is one of a number of places across the country where early warning indicator systems are either under development or already in place. Other efforts are

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happening in places like Denver and Massachusetts, as well as several districts in Ohio.

In Denver, the system, which is not yet approved, grew out of efforts to develop a success-tracking program called the Gateway, modeled on Montgomery’s Seven Keys system.

Researchers say the early warning indicator system emerged as a way to measure whether students were on track to reach stages along the way to the project’s goal: measuring true college readiness, meaning that students would not need a remedial course when they arrived at college.

“The final product is going to be [that] at any point in time from K–12, we know what is the arc of success that a kid is having and whether the kid is on track,” says Chung Pham, senior strategic projects analyst in assessment, research, and evaluation in the Denver Public Schools through his fellowship at the Strategic Data Project. “Having a high arc or not, is the kid on or off track? And then what are we going to do to help that kid get back on track?”

Pham and fellow Strategic Data Fellow Tracy Diel Keenan, also a senior strategic projects analyst in assessment, research, and evaluation in the Denver Public Schools, say the Denver program could potentially offer educators real-time information — a number that includes attendance and behavior mixed in with academic information.

“We have dashboards — principal and teacher portals — so various people could have access to the data,” Diel Keenan says. “Attendance is obviously the main thing that would change daily, as well as, potentially, behavior.”

In Massachusetts, a statewide system divides students into three grade chunks (from first grade all the way up to 12th) and focuses on children’s likelihood of achieving progressive academic targets — all of which are separately considered indicators for high school graduation but also have more immediate relevance. The system replaces a previous arrangement that only focused on incoming ninth-graders and their likelihood of graduating from high school.

“Folks that were using it told us they felt giving just the one-time snapshot of the incoming grade-nine students wasn’t enough,” says Jenny Curtin, coordinator for high school graduation initiatives in the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “They wanted that information for earlier grade levels. They were really thinking about middle school, and they also wanted early warning indicator information for students throughout their high school experience. They wanted to know if they were making progress with students and to track them over time.”

Under the new system, grades one through three are measured against a goal of reading by the end of third grade; grades four through six on proficient or advanced performance on the English and math portions of a state test indicating

middle school readiness; seven, eight, and nine on high school readiness with passing all ninth-grade; grades 10, 11, and 12 focus on the goal of high school graduation.

The new system, which is in its second year, estimates the likelihood of achieving goals based on historical data going back to 2005 but assesses current individual students’ risk levels based on attendance and other factors from the prior year.

The new system, which includes a partnership with American Institutes for Research (AIR), took a year to develop.

The point of the clustering arrangement is to empower educators.

“If I were a first-grade teacher or principal of an elementary school, finding out that my students are at risk for not graduating from high school — it’s important, but it’s not very tangible or actionable or relevant to where I’m at today,” Curtin says. “Saying that they’re at risk for not reading by the end of third grade is really meaningful to the educators working in the building.”

Camia Hoard, Ed.M.’99, assesses early childhood and elementary teachers in the District of Columbia Public Schools as a master teacher, having spent 16 years in the classroom teaching kindergarteners through fifth-graders. She feels that the focus on what goes on in the building should be more acute.

“I think that we have a lot of systems that train teachers to control behavior as opposed to changing it,” she says. “What I would like to see happen from the perspective of my teaching experience is to take a look at what things we are doing as teachers that are pushing kids out.”

For example, Hoard cites what she says is a commonly used repressive color system in the classroom with which younger children are labeled for behavior — red means a call home, green is a good job.

“What’s alarming about something like that is, one, how widely used it is,” she says. “And two, how we recognize who our red kids are immediately. ‘Little Johnny’s out of the line.

Change your color to yellow.’ It’s not even nine o’clock yet.

Instead of saying, ‘This system doesn’t really work for Johnny.’”

In order to move beyond systems like these, uncomfortable conversations are necessary, Hoard says.

“I think back on my teaching career and I wonder, what made me change that? And it was probably very simply a conversation with somebody who said, ‘Where’s the discussion after you change your color? You’ve done something wrong, now you’re on yellow; you’ve done something wrong again, now you’re on red; now we tell your mom.’ As opposed to, ‘Let’s have a conference about why walking in a line is important or safety issues around body space,’ or ‘What can Ms. Hoard do to help you?’”

Hoard says similar care has to be taken in approaching parents. “What I worry about is we’ve got teachers who are

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sitting back and saying, ‘Well, he doesn’t come to school on time, so what am I supposed to do?’ Without having reached out as that number one connection. Because when other people step in, that could possibly cause resistance in families.”

Approached correctly, a parent can be made to feel he or she is helping an exceptional child reach her potential, rather than being called to account.

“Your kid’s really smart,” Hoard says she once told a parent whose child was regularly late to school. “Really, really intelligent and showing me higher-level thinking skills. But he misses so much school that he’s not performing, and I’m seeing [questionable] behavior and all these things because we don’t get started on the right track in the morning.”

In Massachusetts, how districts conduct conversations about the early warning indicators is considered a key part of the process.

“We have actually deterred districts from sharing [early warning] risk levels with parents and students just as a blatant ‘here’s your risk level’ conversation,” says Curtin.

“Instead, we’ve encouraged districts to be a little bit more thoughtful in communicating information. If they’re seeing that they have a high-risk student and that student has really poor attendance and course grades, and those indicators went into determining that they were high risk, then they should be having a conversation with the parents and the student about why those are important things, so that they stay on track.”

Curtin adds that districts need to be thoughtful about digging into the root causes of warning signs like poor attendance.

“The early warning indicator system is not a diagnostic tool; it’s a tool to flag students in a very systemic way,” she says, “based on research and based on our own longitudinal analyses. But it’s not going to tell educators the root causes of what’s happening with students. We’ll never be able to have that information at the state level. That’s always going to have to be done at the local level.”

Indeed, when the data is used for that kind of an examination, it can yield significant results. According to Mindee O’Cummings, principal researcher and the lead for AIR’s dropout prevention work (who did not personally participate in the Massachusetts research), two different districts in Ohio that looked deeper at the root causes found surprising information that helped them make significant improvements in their approach to their communities.

In one, indicators showed that a large number of students were failing one or more courses in ninth grade.

