What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I found an interest in education in the early 1980s. Traveling with my dad (who was a school superintendent at the time), we often visited an old Northern California mining community that had no municipal electric or phone service -- but they had a vibrant one room school house. From those interactions, I developed a curiosity about the role of education in our daily lives. I found out about CPET by luck! I came to TC in 2008 to teach full-time and begin my doctoral work. A few years later, I joined a social studies coaching project in the Bronx, and I have been involved ever since. What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I always loved school and learning, but I also always struggled with math. In college, something clicked, and I realized how awesome mathematics was. I wanted to help other struggling students see the beauty in math and experience success in it as well. I heard about CPET through my friend, who told me how rewarding her experiences were working with CPET as a mathematics coach. Publication: NY Daily News
Date: July 17, 2014 Summary: They’re called “students” and “teachers” for 10 months out of the year, but all 26 of the people who performed a rowdy rendition of “Frankenstein” on Thursday at Columbia Teachers College were simply “players.”Their modern multimedia mashup was the final product of nine days of a radical education experiment, designed to spur kids’ creativity by giving them more latitude to interpret and create. Excerpt: “I would tell the teacher to turn off the screen, erase the board and let the students speak,” said Melissa Kingue, a 15-year-old drama student at LaGuardia High School on the Upper West Side. “Getting on your feet and doing something: that’s exploring.” Read the full article on NY Daily News! What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I have always wanted to teach for as long as I can remember. What truly sparked my interest was when I was in elementary school, I taught English to my cousins in Bangladesh when I would visit them during my summer vacations. I love the notion of education as empowerment. I began working with CPET when I was in the doctoral program at TC and had the pleasure of studying with Ruth Vinz. She told me about CPET and brought me on board. How did you end up working with CPET? Having worked in education for 4+ years nothing is more satisfying than watching students achieve that "ahhhha" moment. My role at CPET is to assist teachers to maximize their students' potential and create the right conditions/atmosphere for true learning to happen in order to achieve a magnitude of "a-ha" moments. What are your current research interests and current projects? My current research involves investigating new platforms or vehicles to progress Math education during the 21st century. I’m currently working on 2 projects:
Shakira Mejia & Iris Torres both participated in a SPI book publishing project as students at the Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem. The project culminated in the publication of Listen Up, Teachers in 2010.
Shakira Mejia is one of our June interns from the Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, a longtime CPET partner school. What do you hope to get out of this internship? Becoming part of the Center for Professional Education of Teacher (CPET) community is a fun and educational learning experience for me. With this internship I want to gain an insight of what each of the three sections of CPET are about and how all three of them work together to achieve something even greater. Although this is not my first job in which I had to be professional, I still want to learn more about how to conduct myself in different workplaces and how to become even more of a team player. Lastly I will want to have a little insight of the impact CPET has on students and teachers, since most of their work is more in the background of schools. Iris Torres is one of our June interns from the Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, a longtime CPET partner school. What do you hope to get out of this internship? I want to gain experience because this is like my first real job. I say that this is a job because I take this internship seriously and conduct myself as I would in the workplace. Although this is a little different from a job, I still have to be professional and be mindful that I’m working amongst adults and not my friends like I’m accustomed to. With my internship with CPET, I want to always be mindful of the importance of taking initiative and helping others, which are are so crucial since I eventually want to be an active leader and help others. I also want to have a better understanding of writing, editing, and publishing since I plan on majoring in Journalism in college. What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? After being a high school classroom teacher for 15 years in my native South Africa and then coming to the USA, I was struck by the similar struggles teachers experienced. I started working at a non-profit as the Youth Coordinator; which took me back into the public schools. I watched as teachers were challenged by a host of scenarios, not the least including classroom management and adequate curriculum and lesson planning. I decided to go back to school to pursue a PhD. I stayed in my discipline of teaching English and as my degree progressed I was offered opportunities through my program to do professional development with CPET. It's the proverbial match made in Heaven for me, which is an ability to grow as an educator, to help teachers grow in their own practices and together to tackle challenges that is faced by the teaching corps with the parameters set out by local and national government. A few weeks ago, we hosted speakers and participants from around the world for the second annual Global Learning Alliance conference at Teachers College. This year’s conference focused on the central theme, “What in the world are schools doing to cultivate 21st century capacities, and why does this matter?” Over 200 people joined us to begin to answer how to effectively empower students with the knowledge, skills, and capacities to engage in our increasingly connected world. We’d like to thank all of our speakers and presenters from universities and K-12 schools from Finland, Canada, Australia, Singapore, China and the U.S. for their participation and look forward to future collaborations!
Congratulations to CPET literacy coaches Kerry McKibbin and Stephen Brodbar, who presented at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Boston on November 22, 2013. Their talk was entitled (Language) Arts and Sciences: Strategies and Concepts for Enhancing our English Curricula While Supporting Students' Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Needs in an Era of Common Core. In it, the teacher educators spoke about ways in which English educators can view current reform movements that provide funding for the sciences as opportunities to deepen their students' writing and reading skills. For more details, click here.
CPET's Director, Ruth Vinz, is featured in a new series by Teachers College: Mini Moments with Big Thinkers. Watch below as Dr. Vinz discusses the role of literature in understanding social and cultural life: Publication: TC Today
Date: May 19, 2010 Excerpt: "In essence, “getting in the door” is what Vinz, now the Enid & Lester Morse Chair and Professor in English Education/The Teaching of English, has been doing ever since, serving as an ongoing point of connection between TC and city schools. As the English Education program has grown steadily on her watch—from 50 students to nearly 250—she and her colleagues have helped create a continuous loop in which TC pre-service students student-teach in local schools while learning their craft; accept teaching jobs in those same schools after graduation; mentor subsequent pre-service students from the College in their classrooms; return to TC for advanced degrees; become school leaders; and, completing the cycle, work with the College to bring the next generation of student teachers to their schools. One result, Vinz says, is that “we constantly foster new partnerships as our program grows.” Another is that Vinz and her colleagues and students have forged close and enduring relationships with individual schools that have enabled them to conduct outreach and research focused on adolescent “literacies”—the meanings that young people make from a variety of sources and how they communicate those meanings to different audiences. The vehicle for this work has been the Morse Center for the Professional Education of Teachers, which Vinz founded in 2002, and which has since housed a number of different literacy-focused efforts." Read |
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