Director of Metro Nashville Public Schools Jesse Register, Dean Camilla Benbow and H. Rodes Hart, emeritus member of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust and longtime university supporter, at the Roundtable Donor Society Dinner on October 11.

Camilla P. Benbow

As a member of the National Science Board, I occasionally have the privilege of hearing firsthand accounts of recent scientific advances. And I am keenly aware of the responsibility that policymakers bear for fostering innovation—for creating the conditions where expertise and creativity meet to produce discoveries, new ideas and new products that improve everyone’s quality of life.

Often the best new ideas result when people with different backgrounds and specialized knowledge are thrown together in unexpected ways and places. A classic example is M.I.T.’s famed Building 20, a ramshackle World War II-era structure built to house scientists working to advance military efforts using radar. Over the decades disparate groups of electrical engineers, acoustic scientists, linguists, model train enthusiasts and many others occupied Building 20 and rubbed elbows with each other. The result was that Building 20 gave birth to innovation after innovation, including the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky and the early concepts behind the Bose Corporation. Building 20 became known as the “magical incubator.”

Peabody College has its own unique history of fostering innovations in the realms of education and human development. This is due, at least in part, to the particular gathering of minds here with backgrounds not only in education but in psychology, especially emphasizing children, adolescents, families, organizations and communities. In the 1960s we saw this bear fruit in groundbreaking research in special education and in early childhood education. In the decades since, we have seen curricular innovations in areas like the undergraduate program in human and organizational development. We have also seen unique combinations of economists, organizational and finance experts, and education policy scholars produce high quality research on important issues like school choice and performance incentives for teachers.

In the last few years we have added faculty who bring with them strong backgrounds in neuroscience. Working in tandem with Vanderbilt scientists from other disciplines, we now offer the nation’s first doctoral program in educational neuroscience. We see similarly fruitful collaborations leading to advances in the study and treatment of autism.

Peabody’s alumni are innovators, as well, who combine knowledge with ingenuity and a commitment to helping others. Witness the project undertaken here in Nashville by Angela Harris, who is working to bring English language courses into the communities where they are most needed.

Peabody College and the wider Vanderbilt community are fortunate to have such talent, ambition and creativity. We look forward to more innovations in the years to come.

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

I read with interest our summer edition of the Reflector and noted several references to “kids.” However there were no references to goats, who are the progenitors of kids.

While observing a high school teacher, who was also a football coach, I learned that he always referred to his students as Mr. or Miss and always easily got their attention. Also, I observed an elementary teacher who always got her class’s attention by referring to them as students.

Is it not a better educational practice to refer to the children that are in our charge by name rather than a grandmotherly “kids?” 

A child’s self-esteem is surely enhanced by using his/her name when the teacher requires that student’s attention or response.

No kidding.

Stuart Lusty, BS’52, MA’53
Charlotte, Tenn.

Principals and Leadership

I read with interest the summer issue article entitled “Principals’ Leadership and Leadership Principles.” It was well written.

However, I vigorously challenge Ms. Dubois’ comment that “the person running the school was usually a shadowy figure, someone lurking on the periphery of their day-to-day educational lives.” A (pre-2000) principal lurking on the periphery of student achievement? Nothing could be further from reality and the truth!

As a building principal and K-16 educator for 45 years, my steady focus and those of my colleagues was directly on teacher evaluation, seeking and implementing robust teaching and learning models, and precisely disaggregating and analyzing test data to improve individual student performance.

Today’s high-stakes testing movement is challenging. But, so was the impact of the Sputnik Era of the ’50s, the prickly results of “A Nation at Risk” report of the ’80s as well as the ice-breaking, effective schools research of the ’90s. In other words, critical generational issues have surrounded public education for years, and it continues today.

As public educators, let us join together in creative partnerships to generate a critical performance mass. With the leadership of outstanding institutions such as Peabody College we can accomplish all that, plus much more.

Dave Ratajik, MA’64
Stevensville, Mich.

Higher Ed Curse?

The Peabody Reflector (summer 2012, page 11) says “the higher education sector is so supported by the government it would be difficult to operate without it.”

This statement raises a serious question. Has the government’s blind support of higher education become a “curse?” Has this support prevented universities from making much needed reforms? Did universities raise tuition and fees continually because students could get these grants and loans?

Today, students need to confront these universities with serious questions and demand answers. Is it ethical for a university to advertise a faculty of distinguished doctors, but have graduate students teaching the courses? Why are there no teacher certification requirements for university professors? Is there valid teaching and testing going on? Should students accept teaching that violates the basic rule of reasoning? (Reasoning is like a trial by jury. We must consider all the evidence and testimony before we draw a conclusion.) Should students accept one-sided, simplistic teaching that violates this basic principle? Must universities justify their graduation requirements? Can we keep a gifted student in acting, art, music, sports or science from entering their profession just because he or she cannot pass two years of a foreign language, a language that they will soon forget and never use?

Thomas L. Reid, MA’62
Tucson, Ariz.

Education Sector is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education, both through improving existing reform initiatives and by developing innovative solutions to pressing education problems. Its mission is to promote changes in policy and practice leading to improved student opportunities and outcomes.

“Education Sector is a dynamic organization working to strengthen both K-12 and higher education,” Benbow said. “I am honored to serve in the company of outstanding scholars and leaders, and I am eager to make strides toward our goals.”

In addition to leading Peabody, Benbow serves as co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a longitudinal study examining the developmental trajectories of more than 5,000 individuals throughout their lifespan. She also is co-chair of the Commission on Standards and Performance Reporting formed by the new Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, which will become the primary accrediting body for institutions and organizations preparing K-12 teachers. Benbow also serves on the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, and on the Fisk University Board of Trustees.

Others appointed to the Education Sector Board include University of Southern California’s Dominic Brewer; Michael Goldstein of the Washington, D.C., law firm, Dow Lohnes; and Jane Wellman, executive director of the National Association of System Heads.

On a beautiful day in late August, Peabody feted new graduate students at a dinner in front of the Wyatt Center (Social-Religious Building) during orientation.

Stella Flores

Peabody’s Stella Flores, assistant professor of public policy and higher education, was one of 21 researchers nationwide who developed an amicus brief summarizing key research on affirmative action in anticipation of the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which went before the U.S. Supreme Court in October.

The document was submitted by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA to the Supreme Court as it prepared to hear this key case that could shape the future of integration in America’s colleges. Nearly 450 scholars from 172 universities and research centers in 42 states signed the brief in support.

In the case, the Supreme Court must decide two central constitutional questions in reaching its ruling, both of which can be addressed by research. The collaborative brief focuses on evidence from across the country relating to the university’s consideration of race as one of many factors in evaluating applicants and as an essential tool to producing a diverse and integrated educational community. It shows that the University of Texas and other institutions would lose educationally critical diversity without such policies, given the inequality of opportunity in America’s unequal schools and communities.

“While demographic shifts in the U.S. population are present in the K-12 public schools, they are far less present in our selective college classrooms,” said Flores, assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development. “Evaluating and communicating the impacts of the absence and benefits of diversity in our higher education institutions through peer-reviewed empirical research was a key charge of the brief committee’s efforts.”

An expert on college access policies, Flores investigates the impact of state and federal policies on college access and completion for low-income, immigrant and underrepresented populations. She has written on the role of alternative admissions plans and financial aid programs in college admissions, demographic changes in higher education, the role of the Hispanic-serving institution in U.S. higher education policy, and Latino students and community colleges. Her work has been cited in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court Gratz v. Bollinger decision (dissenting opinion) and in various amicus briefs in the Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger Supreme Court cases on affirmative action in higher education admissions.

The Susan Gray School was selected by Nashville’s Mayor’s Advisory Committee for People with Disabilities to receive the Mayor’s 2012 Education Award at an awards ceremony and reception on October 25. The school was nominated by Lorie Duke, parent of a 4-year-old at SGS.

Melissa Gresalfi

Gary T. Henry

Andrew Hostetler

Joe Rodgers

Gary T. Henry, professor of public policy and education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, comes to Peabody from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Joe Rodgers, professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, comes from the University of Oklahoma.

Melissa Gresalfi, associate professor of math education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, comes from Indiana University.

Ebony McGee, assistant professor of education, diversity and urban schooling in the Department ofTeaching and Learning, comes to Peabody from a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University.

Gavin Price, assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, comes from a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario.

Andy Hostetler, assistant professor of the practice of social studies education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, just earned his Ph.D. from Kent State University.

Shannon Daniel, lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learning, recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland.

Rachel Robinson, lecturer in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, comes to Peabody from Innova8tive Consulting and Hospital Corporation of America.

Kay Stafford, lecturer in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, comes from Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools.

A five-year, $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs will continue funding of the IRIS Center at Peabody. The IRIS Center develops coursework and teacher training materials to help students with disabilities achieve their academic potential.

Director Naomi Tyler, associate professor of the practice of special education, says the IRIS Center bridges the research-to-practice gap through a free, interactive website that translates research about the education of students with disabilities into practice.

“There is a lot of excellent research that has validated many instructional practices, techniques and interventions, but teachers are exceptionally busy and are having more and more responsibilities placed on them, which makes it harder for them to keep up with the latest research findings,” Tyler says. “We are able to work with the top researchers in the country —many of whom are here at Peabody—to translate their research into engaging, interactive, online modules that teachers can access for free, at any time, to learn about the most effective practices to use with their students.

“Moreover, many of these instructional and behavioral practices and interventions are effective with all students,” Tyler says, “not just those with disabilities.”

Last year alone, 1.4 million people used the IRIS Center website to improve their knowledge and skills. Tyler says she hopes to be reaching 5 million people per year by the end of this new grant cycle, which will be accomplished in part through a partnership with Claremont Graduate University, whose team, led by IRIS co-director Deb Smith, is subcontracted by Vanderbilt to handle the training and dissemination components.

For more, visit iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu

As part of an ongoing, five-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute on Education Sciences, researchers first studied four Broward high schools to identify what makes some large, urban high schools, such as those in Broward County, particularly effective at reaching students from high-need demographic backgrounds. The next phase of the work begins a collaborative design process where a districtwide team will come together to study the findings and design, test, adapt and implement identified practices in different contexts.