Educators suspected the challenging courses that come at that stage — ninth-grade algebra or English, for example — were to blame. But when they examined the data, they

found the culprit was a ninth-grade biology class that required students to do more writing about biology than they were ready for. As a result, educators worked with teachers to ease the amount of writing and also moved the biology course to a later year, replacing it with physical science.

In another Ohio district, prompted by the indicators, educators decided to take a second look at an historical truancy problem. What they found was much more complex than the hooky-playing they’d expected. Most of the students were “newer truants.” When officials called the families to ask what was going on, they found that many parents were working double shifts. As a result, their older children had taken on the responsibility of getting younger siblings to school and were unable to get to school themselves. Consequently, educators in that district are currently considering creating other ways for these older children to go to school — possibly a night school for credit recovery — now that the issue is clear.

O’Cummings says the value of early warning indicator systems’ close scrutiny of the data — like naming names of mysteriously missing first-graders, as Superintendent Starr is hoping for in Montgomery County — is moving educators beyond assumptions: behavioral or demographic.

“It’s equal opportunist,” O’Cummings says. “And we need to be equal opportunist with our indicators, and it’s hugely important. I mean, I’m a living example of it. I’m white, I came from a middle-class family, I went to a public school. I have an orthopedic impairment — I use a wheelchair and if you actually look at my graduation likelihood based off my demographics, it’s up there in the 98th or 99th percentile. But at 16, I dropped out of my high school.

If anyone was using an early warning system way back when in the dark ages, it would have identified me.”

— Jonathan Sapers, a graduate of Harvard College, is a freelance writer in New York who writes about education for Scholastic Administrator and Teachers College Alumni Magazine. Ed.

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B re n n a n b y D es ig n After a meandering academic path, Assistant Professor Karen Brennan finally found her calling: helping students and teachers become coders, creators, and learners, one Scratch at a time.

By Lory Hough Illustrations by Peter Horvath

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ou can hear Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” blaring inside Askwith Lecture Hall even before you get to the beige double doors. It’s the third meeting of the fall semester for T-550, and inside, the room is buzzing. TAs are moving up and down the steps, taping big sheets of blank paper along the walls, nine on each side. Students are everywhere, laughing and talking. A few seem to be dancing. Nearly a dozen are circling a folding table on the stage stacked with more energy: boxes of doughnuts and Starbucks coffee.

It’s 8:15 a.m. For a graduate class meeting this early on a Tuesday morning, the atmosphere is a bit unexpected.

That’s exactly how Assistant Professor Karen Brennan wants it. A recent transplant from the MIT Media Lab, Brennan jokes that she was actually bummed when assigned to Askwith, despite it being one of the brightest and prettiest rooms on our campus.

“It’s called Askwith Lecture Hall,” she says, stressing the middle word. “But there will be no lecturing! For me, it became more like, let’s occupy Askwith! It’s a playground, a lab, a cafe, but never a lecture hall.”

Brennan’s teaching and learning approach owes much to her time at MIT, specifically the Lifelong Kindergarten research group, under director Mitch Resnick, who was her guest speaker that morning in class.

Under Resnick, she says, “you’re never told how to think about something.” Plus, “if I’m lecturing, I can’t understand how the students would be making sense of anything.”

Over the next three hours of Designing for Learning by Creating, Brennan speaks in front of the class very little: She introduces Resnick for a few minutes and later presents four students who will be facilitating the second hour of class — an activity where students come up with ideas for digitally enhanced learning experiences that don’t already exist. Toward the end of class, she spends about 10 minutes discussing key points in that week’s readings and gives them a sneak peak of what’s on for next week. Still, Brennan’s presence in the class is always felt. While students are working in small groups on the activity, she quietly moves around the room, listening and nudging for more detail. She genuinely seems interested in what each student shares. As Resnick says of her style, “Karen is a true constructionist, recognizing that knowledge cannot be delivered by the teacher but must be actively constructed by the learner.”

It is this active constructing that has, in some ways, become the overarching focus of Brennan’s work and research. Her recent MIT dissertation, for example, looked at the experience of

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students and teachers who have become creators of technology, in and out of school. This is what got her interested in Scratch, one of the main projects she worked on when she was at MIT, as well as the offshoot she started and has since brought to the Ed School: ScratchEd. Scratch is a free, easy-to-use, online programming platform that allows users at home or in school to create — from scratch, not templates — their own interactive games, stories, music, and animations. Creations can then be shared with others. Scratch was created with kids in mind, mostly upper elementary through high school, as a way to support their learning, but, as the Scratch website says, “there’s nothing stopping anyone from giving it a crack.” (Resnick points out that even his 83-year-old mom uses it and recently created an animated birthday card for him.) The program turns users, who now number in the millions from 150 different countries, into coders — an important literacy skill that Brennan stresses all students should have.

“It’s important for kids to be creators, not just consumers of technology,” she says. Nowadays, most kids, even the savvy “digital natives” who can expertly fly around their iPads and Xboxes, engage passively with technology as they play video games or access existing information from sites like Wikipedia or YouTube. They point, they click, they browse, but they rarely design or produce.

The problem with this, Brennan says, is that technology makes us vulnerable. Quoting Douglas Rushkoff, one of the authors she assigns to her students, she says, “‘Program or be programmed.’ We are surrounded by computational interfaces that control almost every part of our lives. That makes us vulnerable to the inclinations, the desires of the designers. Take Facebook for example. Enormous decisions about privacy are being made by the people who created it, and [users] just take it as is.” (You won’t find Brennan on Facebook, but @karen_brennan is very active on Twitter, where she has more than 1,400 followers.)

Another way to think about it, she says, is to consider reading and writing. Being able to use computers but not create with technology is like being able to read but not write. There are also missed learning opportunities when kids only point and click. But when they create with a program like Scratch, students might learn about math concepts. Adding something that allows a game to keep track of the score, for example, teaches about variables. Students also learn skills often touted as essential in the 21st century: how to think creatively and how to communicate clearly.

“My mission is not to make everyone a computer scientist,” Brennan says. “Yes, we do desperately need more programmers,

but for me, it’s about having another medium for self-expression.”

