The students from our first-ever, COED-led study abroad trip to Peru have returned! After a month in Peru, all seven students have written extensively on their experiences as part of the course. However, you’ll find that their adventures outside of the classroom were just as educational.
Read on to learn more about Claire, Addy, Sara, Amy, Liz, Amy, and Carrie have learned in their own words!
By Stephanie Nicoletti
On Friday there was a certain buzz going around the school, the kids came in with happy faces and even teachers were grinning ear to ear; it was the last day of school. During our closing circle on the last day I told my students that I enjoyed every minute with them and absolutely loved watching them grow over the school year.
Each year I always get sad during our last closing circle, your students become a part of you after spending a year together. This year I even had a little one who had tears streaming from his face when the bell rang, he was so upset he did not want to leave the classroom. This made me sad of course, but it also made me realize that all of the work teachers do over the summer to prepare for the following school year does not go unnoticed.
I was making a list this morning of all of the things I wanted to accomplish this summer before the school year starts. The list is long and daunting, but then I remember the tears that were in my classroom on the last day and remind myself that everything teachers do, no matter how daunting it may seem, is always for the students. While this summer will be fun, relaxing and refreshing for students and teachers alike, do not forget to remember your students who are itching to come back to school!
By Elizabeth Jorgensen
I hear in the media, and from professionals outside education, that teachers “have the summers off.” But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
In 2007, I searched WECAN for summer employment opportunities and noticed Kettle Moraine High School’s extensive listings. When I interviewed, I learned about the state’s largest summer school program. With a five period day, students from kindergarten through the 12th grade, attend classes ranging from camping to everyday math and from golf to Disney mania. After an interview, I accepted a position with KM’s Summer Academy. Throughout the next decade, I taught online classes and in-person classes to both elementary and high school students. Learn more about Kettle Moraine’s Summer Academy here.
Working in a different district energized and encouraged me. I saw firsthand the positives of my district and I picked up innovative ideas from KM teachers to help advance my AHS curriculum. This summer, I’m slated to teach two sections of ACT Prep online to KM juniors and seniors.
Then, in 2013, one of my colleagues at Arrowhead asked, “What do you do on Saturday mornings?” She proceeded to discuss Dr. Donnie Hale and his work in the pre-college program at Carroll University. Again, after an interview, I accepted a position to work with Project Pioneer. “Project Pioneer is Carroll University’s Saturday pre-college enrichment program which focuses on helping high school students build the skills, knowledge and mindset necessary to succeed in college and beyond.” On Saturdays, fifty high school students from Waukesha and Milwaukee engage in month-long academies “that will lead them through exploring their community and identifying a challenge within it, researching that challenge and finding solutions, and taking action. During this process, students will address a real challenge that their community faces while also building skills around the 4Cs: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Creativity and Innovation, Communication and Collaboration. Students will learn that their voice matters and that when they speak up and take action, they can make positive changes in the world around them.” Although Dr. Hale left Carroll a few years later (to become Florida International University Faculty Director of the Education Effect at Booker T. Washington Senior High School), I stayed on to work in the pre-college program (now under the direction of Maria Ramirez). Learn more about the program here.
My work at Project Pioneer led me to Horizontes en Carroll: “a program which welcomes upwards of 50 high school students from Waukesha, Milwaukee, Racine, and Harlem (NY) to campus each summer to experience university life and gain academic, social and life skills…During this week long residential program, students in grades 9-12 take part in several learning experiences that allow them to understand all aspects of higher education.” At the week-long summer camp, students develop career and college readiness skills and a better understanding of the college experience. Last summer, I facilitated a poetry reading and Horizontes en Carroll literary magazine. This summer, students will produce and publish the second annual Horizontes en Carroll Literary Magazine: A Collection of Creativity. Learn more about the program here.
This summer, I am also teaching online English classes for Arrowhead Union High School. Learn more about Arrowhead’s summer school offerings here.
My summers are, in fact, busier than my school year. I’m not sure who perpetuates the “teachers have summers off” stereotype, but it surely isn’t me.
What are you doing this summer?
As the academic year closes, students in the College of Education’s Masters Degree programs are wrapping up extensive research and consultant projects — read on to learn more about their work!