In the first phase of the study, the researchers identified one major theme—personalization for academic and social learning—which will be the focus of subsequent work in Broward County Schools. Phase one findings revealed that the higher performing schools made deliberate efforts through systematic structures to promote strong relationships between adults and students as well as personalize the learning experience. Additionally, the higher performing schools maintained strong and reliable disciplinary systems, looked for student engagement in classrooms, discussed instructional activities that drew on students’ experiences and interests and encouraged stronger linkages with parents.

Tom Smith

“We are excited to begin this collaboration between researchers, developers, district and school leaders and teachers to develop innovations to improve the personalization of academic and socio-emotional learning for students in Broward County Public Schools,” says Tom Smith, associate professor of leadership, policy and organizations and director of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools. “Our goal is for this work to both improve the learning opportunities for diverse student groups in Broward County as well as serve as a model for scale-up of innovative practices nationwide.”

The partnership with Broward County Public Schools adds a second large, urban district to the center’s research. A similar project in the Fort Worth (Texas) Independent School District will also study, document and disseminate the lessons learned about scaling up and sustaining effective practices.

Design, implementation and scale-up work is further supported by partners from the Educational Development Center, Florida State University, Georgia State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools is one of three national research centers at Peabody funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

For more information, visit snipurl.com/scalingup.

Jason Grissom

Former teachers may be an important source for the teacher labor supply, with as many as 30 percent of this population re-entering the field at some point, but who is most likely to return to the classroom after a hiatus?

New research from Peabody examines what factors affect teachers’ decisions to re-enter the teaching profession after leaving and found that family characteristics are key predictors, especially for women.

“We often worry about where we are going to get great teachers,” says Jason Grissom, assistant professor of public policy and education and author of the study, which is featured in Education Finance and Policy. “This research illustrates that former teachers are one place to look. A lot of people who leave the profession will come back to it if the conditions are right.”

Significant gender differences exist among those leaving from and returning to the teaching field. Men who leave the teaching profession are more likely to enter into other career fields, while women who leave teaching are more likely to leave the workforce altogether. Moreover, women are more likely than men to return to teaching at some point after leaving the profession.

The researchers found that child rearing plays a critical role in this gender difference. Women are less likely to return to the profession with young children at home, but these same considerations did not affect male teachers’ work decisions.

“The impact of child rearing is very specific to female teachers,” Grissom says. “The presence of a preschool-age or younger child at home is strongly predictive of women staying out of the workforce.”

With young children at home as a factor in the length of teachers’ interludes out of the profession, the researchers concluded that policies focused on the needs of teachers with young children may be effective ways for districts to attract returning teachers.

Other key findings among teachers who left and later returned to teaching include: Teachers who are more highly paid at the time of exit are more likely to return; those who are more experienced at the time of exit are more likely to return; the older the teacher is upon exiting, the less likely he or she is to return; and being married positively predicts re-entry for female teachers but negatively predicts re-entry for men.

The researchers analyzed re-entry for exiting teachers using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, which is managed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is a representative sample of 12,686 men and women who were between the ages of 14-22 when the survey began in 1979. Of this group, 970 respondents were teachers at some point in the study timeframe.

“I want you to go places when you read Romeo and Juliet and not think that it’s a 400-year-old—or older than that now—dead text. I don’t want readers to think that it’s something inaccessible.”

— Amanda Havard

An acclaimed young adult novelist is now applying her vision, talent and Peabody connections to engage young readers with Shakespeare.

Amanda Havard, BS’08, MEd’10, is the author of The Survivors series, a five-book project about modern-day exiles of the Salem witch trials. Unlike traditional novels, Havard’s storytelling also uses multimedia components online and in an interactive application (app) of the book. Dubbed an Immersedition by Havard and her publishing team, the trademark-pending franchise includes interwoven links to biographies of historical persons, character profiles, photos, a soundtrack, background on history and mythology, YouTube videos, sound effects and even characters’ Twitter accounts.

Now Havard has reached out to Peabody for assistance for her next project, an Immersedition version of Romeo and Juliet for the iPad.

“I’ve taken this very clear step back to my educational roots and am building educational Immerseditions for my publisher,” Havard says. “I want you to go places when you read Romeo and Juliet and not think that it’s a 400-year-old—or older than that now—dead text. I don’t want readers to think that it’s something inaccessible.”

Amanda Havard

Havard worked with Melanie Hundley, assistant professor of the practice in English language arts, on the educational project. The curriculum writer was Stephanie Sefcik, BS’08, MEd’10. Diana Whitmore, a Peabody intern, project managed the Romeo and Juliet app build. In addition, Havard says that Whitmore, an HOD major, frequently reached out to her own Peabody professors for input and advice.
Havard knows that the project faces challenges, but believes that the Romeo and Juliet Immersedition will reach students who are difficult to engage through traditional teaching methods.

“On Melanie Hundley’s suggestion, we went to the National Council of Teachers of English conference this fall to get this in front of teachers. I know we can’t just walk into school districts and say, ‘You should adopt this,’ and expect them to,” Havard says. “But if you are a teacher who has iPads in your classroom—whether because you’re in a private school or in a low-income, high-need public school and you’ve received them through grants—this serves a purpose for you and your students. And not because it tells them what to write on essays or because it says, ‘hey, do this,’ but because it really teaches them to pull apart Shakespeare, line by line, moment by moment.”

As an early childhood development major, Havard developed an interest in literacy, and particularly, in how important it is that children go places in their minds when they read stories.

“There are a number of things that I learned at Peabody that play into both the way I write books and now the way we’re starting to do apps,” says Havard, who earned her master’s in curriculum and instructional leadership. “I remember the phrase ‘You want kids to go places when they read stories.’ That’s exactly what Immerseditions are designed to do.”

Thomas H. Powell

Thomas H. Powell, EdD’82, currently in his 10th year as president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmetsburg, Md., has led the nation’s second-oldest Catholic university to new heights. The school completed its first new residence hall in 30 years, built a new soccer and lacrosse stadium, a new baseball field, Founder’s Plaza and a peace plaza. He has overseen improvements in student life and the development of new academic majors. Overall, he has laid a foundation for Mount St. Mary’s to go forward, and he credits his time at Peabody as giving him the foundation for what has been a remarkable career.

“All that I have done is a direct result of the wonderful mentoring I had from the very talented and dedicated faculty,” he says.

Powell earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in special education from Montana State University–Billings. “I asked people at Montana the best place to go for a doctorate, and they recommended Peabody. I knew some Peabody graduates already. Peabody was the first name in the country for special education and it still is today. I got to Peabody during the first year of the merger with Vanderbilt,” he recalls. “It was a great move for Peabody and Vanderbilt and improved on the strengths of both. They had such great histories and respected names.”

Much of his research focused on the social interaction between children with disabilities and their siblings. He joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut where he was a professor of education and the first director of the Program of Excellence on Disabilities. “It was not quite the Susan Gray School, but it is a special education program that continues today.” He also turned his efforts to the corporate world to find job opportunities for adults with disabilities. “Children grow up, and we have to address the question, ‘How do we support them in their lives?’ ”

His transition from research to administration happened naturally. He was named dean of the College of Education at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. “Winthrop was a lot like Peabody,” Powell says. “[Robert Charles] Winthrop and [George] Peabody were both industrialists who funded these schools at about the same time.” In short order he was named president at Glenville State College in Glenville, W.Va., where he was credited with completing a major campus renovation program, increasing the endowment and initiating a program focusing on the virtues of academic integrity.

He and his wife, Irene, have three adult children. Their oldest child has autism and lives on his own in Billings, Mont., through a supported-life program. Their second son earned a Ph.D. at Notre Dame, and their daughter is working on a master’s degree at the University of West Virginia. The Powells are in the process of adopting four orphans from East Timor.

“I owe a great debt to Peabody,” he says. “We all do. The dean needs us to support her work.”

Jointly sponsored by the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center and the Nashville Mayor’s Advisory Committee for People with Disabilities, this annual exhibit features work in a variety of media by artists with a wide range of abilities/disabilities and ages. Since its inception in 1976, the Mayor’s Advisory Committee has promoted public education and awareness, and advocated for persons with disabilities and their family members. Selected works were exhibited and artists were recognized at the 31st Annual Awards Celebration of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on October 25. The exhibit runs through December 31, 2012. Top: Susannah Mayhan, “Pillow Fight.” Below left: Kyker Roddy, “Untitled;” right: Kathy Tupper, “Red is the color of the wine we drink at the party you make in my heart”

The Annual Farm to Fork Dinner on the Peabody mall has become a fall tradition on campus, highlighting locally harvested food and bringing students together to pass around bowls of the best grub around. It’s debatable whether one could actually call “rosemary roasted pork loin with spaghetti squash and figs” grub, but it is definitely not cafeteria food. Perhaps a study should be done to determine whether students eating “cider-marinated chicken on bacon-wilted kale” produce better grades than students eating the usual fare. There are many who would willingly sign up as subjects.

This can be seen in Peabody’s ongoing program development. In the last few years, the college has launched several new programs that cross disciplinary and organizational divides, both within Vanderbilt and out in the wider Nashville community. Here is a sampling.

Synergistic Research

This summer, Peabody College, in partnership with the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, formally announced the nation’s first doctoral program in educational neuroscience. The school now is accepting applications for fall semester 2013.

“Everyone involved in this has a sense that we’re pushing the envelope and creating something new that has a great deal of potential,” says Peabody Senior Associate Dean Craig Kennedy. Kennedy, a professor of special education at Peabody as well as an investigator with the Center on Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, is part of the team coordinating the program.

Educational neuroscience, still very much an emerging field, researches the complex interplay between learning and the brain’s chemistry, biology and activity. Its focuses include reading, math, language and psychosocial development.

“People are starting to look at the intersection of genes and neurobiology—how the brain is wired, before and after birth, through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood—and how this affects learning,” Kennedy says. “This can potentially contribute to a new generation of educational approaches.”