Brennan got involved with Scratch just after joining the Media Lab in 2007, a few months after Scratch debuted to the public. It was the ideal time to show up, she says, allowing her to use her ethnographer skills.

“I was able to see what people would do with Scratch. When they created it, they had an idea about how kids would react, but they weren’t sure,” she says.

She started asking “Scratchers” questions online and when she visited schools where Scratch was being used. At the same time, the Scratch creators, including Resnick, were thinking about ways to broaden participation. Brennan had an idea.

Teachers already using Scratch in their K–12 classrooms were emailing her, looking for lesson plans or offering to share information on what they were trying with their students. More than anything, they were looking for ways to connect with other educators using Scratch.

“I thought, what if we could get more teachers involved?” she says. “That became my all-consuming passion. I’m super crazy about teachers. They’re so passionate about their students.”

She and Resnick applied for a National Science Foundation grant, which allowed them in 2009 to start ScratchEd with the help of several Ed School student interns, including Ashley Lee, Ed.M.’10, now an Ed School doctoral student, and Michelle Chung, Ed.M.’10, who stayed on with the project after she graduated. Since then, nearly 7,500 educators from around the world have joined. Online resources include handouts, tutorials, videos, and lesson plans, in subject areas ranging from music to language arts to science and engineering.

In T-550 this semester, Brennan’s students are using these resources to design and produce their own interactive Scratch projects that could be used in classrooms. They are also keeping a design journal that is shared online with the rest of the class and writing a 4,000-word paper analyzing what they created in relation to the course readings. A few weeks into the semester, Brennan had students take their first shot at creating a simple Scratch project demo. Many were silly and fun as the students — most without prior programming experience — played around with the tools. A few, however, were focused on learning. One student started an animated book where a fox named Freddy

wanders into a library and decides he’d like to learn to read.

Ava, a fairy, says she can help and summons her magic carpet to take them to school. In her design journal, the student creator wrote that this was the beginning exploration in how storytelling can increase empathy in small children. Another student created a simple math project with a talking monkey who helps young users count the number of bananas in the numerators and denominators of fraction examples. In another demo, users had to add a comma to sentences to change the meaning — and save a life, including Brennan’s, whose photo Harvard Graduate School of Education

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was in front of a lion’s mouth with the sentence: “Did the lion eat Karen?”

At the end of her dissertation, Brennan shares a story about interviewing a 17-year-old Scratch user five years after they initially met. Asked about her experience with Scratch, the student tells Brennan she doesn’t know where to start. “When I think about my life, I almost divide it into two parts — life before Scratch and life after Scratch,” she finally says. Brennan’s response? “Me too.”

Brennan’s pre-Scratch life only showed hints of where she would end up in her life and career. Born just outside Ottawa, her early passion had nothing to do with coding computers or even academia, but with music — specifically, the piano.

“One of my mom’s lifelong dreams was to one day have a piano,” Brennan says. “When I was five, my dad bought one.

From then on, from the age of five until 20, I took lessons and played seriously.” She eventually taught piano and thought she would make a living as a classical pianist. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), she majored in music.

“But then I realized I hated it,” she says. Not the piano, but the competitive part of playing. She transferred to the University of Montreal, where she had a better experience. However, in time, she realized something game-changing: Music wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life.

“With one course to go, I dropped out,” she says. “My parents, I think I broke their hearts,” especially after she told them what she was going to do next: Go back to UBC and major in math. “I might as well have said I was running off to join the circus! That might have made more sense to them.”

It made sense to a friend who reminded her that she not only liked math, but also “geeking out” with computers. When Brennan was about 11, her father, a salesman for the 3M company, brought home an early-model computer running MSDOS. Brennan remembers tinkering for hours on the computer, sometimes staying up all night.

“It was easier to tinker with early computers,” she says. “Now they’re just so user-friendly.”

Her friend suggested she double major in both math and computer science, a field Brennan now jokes she had no idea you even could major in. Unfortunately, Brennan’s feelings about math started to resemble her feelings about music.

“Once I was doing it, it didn’t feel right,” she says. “But I totally became obsessed with computer science. It made me see the world in a whole new way. Computers are often perceived as mysterious and magical objects. [Science fiction writer] Arthur C. Clarke has a fantastic line about this: ‘Any suf38

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ficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

Studying computer science helped me see beyond that mystery and magic and into the people, processes, and assumptions underlying computational artifacts.”

It also made her want more (“I wasn’t ready to give up being a student!”), so with her bachelor’s degree in hand, she applied to MIT, to the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. There she designed hardware. She liked it, but again, those feelings of something not quite being right started to sink in. With permission from her adviser, she decided to take a year break. She flew back to Canada, to Vancouver, where her husband was. After five days, she says she “freaked out.” There was no way she could spend a year doing nothing.

So, a week before classes started at UBC, her old stomping grounds, she showed up at the school of education with fingers crossed. Luckily, students with math and computer science backgrounds were scarce but in demand, so she got in.

“I fell in love with education and learning research,” she says.

She went on to finish a master’s in curriculum studies but then got itchy again. She missed the building and technology side of learning. Playing around on the computer one day, she finally found a way to tie all of the pieces together: Go back to MIT, this time to the Media Lab. “I was nervous,” she says. “When I went to MIT the first time, I had heard about the lab. I thought of it as that weird place where weird people did weird stuff. Then I realized, I’m a weird person who wants to do weird stuff. I fell in love with Mitch, my colleagues, and the lab, and I thought, finally, this is it.”

Brennan jokes that maybe Resnick picks his students that way. “We’re all from meandering paths,” she says. “Weird, intellectual misfits.”

Resnick may think that, but he says that one of the reasons Brennan really fit at the lab has more to do with how she easily cuts across boundaries, being equally at ease designing a user interface as she is with running a hands-on workshop for teenagers or organizing a professional development seminar for educators. A positive outcome, perhaps, of her meandering path.

“When I first met Karen, I knew that she was the perfect fit.

She brought together a great range of interests and expertise — degrees in both education and computer science,” Resnick says, “an ability to think both creatively and analytically, and a passion for learning new things combined with a commitment to helping others learn new things.”