Enrolled in the College of Education and serving as Teach For America-Milwaukee corps members for two years, these graduate students in Dr. Patricia Ellis’ Analysis of Teaching Course are no strangers to the rigors of academic life both on Marquette University’s campus and in their classrooms.
We asked Tyra Hildebrand, Assistant Director of the College of Education’s TFA partnership, and Dr. Ellis to weigh in on the students’ final projects for this course.
As students put theory into practice within their classrooms, they are able to highlight how social justice, cultural responsiveness, rigor, differentiation, and inquiry not only increase student achievement but also develop their students’ soft skills.
Tyra Hildebrand (TH): “This unit plan assignment has been a regular part of the Analysis of Teaching course at MU. However, four years ago, Dr. Whipp and I made some important modifications to the assignment, in order to ensure our in-service teachers created a culturally relevant, student based, inquiry curriculum project. A book that was used in multiple classes, Pedagogy of Confidence by Yvette Jackson, identifies seven High Operational Practices, which was an additional framework for the project:
· Identifying and Activating Student Strengths
· Building Relationships
· Eliciting High Intellectual Performance
· Providing Enrichment
· Integrating Prerequisites for Academic Learning
· Situating Learning in the Lives of Students
· Amplifying Student Voice
The teachers also had to incorporate the Inquiry Learning Model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate) into their Unit Plan.”
TH: “One of the goals for this project is for our in-service teachers to realize they can successfully plan and facilitate a real-world investigation with their students. This required them to move into highly constructivist teaching methods, which can be unsettling at first. The teachers also noted how truly engaged their students were in this project, which will hopefully carry on in further curriculum planning. Additionally, they recognized how cross-curricular their projects were, and hopefully that will result in reaching out to their teaching colleagues for planning future projects.”
Dr. Patricia Ellis (PE): “Inquiry-based learning brings a level of energy, inquisitiveness, rigor, and excitement into the classroom that makes learning meaningful and relevant for the teacher and their students. The learner-centered curriculum project allows the TFA students to facilitate learning in a manner that supports and nurtures the academic and social-emotional development of the whole child.
Engagement in this project encourages the TFA students to grow professionally and personally as they broaden and deepen their skills, talents, and gifts as well as the skills, talents, and gifts of the students in their classrooms.
As the TFA students discuss the impact of the project on their students, they frequently speak to how they see their classroom attendance increase, students becoming more actively engaged in learning, and students taking great pride in their accomplishments. They also express how this project facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues and allows them to explore potential partnerships with community organizations.
The process and completion of this project teaches students how intentional planning, organization, persistence, flexibility, creativity, trust, diligence, belief, resiliency, determination, and reflection in addition to content knowledge are powerful skills and dispositions for classroom teachers to possess and practice on a daily basis.”
PE: “Seeing the amazing displays of their students’ work along with hearing the passion in their voices as they present their learner-centered curriculum projects clearly demonstrates how engagement in this project helps to change and transform the TFA students’ instructional practices and levels of student engagement.
As students put theory into practice within their classrooms, they are able to highlight how social justice, cultural responsiveness, rigor, differentiation, and inquiry not only increase student achievement but also develop their students’ soft skills.”
Too often, teachers are isolated in their own classroom, but this project allowed the teachers to showcase the student learning.
TH: “Having the opportunity to publicly share the findings of their project is highly rewarding. Each year, we see how proud the teachers are of what their middle and high school students accomplished. We have seen over the years in this project, that the K-12 students always go above and beyond their teachers’ expectations. The teachers also have the opportunity to see what projects their peers facilitated, which is enlightening.”
PE: “Feedback from peers, supervisors, coaches, professional educators, and other professors allows the students to reflect on and enhance their professional practice in order to maximize student achievement and engagement. The feedback also serves to motivate, encourage, nurture, and inspire students to face challenges with courage and to autograph their work in the classroom with excellence.”
TH: “Our audience members and fellow teachers provided a great deal of constructive feedback for the presenter to contemplate if they were to embark on this project again. This cohort of teachers regularly learns from one another and they push each other to become better for their students. Too often, teachers are isolated in their own classroom, but this project allowed the teachers to showcase the student learning.”