Peabody’s new doctoral program in educational neuroscience includes three educationally focused neuroscientists hired within the last three years. From left, Assistant Professor of Psychology Gavin Price, Patricia and Rodes Hart Associate Professor of Special Education Laurie Cutting and Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology Bruce McCandliss with Senior Associate Dean Craig Kennedy.

Kennedy says the idea for the program goes back about five years, to discussions among Dean Camilla Benbow, associate deans and department chairs about developing trends in education. Educational neuroscience, Kennedy says, is a perfect fit for a university with top programs in both educational research and neuroscience.

The school’s investment in this emerging field includes faculty recruitment. Peabody has hired three educationally focused neuroscientists within the last three years: Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology Bruce McCandliss, Patricia and Rodes Hart Associate Professor of Special Education Laurie Cutting and Assistant Professor Gavin Price.

Cutting, who came to Peabody from the neurology faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, played a large role in designing the program’s curriculum, which combines a neuroscience core with courses that teach students to apply it to educational issues such as reading and math development.

“It’s a new field, so I wouldn’t say the boundaries have been fully designed,” Cutting says. “You take what you understand about the brain to help inform education, and the best approaches in education and vice versa. It’s a synergistic process.”

Cutting’s research focuses on the connections between brain activity and reading development and disabilities. As an example of the field’s potential, she describes what has been learned about brain activity and dyslexia.

“For years, the diagnosis of dyslexia was operationalized by assessing the discrepancy between IQ level and reading level (with a high discrepancy indicating reading weaknesses and therefore a need for intervention),” Cutting explains. “A number of years ago, we began to see converging behavioral evidence that this IQ achievement discrepancy method was not working. Now this has been shown neurobiologically, and that is a very powerful message. The brain activation patterns associated with reading are not different between those with the discrepancy and those without. The implication—the policy and identification implication—is that all these people who were poor readers weren’t getting help in schools because they didn’t have a big discrepancy. They were excluded from access to potentially life-changing services.”

Cutting adds, “Neuroprognosis, which means using neurobiology to predict responsiveness to intervention, is another area where educational neuroscience has great potential.”

Kennedy’s work includes research on the connections among autism; sleep deprivation, which is associated with altered serotonin levels; and behavior.

“We discovered people with autism were showing many sleep problems, and that this was affecting their behavior, but we really didn’t understand why. So we used animal models to study the effects of sleep deprivation and assess what’s affected in the brain,” Kennedy explains. This research is ongoing; its findings will have the potential to inform assessment and intervention strategies at the clinical level for students with autism.

Kennedy notes that educational interventions go beyond specific interventions in reading and math to
include social development and adjustment.

“A big component is psychosocial development, and how the brain changes,” Kennedy says. “For example, there’s been research on what happens in the brain when a teenager is rejected. It is similar to pain perception.”

Kennedy is excited about Vanderbilt’s leadership role in this developing field of study.

“Five years ago, there were few, if any, positions in educational neuroscience nationally,” Kennedy says. “Harvard and Johns Hopkins have master’s degree programs in educational neuroscience, but they’re often based on a small number of faculty. We’re really turning out a solid research foundation, along with new researchers to populate this emerging field. We’re hoping Vanderbilt will become the go-to place for the first generation of educational neuroscience researchers.”

Out in the Community

When Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Director Jesse Register wanted to create a new master’s program that would attract the best and the brightest teachers to Nashville’s harder-to-staff middle schools, he didn’t hesitate to reach out to Peabody College.

“A goal of the program is to recruit very high-quality teachers, and to create longevity and stability, a situation where they stay for a while,” Register says, describing the Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools (TLUS) program. TLUS welcomed its first students in 2010, less than a year after Register brought the idea to Peabody Dean Camilla Benbow. This fall, it placed teachers in five MNPS schools.

The program requires students to teach in Nashville’s public schools for five years. During the first two, they also take two courses per semester toward their degrees: a course in a content area along with a seminar in urban issues. MNPS places the students according to district needs in groups of at least three per school so that they have a built-in support system. Peabody faculty visit their classrooms once a week to mentor and coach. In return for the participants’ five-year commitment, Peabody discounts their tuition, and MNPS covers the difference.

“I learned about this program at a middle schools conference,” says Clay Welch, who joined the program’s third cohort this July. This is his first year as a full-time teacher; he teaches language arts at Neely’s Bend Middle School. “I’ve always had a heart for the kids who are being left behind, the at-risk kids. I always thought I would go to a low-performing school. But I was nervous doing that my first year.

Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools Director and Assistant Professor of the Practice Lanette Waddell (left) with TLUS student Kelly Aldridge, who teaches seventh grade math at Wright Middle School. Waddell says, “I’m always in the schools. I get to see teachers teach, and then go back and think about what I saw. It really pushes my thinking and research. It’s a great mix of practice and theory.”

“A lot of teachers jump in wanting to save the world, but don’t have support and get burned out,” Welch says. “The idea of having a professor come to my class, of being able to ask questions, of having a cohort and having that support, those things brought me here.”

TLUS Director and Assistant Professor of the Practice Lanette Waddell also was impressed when Peabody recruited her in 2010 with the program’s well-designed combination of practical experience, professional mentoring and classroom instruction.

“The coaching aspect is incredibly important,” Waddell says. “Having an experienced person in your room every week to reflect with, and then connecting that with the classes you take, is really valuable.”

Waddell says her close involvement with her students helps her, too.

“I’m always in the schools,” Waddell says. “I get to see teachers teach, and then go back and think about what I saw. It really pushes my thinking and research. It’s a great mix of practice and theory.”

So far, MNPS has funded its financial support for the program with federal Race to the Top money. As that runs out, the district must find money elsewhere. It is now working with Waddell to evaluate the program’s teacher longevity and student outcomes. Register says that, though the metrics aren’t in yet, he has been impressed with the quality of teachers and their commitment.

“A lot of times, people coming into the teaching profession are not from settings where you have high percentages of urban diversity and poverty,” Register says. “You have to learn the cultures of the children you’re working with, and you need to want to be there. I think formal education—the content knowledge—is very important, and that has to be emphasized, but teachers also have to learn to live and work in a culture that is perhaps different than the one in which they grew up.”

Register thinks a master’s program gives teachers the opportunity to gain critical skills, knowledge and experience.

“You can’t learn everything that it takes to be a successful urban teacher in four years,” Register says. “The social and emotional component of teaching adolescents is really important. It takes a long time to get those skills.”

Welch couldn’t agree more. He already sees how what he studies in his urban issues seminars will apply to his classrooms.

“It’s extremely challenging,” Welch says. “The shock is the number of students whose parents want us to teach them all the life skills as well. It goes way beyond teaching them content. It’s about teaching them how to be an adult, or I guess a teen.”

Waddell says the program will help her teachers become the advocates that their students need. Part of that depends, she says, on understanding the community in which they live.

“We want our teachers to become leaders within their schools, to learn how to work with students as opposed to imposing learning on them,” Waddell explains.

Welch aims to be that advocate.

“I want to be able to teach any student who comes into my classroom from an urban setting, and do so in a way that makes the student comfortable and allows them to enter into learning,” Welch says. “Students in the same neighborhood can have very different circumstances. I want to help those who have the biggest deficits and those who have the least.”

In his first months, Welch already has learned simple yet effective ways to reach out to students, from greeting them at the door to keeping snacks on hand for peckish stomachs.

“Every day, when they come in, I stand at the door, shake their hands and welcome them,” Welch says. “One day I was late, and one kid shouted, ‘Mr. Welch! You’re not at the door! You’re not at the door!’ Consistency is so important.”

More Tools for Undergraduate Success

Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods Kristopher Preacher and Professor of Psychology and Human Development David Lubinski lead a new undergraduate minor in quantitative methods, an area of increasing importance to making sense of information generated in all kinds of scientific research.

“Quantitative methods have always been a part of education and psychological research,” notes Peabody Professor of Psychology and Human Development David Lubinski. “They’re just becoming more relevant and needed for evaluating what’s going on in the world today.”

Peabody is responding to that need with a new undergraduate minor in quantitative methods. In addition to the two-course introductory statistics sequence already mandatory for all psychology majors, this minor will require four advanced courses. Choices include psychometrics, modeling, correlation and regression, and multivariate statistics.

“There were several factors behind creating this minor,” Lubinski says. “One, on a more global level, if you think of the problems facing our culture—socioeconomic problems, health care or even climate change and discovering oil-independent energy sources, you need quantitative reasoning, methods and tools to understand them, to understand the news and to be consumers of information. Simultaneously, if you look at the exceptional undergraduates coming to Vanderbilt, most are ready for a certain amount of graduate school coursework material during their undergraduate careers. They are ready for advanced courses.”

Kristopher Preacher, assistant professor of quantitative methods, concurs. He raised the idea for the minor when he came to Peabody in 2011 and was met with an enthusiastic response.

“Students just don’t know about these methods and basically entire areas of study,” he says. “Yet quantitative methods are critical for scientific research.”

The minor, first offered this fall, is open to the entire university.

Angela Harris, director of English as a second language at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, at one of the adult English language learner classes at Edmonson Manor Apartments, an apartment complex that TFLI services. Currently, TFLI can only serve those complexes that have a space for such classes. Harris’s ESL to Go program would come to complexes without a classroom.

In 2011, Tennessee welcomed 1,236 refugees from 17 different countries, most of them settling in Nashville. As is true for the entire nation, the largest groups came from Bhutan, Burma and Iraq. All of them had in common, as the United Nations puts it, having fled their country and being unwilling or unable to return due to a well-founded fear.

For a refugee, the first order of business is survival, and the key to survival in the United States is learning English. For Angie Harris, MEd’10, director of English as a second language at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, making sure Nashville’s refugees learn English literally keeps her up at night.

One of those nights, an idea came to Harris after she attended a meeting of community leaders during which lack of transportation surfaced as the No. 1 barrier refugees face in attending English classes. If the refugees couldn’t get to class because of lack of private transportation and the complexities and cost of public transportation, why not take the classes to the refugees? Not by the traditional method of trying to find a willing host in the refugee community, which proves difficult for cultural and other reasons, but with the same level of professionalism students encounter when they’re able to get to a local community center. A classroom on wheels that could make the rounds of the apartment complexes where refugees live.