Chung says, “Her generosity, especially towards her students,” really stood out when she was interning for Brennan at the Media Lab. “She cares so much about them and their learning.”

Brennan is quick to deflect the credit, giving it back to the students themselves, especially the many students from the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program who, like Chung, interned at the Media Lab. “There’s a magic with HGSE master’s students that I haven’t encountered anywhere else,” she says. Moving the ScratchEd project from MIT to Harvard, she adds, “wouldn’t have been possible without them.”

Back in class, the last break for the day is ending. Brennan turns down the music, “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics, just as Donovan, a student who had been sitting in the front row, lets out a huge “Woooh!” as he pumps his fist in the air. It’s loud and another unexpected moment in a graduate class at Harvard, but it is also fitting for the energy level that has been maintained by everyone in the room.

It could be the refueling of doughnuts and coffee. “Karen is a big believer in making sure people are well fed,” Chung says, “especially when they’re working on creative projects.”

It could be the fact that students don’t feel the heavy pressure to perform: Brennan doesn’t grade papers and projects along the way, including the demo Scratch projects they created the week before.

She says she wants students to have the freedom to try new things and take intellectual risks. It seems to be working. During class, when the students talk about what went right and what didn’t with their Scratch demos, one student says she would have been less willing to explore if there had been a grade on the line. Another says the range of projects would have been less diverse if students started to think, What will get me an A? “I also would have lost the excitement,” she says.

In this way, Chung says Brennan gives her students the opportunity to take control of their learning. “As she said to this year’s T-550 cohort: ‘Be bold. Be crazy. Surprise yourself. What do you have to lose? Nothing really, except, of course, sleep.’”

Brennan adds, “I say to students, imagine that the only limitation is you.” In an era of school budget and time constraints, this sense of empowerment is necessary when students go out into the real world and try to use Scratch or their own creative Scratch-like projects to change learning, Brennan says.

“The work of designers is to move from the actual to the aspirational. You need to be moving toward the aspirational. You may be moving just a little, but you need to be moving,” she says. “There’s also power in numbers. The more people embrace the idea that this type of learning matters in school, the more people who think there can be an alternative, Visit gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras to watch a video of stuthe better chance dents from the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard there is that of Hearing, and principal Jeremiah Ford, C.A.S.’91, coding change will happen with Scratch during the Hour of Code event in December.

Ed. in schools.”

Karen Brennan Likes & Quirks Favorite composer: Bach Favorite piano player that might surprise her students: Glenn Gould. And not just because he was Canadian, a hypochondriac, and preoccupied by technology.

I really think that no one performed Bach better!

Guilty pleasure: Watching teen drama television shows Addiction: Books, although I try to avoid paper Favorite doughnut flavor: Chocolate frosted, but I’m vegan, so I didn’t actually eat any doughnuts this semester.

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christian murdock/Colorado springs gazette

Eric Waldo, Ed.M.’03, is deputy chief of staff for policy and programs in the Office of the Secretary at the United States Department of Education. He recently celebrated his six-year “Obamaversary.”

noteable Eric Waldo It was the first September in a long while that Eric Waldo, Ed.M.’03, was heading back to school on a bus. Only this time it wasn’t bright yellow, nor was it filled with loud, excited kids. This bus was decorated with the United States Department of Education seal and was carrying Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his team, of which Waldo is a member.

As part of the “Strong Start, Bright Future” campaign, Waldo — deputy chief of staff for policy and programs for Duncan — accompanied the secretary on their 1,100 mile Back-to-School Bus Tour of the Southwest, visiting schools and community leaders in four different states in only five days.

“The best ideas aren’t coming from D.C.,” he says.

“When we go on the tour, we get to meet real teachers, real parents, [and] real students, and learn about their challenges and successes, and bring those stories back to Washington.”

One success story came out of Tucson, Ariz., where he met a high school principal who has taken his school completely digital, saving money and enabling his predominantly low-income students to take college-level classes.

And in Columbus, N.M., the tour visited a school where 75 percent of the students commute from Mexico, waking up at 4 a.m. to catch the bus. Most of these kids’ parents have never met their teachers.

Stories like this have driven Waldo since his post-college job teaching English and improvisational acting to innercity students in Providence, R.I. “It’s incredibly powerful to 40

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Program: International Education Policy

Major ED Duties:

see the kinds of sacrifices Adviser to the secretary on strategic that parents and children communications and policy; primary are willing to make to get a liaison with the White House on quality education,” he says. agency activities; cochair of the Waldo came to the Ed Advisory Council on Dependents School wanting to transiEducation; partner of Michelle tion into education policy, Obama on the Joining Forces project; hoping to make a greater and aide on communications and impact. After earning his engagement planning around the J.D. at the University of president’s early learning initiative.

Chicago, he clerked for a federal judge in his hometown of Cleveland before becoming involved in Barack Obama’s first campaign for president, eventually joining his transition team in D.C. That is where Waldo met Duncan.

“I joined his team a week after inauguration and was one of the first few political appointees in the door,” Waldo says. “Being here at the inception of policies and helping this team move the president’s agenda forward has been a phenomenal experience.”

The most important thing his team can do, Waldo says, is to impress upon people just how vital education is to this country’s success. “If we think we can cut education and it will lead to better outcomes for children, we are kidding ourselves,” he says. “Education needs to be considered an investment and not an expense.”

— Marin Jorgensen

alumni ne ws and notes 1956

1969

1978

Michael Fink, M.A.T., has been teaching English at the Rhode Island School of Design for 55 years. His elective courses range from journalism to ornithology, from Bible study to the history of Hollywood’s studio years. He writes, “What I learned at HGSE has stayed with me throughout my career. … I think of my days in Cambridge and my companions in the high-minded and creative classrooms and lecture halls with affection and respect.”

Gerald Shields, Ed.M., is serving as interim head of school at Sinarmas World Academy in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is his sixth interim headship in an international school and, he writes, he is hoping to do at least one more.

Richard Simon, Ed.M., retired as the superintendent of the West Islip (N.Y.) Unified School District in October 2013 after a 40-year career in public education, including 25 years as a high school principal. He will continue to teach educational administration at Stony Brook University and Long Island University–Post and do volunteer work. He looks forward to spending more time on his passions: photography and his rescue dogs, Teddy and Molly.