Want to learn more about TFA and Marquette University’s College of Education’s graduate programs? Visit us online!
– By Claudia Felske
Celebrate. Get Sleep. Be Proud. Anyone who reads my blog with regularity will know that this is worlds away from my previous post: Worry. Lose Sleep. Be Anxious. The simple reason for this 360? We’re done with our collaborative novels. Done!
Our 4th hour novelists: Epoch
So, how does it feel, this collective exhale? How does it feel to be click-ready published authors on Amazon.com? First, a glance inside, a peek behind the curtains. As you’d expect, we didn’t go directly from bile-inducing anxiety to euphoric celebration. There were more than a few bumps along the way.
Our 1st Hour Novelists: First Draft
Mantra time. I opened the next class period by scrawling my favorite writing mantra on my board as students watched: “An author is a writer who didn’t give up,” a sentence which remained on front board for the duration of the project. I then openly shared my anxiety with them, I shared my sleeplessness with them, I shared my own publishing experiences with them. I explained the level of precision required for publication. I told them that we could get there, but it wouldn’t be easy.Our first sizable hurdle was a sobering reality check after first drafts were turned in. Student writing was not at the caliber I had hoped; rather, it was at a caliber, to be truthful, that terrified me. The prospect of getting these chapters from their current state—underdeveloped and error-laden, in other words, fiction written by freshmen in high school—to publication seemed inconceivable. That night, sleep eluded me. Getting from point A to point Z would require much more than wishful thinking.
After our heart-to-heart, I gave them a survey, asking for their honest feedback. The result (see graphs) is what pushed us ahead. Ninety percent said they felt like with the help of their teacher and editors they could do this. Only three students said they weren’t sure (but they’d try); and only one person said they weren’t interested. Buy-in was apparent. I knew that if we had the mindset and the work ethic (which we clearly did) we could do this. I could pull in the naysayer and provide a structure that would support my writers and get us across the publication finish line.
Then came the delegation of work. This was a critical step. Yes, I’d be editing each story, but many rounds of editing would have to happen before publication. I needed help. Recruiting student editors would also give my strongest writers a challenge worthy of their skills. However, it would, of course, mean more work for already busy students. Would students be interested in being editors? cover artists? organizers? Again, the stars seemed aligned: my strong writers seemed to naturally self-identify and volunteer to be editors, my artistically-inclined students started working on cover art they’d submit for a class vote. And the momentum began.
Blanket-wrapped editors on a late-night editing session (the heat was turned off).
What happened in the two months that followed was writing, revising, mini-lessons, pep talks, Saturday and Spring Break work sessions, and did I mention writing? What did not happen was “point mongering.” Not a single student asked “What’s my grade?” They were, as educational researcher Alphie Kohn calls it, intrinsically motivated learners. Remarkably, as freshman in high school, they were determined to write stories worthy of publication, to achieve a degree of excellence that transcended grades. And that, I’m deciding right now as I type these words, is the true indicator of authentic learning, the mark that what we’re doing is truly worthy of my time and theirs. That is the new standard I will hold myself to.
Now, instead of subjecting you to all of the sordid details of our writing and editing process, I will pass the ball to my students, in their own words. Here’s what they wrote in their blogs the day after our book signing event. I asked them to reflect on the unit and offer advice to next year’s novelists:
And my reluctant novelists? The ones who weren’t sure they could do it? Here’s what they wrote:
My “not interested” student?
Students proudly signing copies of their novels
Finally, what about me, their “fearless” (a.k.a “fearful”) leader? As one of my students duly noted: “I think that this novel really took a toll on our teacher, but it all worked out in the end.” Yes, and yes—a worthwhile toll, I would add. None of it was easy, all of it was worth it.
And now, through it all, we are bound together for 70 years past my death (copyright law, the great uniter).
Clearly, it’s time to celebrate, get sleep, and be proud.
As the academic year closes, students in the College of Education’s Masters Degree programs are wrapping up extensive research and consultant projects — read on to learn more about their work!
First-year students in Masters Degree programs have a steep learning curve. They are adjusting to an increased workload and higher expectations than their undergraduate experiences while sometimes learning a new city and environment. It’s essential to build a strong foundation for their academic and professional careers. As part of this process, students in the College of Education’s “Foundations of Clinical Mental Health” course are working on skills that will translate to the next level both before and after graduation. Dr. Jennifer Cook’s students research a designated population of society, its perceptions by society and popular culture, and at the end of the semester, present their findings to an audience of peers and community members.