Thus was born the notion of ESL to Go. In a mobile classroom inside a custom-built truck, classes will be held around a table mimicking the traditional classroom setting where TFLI-trained instructors teach English at levels specific to the needs of the students. Students will be close to home with no transportation worries or other distractions from the all-important task of learning to function in a foreign land and a foreign language.

Learning to function in a foreign land and a foreign language is an experience Harris relates to well. A Peace Corps volunteer in Papua New Guinea from 1991 to 1993, Harris, who graduated from Tennessee Tech with teacher certification in Spanish, eventually spent eight years teaching English overseas, establishing language programs and schools in South Korea and Nepal.

“In Papua New Guinea, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I began to understand the tremendous value of a grassroots approach to development and education,” Harris says. “The single most important lesson I learned was that in order to teach effectively I had to learn from those I was teaching. That’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten, and it’s carried me to this point in my career.”

Harris settled in Nashville after teaching in Asia and began working at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, a unique state agency with the mission of teaching foreign languages to native Tennesseans and English to foreigners.

“Since joining TFLI in 1999, I’ve been able to put my accumulated experience and hands-on skills to good use by developing a program that teaches English to non-natives and a certification program for teachers of English as a second language,” Harris notes. “While I’m very proud of both achievements, I also began to be increasingly aware that I didn’t have the academic and theoretical grounding to match and support my grassroots experience.”

In looking at possible graduate programs, Peabody’s emphasis on community development became the deciding factor in her choice. “I clearly picked the right program,” she says. “After years of working on the front lines, the Peabody courses exposed me for the first time to the theoretical and organizational applications that frame and inform community development.”

In April 2012, the Tennessee Office for Refugees awarded TFLI’s ESL to Go program funding for operating expenses. The team now consists of three full-time employees and a selection of part-time teachers. Fundraising to purchase the mobile classroom was recently met, with generous grants from the Frist Foundation, the Memorial Foundation and a private donor, in addition to other donations. The truck will be delivered in March. In the meantime, TFLI is working in collaboration with area refugee resettlement centers to offer ESL classes at apartment complexes with existing classroom space. This is an acceptable solution for some, but won’t replace the mobile classroom because there are few apartment complexes with space to spare. The ESL to Go team plans to have the mobile classroom up and teaching by the spring of 2013.

For Harris, the ESL to Go project is the perfect storm that combines her academic training with her grassroots experience. She credits three of her professors at Peabody with playing a special role in giving her the skills and confidence that have led her to this point. “Dr. Vicki Davis, Dr. Linda Isaacs and Dr. Sharon Shields provided me with mentoring, personal attention and advice,” she says. “All three of these women are exemplary teachers and community leaders.”

Harris has become a leader in English as a second language education by synthesizing the academic research and resources Peabody provided with her experiential knowledge of community development.

“Those lessons [at Peabody] have guided me,” she says, “in creating broad community partnerships with private, city, state and nonprofit organizations that have culminated in the ESL to Go program.”

Located along Capers and 19th avenues, Veterans Village housed more than 300 people—veterans and their families who came to Peabody for education on the G.I. Bill after World War II. The 50 prefabricated apartments and 18 single efficiency apartments were moved from a military base in Georgia and also contained a grocery, laundry and nursery school. Source: Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning by Paul Conkin

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. With an estimated 1.5 million college-student school years lost to military service, and with national enrollment stuck at half its prewar level, a record windfall of veterans on college campuses precipitated an unparalleled period of expansion in American higher education. In 1947-48 veterans totaled nearly 50 percent of college students nationwide. At the University of Michigan, for example, better than half of the 20,000 undergraduates were veterans, and by 1949 nearly 2.5 million Americans were in college—1 million more students than in any single year prior to World War II.

Though several university presidents agreed with Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, who predicted that returning soldiers would turn American colleges into “hobo jungles,” nothing of the sort occurred. Rather, by most accounts veteran students in many ways improved the quality of American higher learning. Veterans were older, often married with children, and eschewed the high-jinks and “rah-rah” behavior of their younger peers. They dismissed Greek life as well as the traditions of in loco parentis, providing ample evidence that the American college was a place for “adults” as well as “children.” Traditional undergraduates complained about the seriousness with which veterans approached their educations. “All they care about is their school work,” fumed an exasperated undergraduate. “They’re grinds, every one of them. It’s books, books all the time.” College administrators thought otherwise. They credited veterans for helping to cultivate a more rigorous and disciplined academic and social culture—a few even went so far as to proclaim them the “best” single cohort of students ever enrolled in American higher education. By the turn of the twenty-first century, this heroic narrative was not only etched in stone, but also permeated popular culture and academic histories. Books, films and miniseries all celebrated the G.I.-Bill-wielding veteran as the heart and soul of America’s so called “greatest generation.”

While the G.I. Bill certainly was great for many white male veterans—the quintessential “adjusted” citizen—the legislation had a far more modest impact on other segments of the veteran population. By design the means-test for accessing the G.I. Bill was simple: a minimum of ninety days of continuous service and a discharge other than a dishonorable one. These criteria automatically barred dishonorably discharged homosexual veterans. Nothing on paper made the systematic exclusion of African Americans and females a foregone conclusion, but the G.I. Bill’s decentralized administrative structure combined with entrenched, often legal discriminatory practices by banks and colleges prevented millions of Americans from tapping the benefits due them. Although many women enjoyed the privileges of the G.I. Bill by way of marriage, fewer than 3 percent of all female veterans actually made use of the legislation in their own name. And African-American veterans found the G.I. Bill’s rewards still more elusive. To preserve their segregated racial order, southern Democrats fought mightily—at one point threatening to altogether derail the legislation—in order to ensure that the Veterans Administration disbursed G.I. Bill home and business loans and educational aid through private lending agencies and semiautonomous higher education institutions and training centers. This decentralized administrative approach reinforced bigoted appraisal practices in the North and South, and prevented all but the most determined African-American veterans from receiving the federally insured loans promised them. An Ebony study highlighted the near-insurmountable challenges of this localized distribution model, discovering that black veterans in thirteen Mississippi cities only secured 2 of the 3,229 loans approved by the Veterans Administration during the summer of 1947. One observer, himself a black veteran, commented, “To Negro veterans in Mississippi getting a G.I. loan is similar to seeking ‘The Holy Grail.’”

College going proved equally challenging for black veterans. Inadequate preparatory training and racist college admission systems largely prevented African-American veterans from enrolling in the nation’s elite schools, forcing them instead to pursue their educational aspirations at vocational schools or at historically black institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, the country’s small network of black colleges and universities was unprepared for the flood of veteran applicants, and an estimated twenty thousand African-American veterans were denied admission because of the lack of institutional capacity. In spite of these obstacles, and in large part thanks to the G.I. Bill, African-American colleges, consistent with the experiences of other higher education institutions, achieved double-digit enrollment increases in the postwar period, educating a record seventy-five thousand students in 1950. Many African-American veterans returned from the war convinced higher learning was necessary for full democratic citizenship.

For psychological and economic reasons, state policymakers and academic leaders agreed veterans should be granted special educational opportunities as a reward for their wartime service. But soldiers were not the only Americans who served and sacrificed during the war. On the home front, the state asked Americans not only to endure the absence and death of loved ones, but also to tolerate rationing, price and wage controls, and tax increases that exacted their own emotional and financial toll. For the most part the civilian population willingly obliged the state’s various demands: families planted “victory gardens,” bought war bonds, curbed gasoline use, cut back on common household consumables, and deprived themselves of personal fineries, including silk and cotton. These may have been trivial burdens in comparison to those experienced by most soldiers, but that did not prevent many civilians from exiting the war convinced that they had contributed to victory and now deserved their fair share of the spoils. “Americans,” one historian has concluded, “had begun during the war to look to the federal government for guarantees of growing economic opportunity, not just rescue from the Depression.”

In this respect the G.I. Bill proved vitally important as a policy touchstone. It whetted Americans’ appetites for education and cemented a reciprocal relationship between higher education and the state that irrevocably altered both institutions in a number of ways over the course of the following decades. First, the state made both active duty education programming and the G.I. Bill permanent policy tools. Subsequent incarnations of the G.I. Bill were less bountiful. But the reformulation of military service as an extension of civilian life—replete with material and educational entitlements for service personnel—endured and permanently changed the way the U.S. armed services marketed themselves to America’s young men and women. Not even the debacle of the Vietnam War, which seriously tested the state’s commitment to its veterans, came close to undermining higher education’s role in sustaining the citizen-soldier tradition forged in the crucible of World War II.

An interior view of one of the apartments in Veterans Village.

Second, the state extended the promise of the G.I. Bill of Rights by helping elevate higher education as a right of democratic citizenship independent of military service. Policy statements crafted by the Truman administration played a pivotal role in this development. In 1947 the historic publication of the widely influential To Secure These Rights: the Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights provided one of the most devastating indictments ever of racial inequality in America. The committee demanded that the federal government vigorously act to guarantee all Americans’ right to safety and security, to freedom of conscience and expression, to equality of opportunity—that is, to full democratic citizenship and its privileges. The report described the persistence of racial segregation and discrimination, not only in the South but everywhere, as beyond shameful, describing in painful detail the moral, economic, and international costs of America’s “history of bigotry.” The committee challenged the federal government to protect racial minorities against “the crime of lynching” and to end discrimination in voting and employment, in housing and military service, and not least of all, in education. Here the report highlighted citizens’ right to education—including higher education—as a core recommendation. Equal educational opportunity had long been a demand of civil rights activists, but their traditional focus had been on equalizing elementary and secondary rather than higher education. To Secure These Rights changed that.

Only weeks after the release of the civil rights report, the President’s Commission on Higher Education unveiled Higher Education for American Democracy, which advanced the state’s growing claim on higher education policymaking in the postwar era. The Truman Report, as it was often called, offered a bold defense of higher education as important for the psychosocial development of the individual, for a more robust and informed public sphere, for international understanding, and for creative solutions to the nation’s and the world’s most vexing problems. The report reaffirmed the call of the Committee on Civil Rights for an end to segregated colleges, universities, and professional schools. And it also endorsed a bevy of other federal initiatives, including a national program of scholarships and fellowships, direct financial support for campus building projects, a new cabinet-level Department of Education, greater support of adult education, and a doubling of the nation’s higher education enrollment (to nearly 5 million) within the decade.