1962 Frederic Ford, M.A.T., recently toured Japan as conductor of the Harvard Glee Club Alumni Chorus. The tour was part of a 50-year tradition of concerts and lectures with the Kyoto University Glee Club Alumni Chorus.

1964 E. Jeffrey Ludwig, M.A.T., is a lecturer at Kingsborough Community College in New York. He recently released Memoir of a Jewish American Christian, Vol. 1, a personal account of growing up in Philadelphia, he writes, with a macho, cynical dad and a lonely, obsessive mom and going to high school with the brightest kids in the city.

1966 James Wallace, Ed.M.’63, Ed.D., was awarded the 2013 Scholarship and Artistry Award from the Country School Association for his book, Twins in a Two-Room Schoolhouse. In order to write the book, Wallace drew on family and community archives to describe the lives of his mother and her twin sister as students and teachers from 1895 to 1921.

1974 Russell Andrews, Ed.M.’70, Ed.D., recently published Too Big to Succeed: Profiteering in American Medicine. He writes that he recalls fondly his “very intellectually formative years” at the Ed School.

1975 Harold Goldmeier, Ed.D., recently retired, selling his business and resigning as chair of the Chicago’s Workforce Development Youth Council and other voluntary organizations.

He teaches business and social/ political policy at a university in Tel Aviv, writes a column on business and finance for the Jerusalem Post, and consults with startup companies on business development. He is a contributing author in the recently published Gale Business Insights Handbook of Investment Research.

Sue Zlatin, Ed.M., is global director of client solutions for The Ken Blanchard Companies. She recently coauthored a children’s book, Whale Done, My Wonderful One, with Blanchard and Cathy Huett.

1977 Belle Gross Frank, Ed.M., has spent more than 30 years in the advertising research business. She recently published The Advertising On-Ramp, a book designed to help 20-somethings find their way into the business world.

1982 Debra Sansone, Ed.M., recently published For Sky, Day Is Night, her second book of original poetry.

Howard Stern, Ed.M., is in his 10th year as a mathematics teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronx, N.Y. He is active as an instructor for Texas Instruments Educational Technology products (such as the TI-Nspire). This year he was appointed to a fellowship as a master teacher by Math for America.

1984 Nikolay Hersey, Ed.M., is a retired science teacher and was a curriculum coordinator at the American International School, Vienna, Austria (1989–2011).

He has begun a new career as vocational and educational counselor for unemployed persons over age 30 in Vienna. He is also engaged as a presentation coach for Callagy English for Executives and continues to be the most remotely located member of the New England Rug Society.

Norman Smith, Ed.D., became president of Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y., in the summer of 2013. He is spear-

heading a revitalization plan for the school.

1985 Patrick Barclay, Ed.M., was among the first Americans — and the only African American — to earn a law degree from Renmin University School of Law, ranked as China’s best law school by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Stephen Brand, Ed.M., is a consultant with the Creative Education Foundation, which hosted Innovators to Educators in Boston on November 2, 2013. At the conference, 16 innovators shared their early childhood learning experiences with 100-plus educators and collectively explored what education could be like in their classrooms and in the future.

This builds on Brand’s doctoral dissertation on understanding the early childhood influences of successful inventors.

Idit Harel Caperton, Ed.M.’84, C.A.S., is president and CEO of World Wide Workshop and Globaloria, the latter of which recently received a 2013 Laureate of the Tech Award.

Susan Gray, Ed.M., received the 2013 Jeanne S. Chall Research Fellowship from the International Reading Association. She is a reading specialist, speech language pathologist, and Ph.D. candidate in speech language hearing sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Renee Hobbs, Ed.D., is founding director and professor at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island.

She is also cofounder of Digital City, an initiative to make Rhode Island a hub for digital media business.

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Joan (Bersin) Ziff, Ed.M., has created an early reading program with her husband Yossie Ziff based on Donald Graves’ teaching methods, to which she was first introduced while at the Ed School. The program is called the Ziff Technique: Learning to Read by Writing.

She writes, “We are very excited and are starting to market our project. If anyone has any great ideas or contacts for us, let me know!”

1989 Maria Angela Narciso Torres, Ed.M., won the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award Grand Prize for Poetry for her first published volume, Blood Orange. Since graduating from the Ed School, she has worked as a child and family therapist, a preschool and kindergarten teacher, a school counselor, and a play therapist; raised three boys; and finished her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Currently, she lives in Chicago, where she is a senior editor for RHINO, a literary journal, and teaches poetry workshops. (www.angelanarcisotorres.com)

1990 Rebecca Holcombe, Ed.M., was named secretary of education in Vermont. She is a doctoral candidate in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Ed School.

1991 Donna Burton, Ed.M., worked for 15 years as a clinician and administrator in community mental health/ behavioral health. She recently earned a Ph.D. in public health, community, and family health from the University of South Florida, where she is now a research assistant professor.

She writes, “I still frequently praise HGSE for the amazing experience in education that I enjoyed there!”

Alice Charkes, Ed.M., is in her seventh year of teaching grades K–6 French in a public elementary school. She writes, “It is challenging work with a 70 percent free- and reducedlunch population. I have been honing my skills of letting go of that which I cannot control and incorporating fun in every lesson.”

Marsha Therese Danzig, Ed.M., is founder of Color Me Yoga for Children and Yoga for Amputees. She was featured in the September 2013 issue of Yoga Journal for her work with amputees. Danzig is the first below-knee amputee in the U.S. to teach yoga. She has published a book about her experiences titled Fierce Joy. Cynthia Gray, Ed.M.’88, Ed.D., completed a documentary about Frances and David Hawkins that premiered at the University of Colorado.

She is currently working on a documentary about the Logan School for Creative Thinking in Denver, Colo.

1992 Bruce Baldwin, Ed.M., is retiring after 36 years in education. He has worked as a teacher, vice principal, principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent. In retirement, he plans to finish the many projects left undone over the years and spend more time with family. He writes, “It is wonderful to have spent a career doing what you love.”

John Verre, Ed.M., was appointed special education ombudsman of Darien (Conn.)

Public Schools. He was previously assistant superintendent of special education and student services for the Boston Public Schools.

