Continued accolades might go to any institution’s collective head. Yet Peabody College’s place atop the rankings of education schools nationwide has made the school’s faculty and leadership anything but complacent. The forward-looking approach that helped to build the college continues to infuse its institutional culture: At Peabody, innovation has become standard operating procedure.

In 2011, Tennessee welcomed 1,236 refugees from 17 different countries, most of them settling in Nashville. For a refugee, the first order of business is survival, and the key to survival in the United States is learning English. Angela Harris, MEd’10, is establishing the ESL to Go program to help Nashville area refugees learn the language.

The G.I. Bill changed the way the state and its citizens thought about one another in the postwar period. This was seen especially in regard to higher education, which quickly emerged as one of the institutional embodiments of the G.I. Bill.

Current students show that Peabody still draws the best for their student body.

The Leadership and Organizational Performance program trains students who cultivate workforce leaders.

For much of the past century, the typical role of the school principal was to serve as the manager-in-chief, an administrator who made sure the boilers worked, the buses ran on time and new teachers were hired and placed in classrooms. In the wake of school reform during the last decade, however, the role of the principal has changed dramatically. For today’s principals, Peabody is creating professional development to provide a whole new skill set.

James Patterson, MA’70, earned his best-selling author status writing violent crime novels filled with despicable villains and miscreants from every walk of life. Patterson’s goal these days is helping educate the next generation of teachers and encouraging children to read.

A professor at Peabody once said in class that research is advocacy just as much as handing out a pamphlet is advocacy. On May 26, 2011, we both saw our research turned into advocacy on a scale that few graduate student researchers ever get to experience.

New research from Peabody finds that preschool teachers’ use of sophisticated vocabulary and analytic talk about books, combined with early support for literacy in the home, can predict fourth-grade reading comprehension and word recognition.

Public education has always been an arena in which the nation’s policy crises have played themselves out. Most pressing social and economic issues—segregation, immigration, unioniza-tion and union-busting, fiscal collapses, crime, drug abuse, unemployment—end up affecting schools and education policy.

What if a fifth grader could learn college-level physics concepts? What if the platform used to teach those concepts could be accessed very simply online through a Web browser? What if that new methodology allowed students to write computer programs, progress at their own pace and provide the teacher immediate feedback on individual progress?

Among the 23 lively students in Miss Smith’s third-grade class (all names have been changed) are several children with disabilities: Katie, who has dyslexia; Billy, who experiences occasional seizures; John, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and several students with behavioral problems.

At first glance, these alumni do not seem to share much beyond their undergraduate major, human and organizational development.

Jeremy Kane’s emergence as a key figure in Nashville’s charter schools movement may well have taken root in seventh grade. That was the year he transferred from a Metro Nashville public school to Montgomery Bell Academy, a private college preparatory school.

Two hundred and twenty-five years is a long time for an institution to survive. Founded as Davidson Academy in 1785, what is now Vanderbilt’s Peabody College initially existed under various names—Cumberland College, University of Nashville, State Normal College of Tennessee, Peabody Normal College. During those years, Peabody’s primary innovation was its continued existence in a region not always responsive to higher education.

In the movie Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating (played by Robin Williams) asks his students to climb up on the desk and view the world from a different vantage point. Every year, participants in the Educational Leadership Learning Exchange program, more commonly called ELLE, get a chance to climb up on the desk and see [...]

Can the achievement gap in education be bridged? A look at factors contributing to this seemingly intractable problem.

The rural achievement gap must deal with issues relating to distance as well as poverty.

Peabody alumnus Chris Barbic is reversing trends with his charter school network in Houston, Texas.

Peabody student Jamie Graham and alumnus David Pérez have risen above circumstances to create a better life through education.

A World of Hurt It’s a gray winter day at Ross Elementary, an inner-city school in East Nashville that serves a high percentage of children who qualify for the free and reduced-priced lunch program, and pre-K teacher Tish Smedley is overseeing the controlled chaos of her 4-year-old students as they prepare for rest period. A [...]

Substantial investments in Peabody’s strategic plan, continuing success in the recruitment of nationally prominent faculty who garner ever-increasing external funding, and growing numbers of stellar students have propelled Peabody to the level described in our vision of 10 years ago.

Innovative developmental cognitive neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss continues his research into educational neuroscience, the study of how a child’s brain might influence educational experience and how educational experiences might influence a child’s brain.

Peabody’s early language development experts focus on teaching methods and curricula as a precursor to pre-K success. More than 45 years ago, Susan Gray conducted the first randomized clinical study with low-income children showing that an enriched environment could lead to gains in children’s language mastery. Her findings helped lead to the establishment of Head Start, a national school readiness program.

Peabody alumni may be surprised to learn that the college is using new ways to stay in touch with graduates day today, via Facebook, VUconnect, Twitter and YouTube. How is this tangle of newfangled social networking terms changing the face of alumni communications?