With the exception of desegrating the military, which occurred via executive order in 1948, the other promises listed in the civil rights and higher education reports remained unfulfilled until the 1960s. Even so, the egalitarian message embedded in both documents (along with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950) helped put higher education on the nation’s political agenda in a most visible way. The belief that millions more Americans—white and black, young and old—were not only deserving but capable of at least some advanced study fueled widespread interest in the so-called “democratization” of higher education during the 1950s. The continued growth of college enrollments, the steady expansion of the junior college sector, and the introduction of educational television suggested that the government was serious about equalizing educational opportunities for all. Meanwhile, participation in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the government’s enactment of the Fulbright educational exchange program, the Point IV Program, and other broadly construed academic exchange programs revealed that the state and higher education were interested in exporting America’s educational expertise to the rest of the world. By the close of World War II, American higher education had become democracy’s proving ground.

Celeste Martinez, left, recipient of the Allison Poarch Scholarship, with Allison Poarch, BS’07

When you find something good, something worthwhile, you recommend it. If it’s really good and really worthwhile, you take it to the next level and share it. That’s what Allison Poarch, BS’07, and her family have done by establishing the Allison A. Poarch Scholarship. The gift is made in conjunction with Allison’s five-year class reunion and as a way to share the Peabody experience with future students.

While at Peabody, Allison majored in human and organizational development and Spanish. She is the former director of individual giving at YES Prep Public Schools in Houston, a nonprofit charter school system started by Peabody alumnus Chris Barbic, BS’92. This scholarship is intended to support undergraduate students who graduated from YES Prep and are enrolled at Peabody. “YES Prep provides low-income students with the resources they need to succeed and go to college,” Allison explains. “I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I had to attend Vanderbilt, and I feel very strongly that any student, regardless of family income or ZIP code, deserves the same chance. I have watched YES Prep students at the bottom of the ladder, working tirelessly to beat the odds and get into college, and I want to ensure that those who are eligible academically are not ruled out because of their inability to pay tuition.”

In establishing this scholarship, Allison is following closely in the footprints of her parents, Donald and Cynthia Poarch, who endowed the Poarch Family Scholarship in 2010. That scholarship provides financial support for talented young people, preferably from rural areas, to attend Peabody.

“After reading some of the profiles in the Peabody Reflector about family scholarships, I reflected on how much Vanderbilt did for me,” says Allison. “I wanted to be able to help others, without the means, by allowing them to have the same experiences and walk away with a great education, just as I did.”

YingLian Helen Du, left, has established the Peabody-Asia Center for Education Fund, which will help Peabody expand programs and partnerships in China. Her college friend, Associate Dean for International Affairs Xiu Cravens, right, will help direct projects for the fund.

With a donation from YingLian Helen Du, a native of China who splits her time between Beijing and Nashville, Peabody has established the Peabody-Asia Center for Education or PACE Fund. The new funding will allow Peabody to expand existing programs and partnerships already in place in China and to explore new possibilities. Recently, the Peabody Reflector spoke to Du and her college friend, Xiu Cravens, Peabody’s associate dean for international affairs, who will direct projects for the fund with guidance from the Peabody Dean’s Office and the Vanderbilt International Office.

Reflector: Why did you decide to give the gift that established the Peabody-Asia Center for Education (PACE) Fund for International Affairs?

Helen Du: It started with something personal. In the last few years my husband and I have been trying to find a suitable learning environment for our son, Daniel, who was struggling in school. After some very challenging and frustrating attempts in China and at a boarding school in New England, it was the expert advice from Peabody’s faculty and their referral to Currey Ingram Academy’s diagnostic center that helped us understand Daniel’s strengths and needs. Today he is an honor student with blossoming interests in arts, interior design and technology.

Even before I came to Nashville, I got to see Peabody’s “magic” at work. Through keeping in touch with Xiu in the last few years, I witnessed important ties being established between Peabody and universities in China so that we could work together to make education better for both of our countries. Each time Xiu visited China with Dean Benbow and Peabody faculty, I volunteered whenever I could. There is so much to be done. As more of us see how important the U.S.-China collaboration is to our future generations, I hope my gift can start a fund that can grow. I am thankful that I can be a part of it!

Reflector: What does Peabody hope to accomplish with the PACE Fund?

Xiu Cravens: We hope to use it as seed funding in three main areas: to assist Peabody faculty in exploring strategic partnerships in educational research with Chinese universities; to identify viable professional development programs such as the Principals’ Leadership Academy in Nashville and Peabody Professional Institutes; and to support university-wide collaborations in China that enhance and internationalize academic programs and study-abroad opportunities.

Reflector: What kinds of partnerships or projects between Peabody and Chinese universities do you see coming to fruition as a result of the PACE Fund?

Cravens: In the last three years, Peabody has established formal partnerships with major educational institutions and teaching universities in the Asia-Pacific Region, including Beijing Normal, East China Normal, South China Normal, Nanjing Normal, Hong Kong Institute of Education and National Taiwan Normal. We now have ongoing research collaborations in the areas of school leadership development, mathematics curriculum and pedagogy, neuroscience and educational psychology, parental involvement and social context, and community psychology and development.

Special education and gifted education are two new areas in which Peabody’s expertise may make a strong impact as China strives to build a more knowledge-based and equitable economy and as its educational system becomes more learner-centered.

Reflector: The Principals’ Leadership Academy of Nashville has had an exchange program with some Chinese universities in the past. Will the PACE Fund expand on that program?

Cravens: Peabody’s Principals Leadership Academy of Nashville has been working with South China Normal University for its Educational Leadership Learning Exchange (ELLE) program. PACE funding could be used to facilitate conversations on how we may build upon the ELLE model and develop program capacity to benefit more school leaders.

Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America and Teach for All, participated in a roundtable discussion with select Peabody faculty and administrators while on campus for a public lecture in January.

Meghan Burke, a doctoral student in special education, received the Anne Rudigier Award of the Association of University Centers on Disabilities. The award recognizes an outstanding trainee or student.

Steve Graham, Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education, took part in an international meeting of experts convened by UNESCO on the formative assessment of writing in the early grades in January.

Craig Anne Heflinger, professor of human and organizational development, served as an expert witness last November on the federal lawsuit John B. v. Emkes, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the 750,000 children enrolled in TennCare brought by the Tennessee Justice Center. She was supported in developing her evaluation of the service system for TennCare children with emotional and behavioral problems by Community Research and Action graduate student Lindsay Satterwhite Mayberry.

Velma McBride Murry, Betts Professor of Education and Human Development, has been appointed by the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest to its committee on psychology and AIDS.

Ron Zimmer, associate professor of public policy and education, was named by Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to a task force investigating a possible opportunity scholarship initiative in Tennessee.

Things really haven’t changed at Peabody, despite the decades and the merger. Our students are still learning and helping, they’re still “up and doing!”

The following profiles introduce you to four of our current students, three of whom will be alumni by the time this magazine reaches your mailbox. Look closely.

Do they remind you of anyone you knew at Peabody?

Ashley Mace Krueger, B.S.

in human and organizational development (health and human services)

As she looked into the eyes of the patients at an HIV/AIDS hospice in South Africa, Ashley Mace Krueger had an epiphany.

“They were girls my age, and many of them already had full-blown AIDS,” she recalls. “Some of them were so ill that they couldn’t get out of bed. It was an eye-opening experience.”

Krueger chose to work in the South African hospice as her service project for the Peabody Scholars program. For two months last summer she worked in the rural KwaZulu-Natal province with Genesis Trust, a nonprofit organization that provides medical care and other support to HIV/AIDS patients.

“I chose Genesis because of its holistic way of treating AIDS patients,” she says.

Krueger worked in the organization’s job-skills training program, sustainable community garden and after-school program, in addition to teaching guitar and voice lessons in the music academy. But she made the greatest impact through her work as an administrative assistant in the care center by designing a software program to better track the patients’ progress.

“The program allowed the hospice to report decreased patient mortality to their funding agencies, which has helped them obtain more grants to support their work,” she says. “They are also exploring the possibility of using the software to implement a text-messaging system to inform patients about their disease and remind them to take their antiviral medicine on schedule.”

Peabody’s human and organizational development major drew Krueger to Vanderbilt and allowed her to specialize in health care. As one of 15 Peabody Scholars in her class, she received a $5,000 summer stipend to support her study in South Africa. The scholars program also allowed Krueger to conduct independent research with Peabody faculty members Corbette Doyle and Dayle Savage, compiling data on changes in health care and how physicians can leverage change in their practices.

Following graduation in May, Krueger began her career as a supply chain analyst with Ascension Health, a national Catholic health care system, which includes Nashville’s St. Thomas and Baptist hospitals. A newlywed, she and her musician husband, Kaleb Krueger, divide their time between Nashville and their hometown, St. Louis, where Ascension has its headquarters.

Krueger says her experiences in South Africa broadened her perspective on health care.
“It was a unique opportunity. It gave me the chance to see health care policy and practice in a totally different context. It also made me aware of the benefits of the U.S. system.”

—Joanne Lamphere Beckham

Greg Aikens, M.Ed.

in special education (visual disabilities)

While visiting an orphanage for children with disabilities on the other side of the world, Greg Aikens discovered his life’s work.

“Those children touched my heart,” he says.

An ordained minister, Aikens was working in Central Asia as part of a monthlong internship. Blind from glaucoma since age 12, he was moved by the plight of the children, many of whom came to the orphanage because their parents were unable to cope with their disabilities.

“I knew I wanted to work with children like them, and I really wanted to do that well,” he recalls. So he applied to the graduate program in special education at Peabody, with a focus on teaching visually impaired students. Supported by a Peabody Honors Scholarship, he received his master’s degree at Commencement ceremonies in May. His immediate goal is to teach at a school for the blind or as an itinerant instructor in the public schools.

Aikens counts his own disability as an asset in teaching visually impaired students. “I can connect with the students because I’m also blind,” he says. “I’m very comfortable with the techniques and technologies used to teach them.”