1993 Olga Makhubela-Nkondo, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D., coordinates the School Health Improvement Project at the University of South Africa to help learners from poor schools and rural areas of South Africa succeed

inmemor y George Brenneman Barner, GSE’32

Mecca Carpenter, GSE’60

Joyce Foster, Ed.M.’76

Nancy Sheedy Tanner, Ed.M.’40

John McClure Good, M.A.T.’61

Miriam Kidroni, Ed.D.’76

Alice Sewell Palubinskas, M.A.T.’46

Happy Craven Fernandez, M.A.T.’62

John Rothermel Jr., Ed.D.’76

Pei-Yu Wang Chow, Ed.M.’49

Maurice William Lindauer, Ed.M.’62

Nancy Doolittle, Ed.M.’77

Robert Olcott II, M.A.T.’49

Linda Jewell, M.A.T.’64

Marguerite Peet Foster, Ed.M.’77

Stanley Caywood Jr., M.A.T.’50

David Smith, Ed.M.’64

Elizabeth Holmes, C.A.S.’78

Armand Guarino, Ed.M.’52

John Joseph Hunt, Ed.M.’66, C.A.S.’66,

Anne Haffey Quinn, Ed.M.’79

Nancy Wagner Hart, Ed.M.’53

Ed.D.’68

Jason Lamb, Ed.M.’83

Susanna Parker, Ed.M.’55

Anthony Lobo, Ed.M.’68

Carol Caton, Ed.M.’84

John Shepard, Ed.M.’56

Nelson Ashline, Ed.M.’59, C.A.S.’68,

Audrey Brunner, Ed.M.’89

Walter Montgomery Snyder, Ed.D.’57

Ed.D.’70

Lorraine Lupone, Ed.M.’89

Camilla Lucy Titcomb, Ed.M.’57

Charles Brady, Ed.D.’70

Malini Mayerhauser, Ed.M.’01

Myrna Britz Danzig, M.A.T.’58

Frank Miranda Jr., Ed.M.’72

Keith Henderson, Ed.M.’04

Sam Hawkins, M.A.T.’58

Robert Munnelly, Ed.D.’73

Joeritta De Almeida, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’05

Walther Weylman, Ed.M.’58

Thomas Franklin, Ed.M.’74

Robert Hoodes, M.A.T.’59

Patricia Page, Ed.M.’74

2

Where’s Ed.?

In this issue, Ed. spends time with our amazing staff members.

1

1 2 3 4

Jack Jennings, dean for administration, was so captivated by last summer’s issue of the magazine that he read while scooping at the annual ice cream social.

Ed., the Ed Sox softball team, and the team bats celebrate a playoff win on the Cambridge Common.

Matthew Weber, Ed.M.’11, and current doctoral student Nell O’Donnell, Ed.M.’10, made sure to invite Ed. to their wedding in Houston on June 22, 2013.

The lovely (and missed) Lola Seck, former head of security, lounges poolside at her new home in Florida with, what else? Her favorite magazine and her favorite beach towel.

Thuy Buonocore

Email high-resolution images with background information to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.

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at university. She is the current vice president of the Democratic Nursing Organization of South Africa. She established the Advocacy and Resource Centre for Students with Disabilities and launched the HIV and AIDS Centre during her tenure as dean of students.

writes overlooking the harbor in Gloucester, Mass.

Erin Coyle Giesser, Ed.M., writes that she still loves her classroom time at Revere (Mass.) High School.

1995 1994 Jackie Zollo Brooks, Ed.D., published her new novel, The Ravenala, in September 2013.

She taught in the English departments of University of Massachusetts–Boston and Wentworth Institute of Technology before joining the Peace Corps. From 1997 to 1999 she was an English teaching supervisor in Madagascar, helping Malagasy teachers learning to teach English to high school students. Brooks lives and

Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D., was promoted at the Ed School from senior lecturer to professor of practice.

Jewell-Sherman joined the faculty in 2008 after serving for seven years at superintendent in the Richmond (Va.) City Public Schools. Jewell-Sherman started her career as an elementary school principal in Hampton City Public Schools in Virginia.

William Michaud, C.A.S., is serving as the interim superintendent of schools for the

Yarmouth (Maine) School Department. He worked for 28 years in Maine public schools as a teacher, principal, and superintendent before earning a law degree in 2009. Since 2010 he has represented clients in employment, child protection, family, and criminal matters.

W.J. O’Reilly, Ed.M., hosted The K–12 Conversation on PBS affiliate WVIA-TV in October, America’s first live studioproduced town hall meeting on K–12 schools. He is founding headmaster of The Hanal School in Ridgefield Park, N.J. and Guatemala, one of several schools he’s cofounded, including the Performing Arts and Technology High School and the New York French American Charter School. He was also instrumental in the expansion of the Brooklyn Amity School.

He has served for the past seven years on the New York-area committee of Harvard College’s Center for Public Interest Careers.

1996 Erika Bryant, Ed.M., was recently promoted to the position of executive director of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. She was previously managing director.

1997 Frederic Ford, M.A.T.’62 (left), and Roy (Trey) Farmer III, toured Japan as part of the Harvard Glee Club Alumni Chorus.

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Elimari Sánchez, Ed.M., returned to Puerto Rico after teaching Spanish and French in public and private schools in Boston and Houston. She is now middle/upper school principal at the Baldwin School of Puerto Rico, a PPK–12 independent school. She writes, “Life is a creative balancing act with my husband and three boys.”

1997 Roy (Trey) Farmer III, Ed.M, recently toured Japan as a member of the Harvard Glee Club Alumni Chorus. The tour was part of a 50-year tradition of concerts and lectures with the Kyoto University Glee Club Alumni Chorus.

Paul Whyte, Ed.M., has been named supervisor of school turnaround in Waterbury, Conn.

1998 Rhea Suh, Ed.M., is the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget for the U.S. Department of the Interior. In October 2013, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Suh as assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Suh would oversee and coordinate policy decisions for the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

1999 Lisa Childress, Ed.M., recently accepted the position as director of international education at Radford University in Virginia. She and her husband, Trey Childress, are pleased to welcome Shana Mackenzie into their family, born April 26, 2013. She joins big brothers Jacob (4 1/2) and Caleb (2 1/2).