This particular project occurs in four phases. In Phase One, students write a proposal. As background, students may work with a partner or on their own, the choice is up to them. Students who work together typically do so based on subject interest. They identify the population they will investigate for the entire project, conduct a preliminary literature review (to ensure the topic is viable from a counseling literature perspective), and state their personal and professional motivations for their chosen population.
In Phase Two, students examine both popular culture and scholarly literature perspectives of their chosen population. For the popular culture piece, they evaluate multiple media forms (e.g., movies, TV, Facebook, Twitter, memes, informal surveys, blogs). For the scholarly literature, they are required to examine six domains (e.g., evidenced based practices, common diagnoses, utilization of wellness and prevention services), while they integrate the impact of multiple cultural identities and social justice needs/implications. To conclude Phase Two, they compare and contrast popular culture and the scholarly literature, and draw reasonable conclusions how both impact clients, counselors, counseling treatment, and counseling outcomes.
During Phase Three, students interview at least one counseling clinician who works with their chosen population. They have to devise their own interview questions, many of which come from what they learned during Phase Two and the questions that arose for them. In all phases, students reflect on their own process and how it is shaping them as a counselor. Phase Four is the poster presentation. Students create a poster that captures their largest learnings throughout the project; they are responsible for designing the poster and deciding what to include. At the end of the semester, all students present their research in front of an audience of faculty, staff, and community members.
For Dr. Cook, there are a couple of advantages to students’ work and outcomes: “first and foremost, it gives student the opportunity to educate others and advocate for the population they researched.” If each year students and the audience can take away new information about topics that they hadn’t previously considered, she considers it a win. In addition, Dr. Cook notes that students “get to practice professional skills, like public speaking, having professional conversations, and displaying the most important information people need to know (posters are common at our professional conferences).” As students’ confidence increases and anxiety related to presenting decreases, she sees another benefit as “counselors are called on to present to lay people and professionals pretty regularly, so it’s excellent to expose them to doing it early so they know they can.”
Overall, this project is beneficial because it challenges students to view populations from multiple angles, to understand more about the reasons why people can’t or won’t seek mental health treatment, and to understand the realities of working with their chosen population.
This semester, students chose to focus on the following populations:
Interested in learning more about the College of Education’s graduate programs in Counselor Education and Counseling Education? Visit us online!
As the academic year closes, students in the College of Education’s Masters Degree programs are wrapping up extensive research and consultant projects — read on to learn more about their work!
It is that time of year again when second-year Masters students complete their degrees and showcase the knowledge they gained over the course of their time on campus. In their last semester, Student Affairs in Higher Education (SAHE) students complete a final capstone project, called the “Office Consultation Project,” to bring together the information they were taught over the semesters. “The Capstone class, and the Office Consultation Project in particular, helps students to synthesize the content they learned throughout the program and apply it to practice. The project reflects our commitment in the SAHE program to teaching students how to apply theory to practice,” explained Dr. Jody Jessup-Anger, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the SAHE program.
As the faculty member teaching the course, Dr. Jessup-Anger solicits projects from clients (typically a department within either student or academic affairs at Marquette University or other area institutions). These clients then give a brief presentation of their issue to the students who choose which topic to address. Students then spend the spring semester looking at the issue, conducting a literature review, and meeting with their clients. In the final weeks of the semester, the students prepare a report and presentation as they present the results of their research and provide recommendations for resolution.
Along with the hard work, students find themselves feeling more prepared in interviews while preparing and researching the issue or question given by the client. “Students have reported that as a result of the project they feel more prepared to interview for jobs and also to implement change in their professional lives,” stated Dr. Jessup-Anger. All of the time and effort will pay off for future professional development.
This year, students had the opportunity to work with one of the three clients listed below:
All groups prepared detailed reports and presentations and demonstrated their hard work throughout the semester. Congratulations SAHE Class of 2017!
Want to know more about the College of Education’s Student Affairs in Higher Education Masters Degree? Visit us online!