He uses a computer program to plan math lessons in Braille. He also takes notes on his laptop with a special program that reads the words on the screen. “I can access the Internet, Facebook and my email in the same way,” he says.

Aikens understands intuitively that visually impaired students don’t get information indirectly. “For instance, a child who’s been blind from birth might not understand body language and other nonverbal communication,” he says. “Their experiences are limited to touch or viewing at short distances, and they may need a monocular telescope to see the classroom board. In addition, they often need help with both language and social skills.”

He can share from his own experience that having a visual disability need not prevent his students from accessing certain leisure activities, sports or hobbies.

“I was in the marching band in high school,” he recalls. “I memorized the steps and one of my friends marched with me.
“Throughout my education, I was fortunate to have very supportive teachers, principals and professors,” he says. “The people at Peabody have been wonderful.”

Although he loves teaching, Aikens says his ultimate goal is to be a minister. “But I don’t know what that will look like for me,” he says. “Eventually, I want to work in a developing country with children who have disabilities.”

—Joanne Lamphere Beckham

Shaka Dickerson, M.Ed.

in organizational leadership

Shaka Dickerson believes that confidence is the key to success. Sound too much like a late-night infomercial? Listen again. He has a new take on the “teach a man to fish” saying.

“You can teach a man to fish, but if he doesn’t believe he can fish, he won’t be successful,” the Peabody graduate student says. “But if a man believes he can fish, even when he doesn’t know how, he’s going to get in the water and figure it out somehow.”

Providing people with that innate sense of self-confidence is Dickerson’s ultimate career goal. After graduation, he would like to use what he’s learned in his organizational leadership program to develop a social enterprise that “infuses every average person with the confidence that they can do their part to change the world.”

“We all have a large capacity to effect change,” he says. “But most of us don’t believe that we can do it.”

Dickerson believes that his studies at Peabody will help him be a change-maker. “I feel like it was divine intervention that led me here,” he says, noting that the program is a great fit. “Organizational leadership gives me that M.Ed. background, a business background and a teaching background. I have a lot of options.”

Dickerson majored in urban studies as an undergraduate at Columbia University and learned about Vanderbilt only when he was well into his graduate school search. He liked what he found.

“Vanderbilt is uniformly respected, and Peabody is the top-ranked school,” he explains. “But it’s the intangibles that rankings don’t really show. People here are proud to say they are representing Vanderbilt. There’s a very active student and social component to the campus.

“Rankings help. But how much people enjoy their experience is important, too. I found both here at Peabody.”
Dickerson has found lots of support in his program’s cohort as well as the team approach that both faculty and staff have with students. He’s been active on campus, serving as vice president of both the Peabody Coalition of Black Graduate Students and Peabody’s Graduate Student Association. During the last year, he’s had an opportunity to help recruit students of color to the school as the admissions liaison of multicultural recruitment.

“I would love for other people to have the opportunity that I’ve had here,” he says.

—Jan Read

Ellen Zambetti, M.Ed.

in teaching and learning in urban schools

Ellen Zambetti is one of seven participants at Bailey STEM Magnet Middle School in east Nashville teaching and learning thanks to an innovative partnership between Peabody College and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools is a master’s degree program that puts a team of licensed teachers in an urban school and then closely monitors their work in the classroom. Zambetti is passionate about working with children, and the program seems tailor-made for her.

“I was excited about this program because I knew it would help me become a better teacher,” she says. “Your basic undergraduate teacher preparation doesn’t prepare you for all the struggles that you have in schools with a low-income population.”

Zambetti teaches math at Bailey. She creates six-week projects, called capstones, to engage her students. In one project, her students had to plan a road trip across the United States in which they used their new math skills to calculate gas prices while also comparing to gas prices in the 1960s. In science class, the ’60s theme continued and they built model cars of the era. Reading class featured a book about a family road trip from Michigan to Alabama, also set in the ’60s.
“With this method, the students learn through exploration instead of us just standing up there talking to them,” Zambetti says. “We try to do things that are really engaging, and they end up teaching themselves and each other.”

The program is a five-year commitment for the teachers who are participating. Their two years of Peabody tuition is paid by Metro Nashville Public Schools and the Nashville Public Education Foundation. In return, the teachers are contractually obligated to teach an additional three years at an urban school.

“Teaching at a school like that takes a lot more effort and can be emotionally exhausting,” Zambetti says. “A lot of times we’re their family. We have to get them necessities, but we love to do that because we love our kids.”

In the short time she’s been with the program, Zambetti has seen a definite improvement in her students. Test scores are up and behavioral problems are down.

“Helping these kids overcome their personal obstacles is my biggest goal,” she says. “With the right tools and the right leadership any school can succeed.”

—Cindy Thomsen

Students from the Leadership and Organizational Performance program took part in a poster event held last September at Peabody’s Wyatt Center (formerly the Social-Religious Building) that highlighted students’ summer internship experiences.

In this increasingly competitive and complex professional environment, organizations are looking for returns on their biggest continuing investment—their workforce. Employees once stayed with the same company for decades, hoping to move from the cubicle farm to a wood-paneled haven. Today’s employees jump jobs, flex their time, work part time, share positions, consult, telecommute and repurpose their careers four times or more. Given these challenges, how does today’s organization recruit, retain, advance and lead the best employees?

In response to these changes, Peabody is changing as well. The new Leadership and Organizational Performance master’s program is a hybrid, taking what worked best from its predecessors and adding new areas to position the program for the 21st century. The program, which enrolled its first students in fall 2011, is focused on developing managers and leaders who promote talent development, employee engagement and organizational performance. The LOP program, building on the solid foundation provided by the Human Resource Development and Organizational Leadership programs, takes the field into the next generation.

“Focus is changing from leadership to performance—as in how is the company performing? How do we know if a new idea is working? What part do employees play in that? How do we measure performance?”

—Dayle Savage

Leading the program is Dayle A. Savage, EdD’05. Savage joined the Peabody faculty after receiving her education doctorate and is assistant professor of the practice of leadership and organizations. She developed and launched the highly successful Peabody Office of Career Development in 2005 and continues to research organizational change and leadership development, particularly as it relates to talent management and human capital. “Learning and performance go hand in hand,” she says.

Savage is a perfect example of today’s employee. After earning a degree in music education, she taught high school choral music for four years, was an employment counselor for five years, the HR director and administrator of a large law firm for more than a decade and then developed her own consulting practice before earning her doctorate. Savage has had a successful consulting practice in industries including health care, technology, education, nonprofit, entertainment and professional service organizations. She is also a professional coach.

“I’m a practitioner in a research world,” she says. “Many of the professors in our programs had practical experiences before they came to academia.” Joining Savage on the LOP faculty are John Bachmann, Mark Cannon, Corbette Doyle, Christine Quinn Trank and Deborah Tobey.

The LOP curriculum is grounded in theory from the disciplines of leadership, organization theory, behavior and development, learning, analytics and strategy. “The classes take known theory and apply that theory to practice,” Savage says.

“At the program’s core is new knowledge about leadership and organizational theory. The focus is changing from leadership to performance—as in how is the company performing? How do we know if a new idea is working? What part do employees play in that? How do we measure performance?”

The LOP program attracts students who want to develop and use their leadership abilities in various sectors including for-profit, nonprofit, government, education and NGOs.

The curriculum includes case studies with actual clients, with the focus varying by course. Students may analyze organizational initiatives, a strategic plan for a new market, or programs. They will use their newly learned consultation skills to advise on cases, including marketing, membership development, customer satisfaction and performance standards.

The program also requires an internship with at least 135 hours of contact time at an organization. Savage is able to turn to her extensive network to pull in companies for case studies and internships. Prior projects have included Bridgestone, Nissan, Asurion, the Vanderbilt Medical Group, Trinisys, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. “This will typically be project work,” Savage explains. “A manager will say ‘Here’s a problem, please fix it.’ ” One of her students developed a change management toolkit during an internship that is saving the company $28 million.

The master’s program can be completed as a traditional master’s, an evening/weekend program or as a fifth-year program for Vanderbilt undergraduates. Savage says the 32 members of the program’s first class ranged from recent graduates to professionals in their mid-30s. The group stays together as a cohort during the program’s first year through the core courses; they will branch out to specialize through electives in the second year.

The program’s goal is for students to build the skills needed to be strong leaders and managers in today’s world in areas such as strategic thinking, managing ambiguity, critical thinking, leading and managing others, innovation and creativity, risk taking, conflict management, negotiation and influence, analytical thinking, intercultural adaptability and learning agility.

Savage expects graduates to move into careers as consultants, human capital analysts, project managers and recruitment or admissions executives. “I believe in this program, the work behind it, and the students,” she says. “People are the most important asset. How people lead and how people learn help define the success of an organization.”

In the wake of school reform during the last decade, however, the role of the principal has changed dramatically. Forget a slow evolution of duties—what took place was a sudden seismic shift in expectations by legislators and the public. Needless to say, many principals and district superintendents were caught off-guard.

“The major driver here was the emergence of this era of massive accountability that holds principals and schools responsible for student outcomes in achievement scores,” explains Joseph Murphy, Frank W. Mayborn Professor of Education at Peabody College. “That required principals to learn whole new sets of skills. And these were skills they weren’t hired on, or trained for or promoted for.”

Leadership as a catalyst

The federal data-driven education reform acts, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, brought American school principals under sharp scrutiny. As researchers began examining their data, they realized that the leadership qualities of the principal, or the lack thereof, strongly correlated with student achievement across the board in grades K-12, in small and large, urban and suburban, wealthy and underserved schools. These findings generated a wellspring of programs, such as those supported by the National Institute for School Learning and the Wallace Foundation, with the purpose of expanding upon this data and creating professional development programs, commonly referred to as PD, based on their findings.

Those findings included evidence that leadership by the principal was one of the most pressing issues in public education—second only to classroom instruction—among school-related factors that affect student learning. According to the Wallace Foundation’s report, The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning: “Teacher quality stood above everything else, but principal leadership came next, outstripping … dropout rates, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education, student testing, and preparation for college and careers.”