2001 Cara Jackson, Ed.M., recently accepted a position at the Urban Teacher Center as a Harvard Strategic Data Fellow, cohort 5. She’s planning on defending her dissertation on the relationship between school working conditions and teacher effectiveness this fall.

Instalove [n] -- The state of being head over heels for our new Instagram page

(harvardeducation), where we take fun, artsy photos of the Ed School campus and community and filter them to look like vintage 1950s photography. Somehow, it works.

Visit www.instagram.com/harvardeducation to experience instalove yourself.

2002 Lizette Ortega Dolan, Ed.M., just began her first year as middle school head at the Park Day School in Oakland, Calif. She recently received the St. Mary’s College of California Kalmanovitz School of Education scholarship as she pursues her doctorate in educational leadership. She is writing her dissertation on the experiences of self-identified students of color within predominantly white independent schools.

Craig Outhouse, Ed.M., was recently named principal of Synergy Alternative High School in East Hartford, Conn.

Sheila Sjolseth, Ed.M., has started Pennies of Time, a movement focused on teaching kids to be kind and serve others. She writes, “I started it a year ago not knowing if anyone would relate. The response has been fantastic!” (www.penniesoftime.blogspot.com)

Ruth Shoemaker Wood, Ed.M., is a consultant at Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates, an executive search firm that conducts searches for seniorlevel administrative positions at colleges and universities.

Her book, Transforming Campus Culture: Frank Aydelotte’s Honors Experiment at Swarthmore College, was published in 2012.

2003 Rebecca Deering O’Hara, Ed.M., and Jonah Tichy O’Hara, Ed.M., met at the Ed School and got married in October 2004. They live in Austin, Texas, with their two sons, John David and Patrick. Rebecca writes that she feels lucky that she can be at home with the boys while Jonah works as a college counselor at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School.

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2004 Sarah Mittlefehldt, Ed.M., recently published Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics.

2005 Joeritta Jones de Almeida, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D., passed away at her home in Belmont, Mass., on August 11, 2013.

She was a teacher in the Boston area since the 1960s and was most recently on the faculty at Wheelock College.

2010 An unofficial class of 2010 reunion in Red Feather Lakes, Colo., on July 20, 2013. L–R: Trevor Ivey, Adam Sapp, Julia Gitis, Neil Spears, and Clay Harmon.

Jae-Eun Joo, Ed.M.’95, C.A.S.’98, Ed.D., is the director of online programs at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.

Her role is to integrate effective pedagogy with new technologies, creating interactive online learning environments that implement research and best practices proven to help students learn most effectively and improve their performance.

Max Klau, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D., recently served as an on-train mentor for the inaugural journey of the Millennial Trains Project. As vice president of leadership development for City Year, Klau designed the leadership development curriculum used on this 10-day cross-country train trip for millennial innovators and entrepreneurs. He accompanied 24 “pioneers” as they pursued a variety of social change projects and traveled in a restored, deluxe 1950s train.

Kristina Pinto, Ed.M.’00, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D., released the book Fit and Healthy Pregnancy in June 2013. A guide to health and wellness for expectant athletes, the book offers readers advice and motivation for mindbody wellness during pregnancy and beyond.

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2010 Harvard classmates and coworkers mugged for the camera at the wedding of Nell O’Donnell, Ed.M.’10, and Matt Weber, Ed.M.’11.

2006 Lisa Boes, Ed.D., was named dean of academic services at Brandeis University. She was previously the Allston Burr Resident Dean for Pforzheimer House at Harvard.

Matt DeVecchi, Ed.M., is the associate dean for external relations at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. He serves as the chief fundraising officer for

• winter 2014 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

the school which is tasked with raising $400 million as part of the university’s $6 billion fundraising campaign. He and his wife Libby relocated to Santa Monica, Calif. several years ago where they live with their two children, James and Eliza.

Wenli Jen, Ed.M., joined the faculty at California Institute of Advancement Management, teaching business ethics and leadership MBA courses.

2007 Edward (Ned) Parsons, Ed.M., was recently appointed the eighth head of school at The Rivers School in Weston, Mass.

Fumio Sugihara, Ed.M., has been named vice president for enrollment at Juniata College, effective February 1, 2014. He has been director of admission at the University of Puget Sound since 2007.

2008

2010

2012

Angela Bermudez, Ed.D., works as a senior researcher at the Center for Applied Ethics, Deusto University, in Bilbao, Spain. She is the principal investigator of an international study on critical understanding of political violence through history education, funded by the European Union and the Spencer Foundation.

Miriam Archibong, Ed.M., served as an intern in the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs in the summer of 2013.

In this capacity, she participated in meetings and roundtable discussions with key opinion leaders and subject matter experts, and developed connections with fellow interns from around the country. She writes, “I found this experience to be incredibly rewarding and enriching.”

Kiran Patwardhan, Ed.M., is an instructional design specialist at the Education Development Center in Waltham, Mass. The institution recently finished a project called PromotePrevent, which focuses on providing information and resources to help create and maintain safe and healthy school communities. (www.promoteprevent.org)

Morgaen Donaldson, Ed.M.’97, Ed.D., was recently awarded a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education to study how incorporating student academic achievement in teachers’ performance evaluations affects teachers’ motivation and work behaviors. She is an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education.

Julie Joyal, Ed.M., started the nonprofit HMS MEDScience to inspire critical thinking, problem solving, and scientific reasoning through high-impact learning in the world of medicine, combining classroom didactics and realistic simulation with a lifelike mannequin called STAN. The program is in four Boston public high schools and is part of the Pathways to Prosperity Initiative. (www.hmsmedscience.com)

2009 Christine Jee, Ed.M., has joined the staff of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., as its new education associate for school and community collaborations. In her role with the museum’s education department, Jee will serve as its primary liaison with area schools and community organizations.

Nell O’Donnell, Ed.M., exchanged vows in Houston this past summer with new husband Matt Weber, Ed.M.’11, celebrating with fellow HGSE grads and Ed School coworkers. They write, “Yes, even our beloved alumni magazine got a plus one.” O’Donnell is a current Ed.D. candidate at the Ed School.

Amelia Peterson, Ed.M., coauthored Redesigning Education, a book synthesizing learning from the Global Education Leaders’ Program, an initiative that has been running for three years, involving teams of system leaders from 12 jurisdictions around the world, including Australia, South Korea, Finland, British Columbia, two U.S. states (Kentucky and Colorado), and the New York City Office of Innovation.

2011

2013

Rachel Davidson, Ed.M., is in the second year of her second master’s in occupational therapy. She writes that she is “so excited to marry my background in human development with my new therapeutic discipline once I begin clinical practice!”

Cela Dorr, Ed.M., is an elementary assistant principal in Chelsea, Mass., where almost 90 percent of the fourth-graders scored proficient or advanced on the MCAS.

Matt Weber, Ed.M., exchanged vows in Houston this past summer with new wife Nell O’Donnell, Ed.M.’10, celebrating with fellow HGSE grads and Ed School coworkers. They write, “Yes, even our beloved alumni magazine got a plus one.” Weber works as the Ed School’s digital strategist.

Amy Loyd, Ed.L.D., is executive director of the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a collaboration of states, Jobs for the Future, and the Pathways to Prosperity Project.

Karen Maldonado, Ed.L.D., was recently named senior director of the principal candidate pool for the New York City Department of Education.

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It Floats Her Boat She likes the water. She likes the exercise. But when it comes to dragon boat racing, what Tracie Jones, student engagement ambassador in the Office of Student Affairs (OSA), really likes about being a member of the Harvard Dudley Dragon Boat team is the fact that everyone works together.

“I love that you’re able to meet other people from the Harvard community that you wouldn’t normally meet,” she says. The team, originally made up of just students, now includes people from all over the university — staff, students, fellows, and faculty. Jones says that the bond created is actually essential for the team to practice, which it does three times a week, and for competing in races, which is does about six times a season. (The season runs from late April until early September.)

“Our motto is: one boat,” she says. “If you’re not all in sync, you won’t be able to go faster.”

Getting in sync can take time; team members can join without having any prior experience.

“They give you a paddle and show you what to do,” Jones says.

“You learn by watching the person in front of you, and the person behind you gives you suggestions on how to improve your stroke.”

Dragon boats are similar to canoes. With both, users paddle rather than row, and pad48

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dlers face forward, toward the direction of travel, rather than backwards, as you would when rowing. The number of paddlers in a boat varies, but the Harvard team uses 20, with 10 on each side, as well as a person in front facing the paddlers, called the drummer, and one in back, called the steerer.

Jones says that dragon boat racing has a long history, dating back more than 2,000 years to China when a poet named Qu Yuan threw himself into the Miluo River to protest the government. Distraught villagers, in an attempt to save him, furiously paddled their boats across the river, pounding their paddles along the way to scare away fish. Unfortunately, Yuan died. To honor his memory, a dragon boat festival is held every year in China. The Harvard team traveled to the festival in Taiyuan last June to compete against 50 other teams. In addition to Jones, team member Alex Galindo, also a staff member in OSA, attended. Galindo couldn’t race because of tendonitis but served as the team’s flag bearer.

Still, he says, being on the team and going to China “was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” and highly recommends the sport to everyone.

Although the team is on hiatus until the weather again gets nicer, Jones is actively filling the candy jar that sits on the front desk in the OSA office, hoping it attracts students or staff members who want to learn more about dragon boats — or joining the team. As Jones says, quoting novelist Marcel Proust, “Discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing things with new eyes.” So why not, she adds, “discover the sport of dragon boating?” — Lory Hough

in v es ti n g A Partner’s Perspective

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“To see this as a collective challenge and a collective effort by these schools, is particularly powerful,” says Wyatt. “When you have different sectors standing up and saying, ‘This is important,’ that is a potential game changer.”

Now in its fourth year, the Ed.L.D. Program is a cohortbased, three-year program where students participate in two years of intensive, on-campus study, with the final year spent in a full-time, yearlong residency with one of HGSE’s partner organizations. Wyatt says the foundation recognized the vast potential of Ed.L.D. graduates to change the landscape of educational leadership, which fits with their mission to promote rigorous learning environments, producing better educational and life outcomes for students. As Wyatt explains, the career path of Ed.L.D. graduates is well suited to help the Bezos Family Foundation fulfill its mission and goals to effect change in the nation’s schools and school districts.

“All of these fellows go on to achieve remarkable things, and HGSE is in a unique position to elevate and advance what their graduates go on to do,” says Wyatt. “When we look at what’s working in education, leadership is at the core.

It is leadership at the district level, the school level, and the classroom level, even at the student level. The emphasis of the Ed.L.D. Program is about the next generation of leadership, and leadership is the prism for which we think about this issue.” — Mary Tamer

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With early education universally identified as a critical lever in student success, the Bezos Family Foundation is well aware that children who start behind in school are too often the same children who stay behind in school.

It is one of the many issues the 13-year-old Seattle foundation aims to address through its funding of research and partnering with organizations around the country. Focused solely on improving educational outcomes for children from birth to grade 12, the foundation is now partnering with the Ed School, specifically the school’s innovative Ed.L.D. Program, which trains tomorrow’s educational leaders committed to transformative change.

“The Ed.L.D. Program gives us reason to be optimistic about the future of public education,” says Jackie Bezos, president and cofounder of the foundation, along with her husband, Mike. “This infusion of talent into the field is leading to greater opportunity and outcomes for students. The program has created a draw among its fellows to early education — a critical part of helping all children achieve their full potential, starting from birth.”

When considering potential partners, Megan Wyatt, managing director of strategy and programs for the foundation, says the Ed.L.D. Program stood out for several reasons, including its crossdisciplinary approach where students experience key issues from several perspectives, including education, public policy, and business, by taking classes at both the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School.

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Where’s Ed.?

When singer Josh Groban visited the Ed School in December to talk with master’s students, one thing was clear: he believes. He believes in the importance of funding the arts, providing instruments to schools around the world through his Find Your Light Foundation, and music therapy — his latest interest. He also believes in something equally as important: holding the last issue of Ed. magazine.

To read Ed. online, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ed.

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