Most of a principal’s influence is indirect and takes place by raising the standards of education and adding rigor into the curriculum, by motivating both teachers and students to strive for quality education, and by creating a positive work environment for teachers and students. Outstanding principals do not spend most of the day in their offices, but are front and center in the building. When considering both direct and indirect effects, a school leader’s impact on student learning accounts for about a quarter of total school effects. Not surprisingly, these leadership effects tend to have the greatest impact on student learning in schools saddled with the biggest problems. In fact, Wallace Foundation researchers emphatically state in How Leadership Influences Student Learning: “There are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader. Many other factors may contribute to such turnarounds, but leadership is the catalyst.”

Given that principals are so important to raising and maintaining high academic standards, the logical solution would be to remove principals who aren’t up to snuff and replace them with individuals who are. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Experts predict a shortage of principals in the coming years, when as many as 40 percent of the current sitting principals are expected to retire. In addition, the Wallace Foundation discovered “… a significant shortage of individuals willing and able to take on these tasks, especially in the most challenging schools and districts…. Nationally, almost half of superintendents report difficulty in finding qualified and effective individuals to fill principal vacancies.”

All of which places a unique burden on professional development programs: first, to help new incoming principals acquire the skills and techniques that will have a beneficial impact on instruction; and second, to help sitting principals hone their expertise and change activities or habits that interfere with this revised role as instructional leader.

Impact and outcome

School districts across the nation are spending millions of dollars a year on professional development for principals. “The question is: does it make any difference?” asks Ellen Goldring, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Education, Policy and Leadership. “And more importantly, what type of PD would be most likely to improve the leadership practices and behaviors of school principals and ultimately lead to changing the outcomes for kids? A lot of programs are out there, but there’s very limited rigorous research about the impact of these programs. We don’t know much about outcomes. We know they can’t be that great, because given all the money that’s spent on PD, if we were doing a great job then the outcomes would be better.”

What makes the issue so frustrating is that researchers know the qualities and characteristics that make a school principal successful. The downfall has been in crafting professional development that leads to transformational action by school leaders participating in these programs—in transporting them from knowing what to do, to actually being able to do it under the pressure of their own unique circumstances.

One of the biggest differences between being a teacher and a principal is that the principal must be skilled at working and influencing adults. Jody Spiro, director of education leadership at the Wallace Foundation, says an effective principal must be skilled in six primary areas: shaping a vision of academic success for all students, creating a climate that is hospitable to education, cultivating leadership in teachers and other employees in the building, managing people and data to foster school improvement, engaging the support of the surrounding community, and doing all of these tasks in a way that enhances instruction. Spiro adds, “It’s about getting adults to live up to their potential, as the adults get the students to live up to theirs.”

A leader of leaders

It’s difficult for a principal to find protected time for overseeing a new social studies curriculum when the roof is leaking, parents are calling, children don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods and classroom teachers are dealing with burnout. Therefore, a major component of high-quality professional development is helping principals prioritize and manage their time so that their entire school day isn’t spent addressing crisis after crisis. This entails handing off some of those managerial duties to other adults in the school—in other words, becoming a leader of leaders.

Like its myriad counterparts across the country, the Metropolitan Nashville school district has been investing heavily in a variety of professional development programs, workshops and leadership institutes to train principals in specific areas of good instruction. Some of these include the Skillful Observation and Coaching Lab, The Artisan Teacher, and the Principals’ Leadership Academy of Nashville. (See sidebar). Armed with ideas for promoting high-quality instruction, the principals then return to their schools and pass this knowledge forward so teachers can improve their practice. “A lot of principals are telling me that the most effective thing they do is to be visible in the classrooms during the school day,” says Jesse Register, superintendent of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. “They say that observing instruction has had a positive effect on the climate in the school.”

Of course, it’s tough for principals to be out of the building attending professional development workshops, Joseph Murphy admits. “They put pressure on themselves not to be gone,” he says. “Plus they have financial constraints. And we have a long history of poor professional development—where people went in, got lectured to for three hours and went home.”

The key to creating a pipeline to student outcomes, the experts agree, is to provide job-embedded professional development that is tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of a particular school, and to provide high-quality coaches and/or mentors who can observe, guide and support principals while they are in the trenches, dealing with an onslaught of issues. While it’s much easier to conduct professional development off site, researchers claim that it’s crucial to have a highly trained coach periodically come to the school and observe the principal on the ground, helping him or her design and reflect upon a course of action to solve a particular problem.

“Principals need to know what good practice is, but that is not enough; they need to know how to engage with it in their schools,” Goldring says. She describes an example where a principal wants to hold a meeting with teachers about improving an area where data indicate students are struggling—third-grade math. In a professional development session the principal would practice forming a team, leading that team, developing a plan for improving student math skills, and then would go back and actually call together her third-grade teachers for a meeting. During this meeting the principal would be observed by a coach, who would provide feedback. The best professional development creates a back-and-forth channel between training and practice.

How to eat an elephant

Tom Ward is a former lecturer in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organization at Peabody, most recent director of PLAN and formerly the principal at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School in Nashville, one of the highest-achieving schools in Tennessee. He advocates a “continuous improvement model” for the coach/principal relationship. “A coach helps a principal set smart short-term goals, which are time-bound, relevant and related to the work,” Ward explains. The key to tackling an avalanche of problems in difficult school situations, he says, is for the coach to hold the principal accountable for achievement by focusing on short-term increments.

Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, for example, includes 5,500 classrooms. Superintendent Jesse Register wants to see change in instructional practice in every one of those classrooms. Given the task of formulating instructional changes in every classroom in their schools, it’s clear why principals would feel overwhelmed.

“Being a principal is a job that’s so big, it’s like eating an elephant,” Ward says. “You’ve got to learn how to break it into manageable pieces if you really hope to achieve what you want to achieve.”

The Wallace Foundation has chosen to mainly support professional development for new incoming principals—either those in their first years of principalship or those who are assuming the job in a totally new situation, such as an administrator from a middle school who is moving to a high school. In these situations, Spiro says, a coach or mentor can be invaluable. “No matter how much you prepare somebody or how fast they get out of the gate, it’s still a new experience. A mentor will ask critical questions, causing you to be self-reflective and sharing some of his or her experiences when relevant,” she says. “In the past, mentoring was for remedial purposes for a principal who wasn’t doing well, and where a more experienced person was telling an inexperienced person what to do. That’s not what this is. This is a different concept of mentoring where the mentor is a coach.”

She stresses that the mentor-mentee relationship needs to continue for at least three years, and importantly, that mentors or coaches need professional development, as well. “We did a perspective on mentoring and here is our big conclusion: You’ve got to train the mentors. That’s been a missing link.”

Ward believes that although coaches or mentors are not a panacea for principal professional development, they can be valuable, “if for no other reason than that the job is so lonely. Ultimately, you are responsible for every decision made in the building,” he says. “You are the custodian of every student record by law. When a teacher is callous and hard on a kid, you’re going to be the one who has to clean that up. A mentor helps you stay the course when you’re doing the really hard work.”

The multiplier effect

One activity used by the Principals Leadership Academy of Nashville is to have participants build a structure using specific rules. Given noodles, marshmallows, string and tape with which to build, participants use collective perspective and adaptive expertise to understand the directions and anticipate consequences before they build the structure. Most structures ultimately collapse under the weight of the marshmallows, because not enough attention is paid to building a supportive foundation.

Obviously, professional development for principals is expensive. Experts argue, however, that high-quality professional development, while costly, is extremely cost-effective. Spiro says, “We know that an effective principal is the key factor in teacher satisfaction and in the retention of good teachers. Even beyond money, having an effective principal is the number one issue for teachers. So how do you put a price tag on that? For every one principal we prepare, that principal coaches maybe hundreds of teachers. There’s a multiplier effect.”

Perhaps real cost savings will come about when colleges and universities that grant degrees in school administration critically examine their obligations in this issue. Jesse Register says, “Frankly, I think a lot of the training programs for principals in a lot of our colleges and universities are not very good.”

Goldring agrees, adding, “The million-dollar question is: Why is there a need for PD in the first place to the extent there is, especially for the new generation of principals? If they were being correctly trained and highly prepared, then why is there a need for PD? They just finished their degree program! One of the reasons why there is such a huge need for professional development is because many initial preparation programs—these are master’s degree programs—are not doing their job in preparing people to enter the principalship.”

In the meantime, she believes not only that the funding streams for principals’ professional development must continue, but also funding for rigorous academic research into PD programs. That research will ultimately lead to districts being able to scale up across their school systems and significantly raise the quality of American education.

“I’m an optimistic person,” Goldring says. “I think with better technology and more people focusing on the delivery and implementation of job-embedded PD, and with better diagnostic tools to help principals identify where they need PD—because it’s not one-size-fits-all—then strides can be made.”

Illustration © 2012 by David Vogin (davidvogin.com)

Visit Peabody College’s website
at peabody.vanderbilt.edu

Bonnie Arant Ertelt, Editor

Donna Pritchett, Art Director

Michael Smeltzer, Designer

Nelson Bryan, Class Notes Editor

Contributors: Joanne Lamphere Beckham, Kurt Brobeck, Lisa DuBois, Brent Meredith, Katie Payne, Jan Read, Cindy Thomsen, and Jennifer Wetzel

Camilla Persson Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

Jennifer Zehnder, Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations

©2012 Vanderbilt University

The Peabody Reflector is published biannually by Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development in cooperation with the Vanderbilt Office of DAR Communications. The magazine is mailed free of charge to all Peabody alumni, parents of current Peabody students, and to friends of Peabody who make an annual gift of $25 or more to the college. Correspondence, including letters to the editor and Class Notes submissions, should be mailed to: The Peabody Reflector, Office of DAR Communications, PMB 407703, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7703 or by email to reflector@vanderbilt.edu.

Camilla P. Benbow

In the winter issue of the Reflector, we examined “the embattled teacher” and the challenges faced both by current teachers and those who aspire to enter the profession. But although they are a critical factor for student success, teachers are not the only factor. In schools as a whole, it is up to principals to establish a vision for academic achievement and to create environments that foster learning. Principals hire and develop great teachers, ensure that instruction is relevant and rigorous, and manage processes with an eye toward continuous improvement. This issue of the Reflector takes a closer look at principals and highlights the research and training being conducted by members of the Peabody College faculty.

One trait that principals will affirm is needed in a successful school is a steady focus on students. Principals and teachers alike must establish relationships with students characterized by care, cooperation and clear communication. Students thrive when they know that those charged with their educations are genuinely committed to their well-being and advancement.

In the best of situations, students return others’ investment in their educations by investing themselves. At Peabody, students like undergraduate Ashley Krueger and graduate students Greg Aikens, Shaka Dickerson and Ellen Zambetti are emblematic of the abundance of Peabody students who not only are talented and high achieving, but who are deeply engaged with fostering the well-being of others.

We have every reason to think that amazing students like these and others will go on to become leaders in their fields, whether it be education or in other organizational and even for-profit settings. Our new master’s degree program in Leadership and Organizational Performance, which also is described in this issue, is intended to prepare graduates who can move all types of organizations forward.

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

One of life’s small pleasures for me is sitting with a cup of tea on my patio relaxing in sunny California reading the Peabody Reflector. The winter 2012 issue was no exception. While I enjoy the overall format, photographs and layout of the magazine, I particularly enjoy reading the research news section. I was touched reading an excerpt from a study previously published in Developmental Science related to autism “sticky mittens” and infant early training and social development at the Kennedy Center (p. 12). Autism is such an important issue right now and the more faculty and researchers can explore ways to help all children succeed in life deserves our attention.

Although I am many miles away, the Reflector has kept me informed about many events both past and present. Thanks for providing such a variety of pertinent and interesting information happening at Peabody!

Joan C. Fingon, EdD’90
Sylmar, Calif.

The Reflector is most informative, and I enjoy the covers—the winter 2012 knight and hydra head and, a few years ago, the endless apple peeler.

Possible future essays might present information about how the Jeffersonian ideal campus was chosen, commitment to international students, children’s literature collection and special summer attractions. That watermelon picture rang a bell!

As I enrolled at Peabody in fall 1962, I am now a 50th anniversary admirer.

Congratulations on a fine publication.

Betsy Moriarty, BS’66
Tullahoma, Tenn.

Planet Peabody

Best issue of the Peabody Reflector on record. Is the photo of the Peabody campus available as a print? Most unusual. Thank you!

John Burgin, PhD’71
Jefferson City, Tenn.

I am fascinated by the wonderful fisheye photograph in the back of the latest issue of the Reflector! Could you possibly tell me anything about how the photo was made and if copies of it are available? It is a wonderful photograph. Thanks for publishing it.

Mary Ann Brown, BS’58, MALS’60
Durham N.C.

Regarding the 2012 Reflector photograph of Planet Peabody, it is a wonderful memory for me! However from my artistic viewpoint it is a “Peabody Eye” with the lovely grass medial as its pupil. How fortunate it is still the heart and eye of its campus!

Is it possible to have this available for purchase as a print for mounting? I would like one.

Mary Anne Socey Rowan, BS’62
Columbia, Tenn.

Editor’s Note: Many people have contacted us by email, through Peabody’s website and Facebook pages and in writing to ask if the Planet Peabody shot is available to purchase. We are happy to say that it is available through Replay Photos: http://snipurl.com/peabodyfisheye.

More about Dr. Hall

In the summer edition of the Peabody Reflector, you published a picture of two men presumably gorging themselves on watermelon. One was Dr. A. L. Crabb and the other was Dr. Clifton Hall. I remember three things about Dr. Hall.

First, he was meticulous in speech and dress. He spoke in measured words to be absolutely precise.

Second, in his introductory remarks to the class, he compared many students of the day to “the gallant knight who upon hearing the fair maiden scream, jumped on his white charger and galloped off in all directions at once.”

Third, he also led an enormous conga line (with at least 50 students) back and forth across campus for a charitable fundraising event.

He was an excellent and delightful teacher.

William D. Nagle, MA’54
Burnsville, N.C.

Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows studying at Peabody this year helped paint a firehouse on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service on Dr. King’s birthday. The above photo was taken at Firestation 25, White’s Creek.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows journeyed to Franklin, Tenn., on February 27 and 28 for Volunteer Tennessee’s third annual Tennessee Conference on Volunteerism and Service Learning. The fellows, educational leaders from nine developing nations, attended workshops on project-based learning in multicultural communities, integrating art into service, building youth leadership capacity and leveraging community resources. The theme for the conference, “Serve. For a Change,” encouraged participants to think about the impact of service, to not only do good, but to make long-lasting changes in individuals and communities.

The concept of impact is fundamental to the Humphrey Fellowship Program. Fellows are selected because they are agents of change. They are policymakers, educators and reformers, private and public sector leaders with lengthy records of service and visions for the future. Fellows engage in service not only to connect with and support the Nashville community, but also to learn, to gain skills and experiences that will deepen their impact back home.

Fellows were engaged in service directly following their August arrival in Nashville. They sorted school supplies and assisted with teacher shopping at LP Pencil Box, organized donations for the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement program, helped out at the Second Harvest Food Bank, painted a firehouse on MLK Day of Service, and reached out to students at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School and Eakin Elementary. Fellows individually served with organizations such as the Red Cross, STEM Prep Charter School, Hands On Nashville and the Nashville Public Library. Additionally, each fellow was engaged in a high level internship at educational organizations around the city to learn, but also to contribute to the development of our educational system.

The fellowship year officially ended in June, but Humphrey Fellows’ impact will extend beyond that time. Lessons learned in service will enable fellows to implement their plans in their home countries—plans that include improving low performing schools; empowering women, people with disabilities and those in rural communities; creating new non-governmental organizations to address unmet needs; or promoting service-learning methodology in their schools and organizations.

For more information about the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship program and the Fellows:
snipurl.com/vuhumphreyfellows

Joseph Murphy

Richard Lehrer

Steve Graham

Lynn Fuchs

The American Educational Research Association has selected four Peabody faculty members to be AERA Fellows. Lynn Fuchs, Steve Graham, Richard Lehrer and Joseph Murphy are among 36 scholars nationwide named to the 2012 class in recognition of their exceptional scientific or scholarly contributions to education research or significant contributions to the field through the development of research opportunities and settings.

“We are thrilled to see four members of the Peabody faculty recognized for their longstanding contributions to education research,” said Dean Benbow. “Together with other members of the faculty previously chosen as fellows, they demonstrate Vanderbilt’s impact on the field.”

Fuchs, Nicholas Hobbs Professor in Special Education and Human Development, focuses her research on instructional practice and assessment of student progress for students with reading and other disabilities.

Graham, Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, researches learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development.

Lehrer, Frank W. Mayborn Professor of Education, researches children’s mathematical and scientific reasoning in the context of schooling, with a special emphasis on tools and notations for developing thought.

Murphy, also Frank W. Mayborn Professor of Education, works in the area of school improvement, with special emphasis on leadership and policy.

These new fellows join eight previously inducted AERA fellows from Peabody, including: Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development; Paul Cobb, Peabody Professor of Teaching and Learning, professor of education; David Dickinson, professor of education; Dale Farran, professor of education and psychology; Douglas Fuchs, Nicholas Hobbs Professor of Special Education and Human Development; Ellen Goldring, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Education Policy and Leadership; Karen R. Harris, Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy; and Daniel Reschly, professor of education and psychology.

Peabody has topped the rankings, selected through expert opinions and statistical indicators, since 2009. Its administration/supervision and special education programs were also ranked No. 1 in the country, special education in a tie with its peer program at University of Kansas.

“We are pleased to again be ranked No. 1 and to have eight of our programs included in their respective top-10 rankings,” said Dean Benbow. “There is nothing more important to our children’s well-being and our economic future than education. It is gratifying that Peabody’s contributions to transforming education are seen as leading the nation.”

Peabody was also ranked for its programs in elementary education (No. 4), curriculum/instruction (No. 5), education policy (No. 5), higher education administration (No. 5), educational psychology (No. 6), and secondary education (No. 6).

Rankings are available at the U.S. News & World Report website, and the complete list was published April 3 in the U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools book.

Donald J. Stedman, PhD’62, was awarded Peabody’s Distinguished Alumnus Award during Commencement ceremonies on Friday, May 11. During his career, Stedman taught at Duke, Peabody and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as professor of education, associate director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, chairman of the Division of Special Education, and dean of the School of Education.

Christine Quinn Trank

Steve Graham

Karen Harris

Ron Zimmer

The American Educational Research Association has appointed Ron Zimmer, associate professor of public policy and education, as an incoming editor of its quarterly publication, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. The EEPA is a multidisciplinary policy journal that focuses on educational evaluation and educational policy analysis, and the relationship between the two.

Zimmer will assume this position with the 2013 volume year along with education researchers and policy experts Mark Berends of Notre Dame, Laura S. Hamilton of the RAND Corporation and Luis A. Huerta of Teachers College, Columbia University.

The American Psychological Association has released the first edition of the Educational Psychology Handbook, co-edited by Peabody faculty members Karen R. Harris and Steve Graham.

The handbook consists of three volumes that reflect the broad nature of the educational psychology field, including state-of-the-science reviews of the diverse critical theories driving research and practice.

Harris is Currey Ingram Professor in Special Education and focuses her research on issues surrounding academic and self-regulation strategies among students who are at risk or have severe learning challenges, particularly in the area of writing. She is the author of more than 100 publications, co-author of several books and former editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Graham is also Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education. His research focuses on writing difficulties and disabilities and on examining the effectiveness of specific prevention and intervention procedures to enhance writing development. He is the author of numerous books and more than 135 papers on handwriting, writing instruction and learning disabilities and is the former editor of both Exceptional Children and Contemporary Educational Psychology.

Christine Quinn Trank, senior lecturer of organizational leadership, has been named editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry and associate editor of the Academy of Management Review.

Professor Quinn Trank’s research focuses on the institutional environment of education, including the integration of new ideas into textbooks as well as the “de-professionalization” of business education. Most recently, she has studied the role of rhetoric in the process of developing organizational identity in the face of large-scale change.