SOE News

Please join me in wishing Mike Dubin, director of development, all the best as he runs the New York City Marathon this Sunday, November 1, 2009. Mike was chosen by the Michael J. Fox Foundation to be a member of Team Fox. He has been working hard over the last few months not only to prepare his body for the marathon but also to raise awareness and funds for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Best of luck, Mike!

Update: Mike successfully completed the marathon. Michael J. Fox waited along the course to meet Mike and cheer him on. A short video of their meeting is available.

Mike Dubin meets Michael J. Fox

For everyone who is appointed here in our school (faculty, staff, and graduate students): The school’s leadership (consisting of faculty, staff, and student leaders) are urging you to consider contributing to the United Way or other charitable organization this year during the university’s annual drive, currently underway. It is vital to our school and to the university that we show our commitment to our surrounding communities in these difficult economic times. Although the drive is identified as the United Way drive, you do, in fact, have the ability to choose any 501(c)3 charitable organization. Contributions can be made online. Absolutely any amount of money will be deeply appreciated and used and the amount of your donation (or whether you choose to donate at all) is completely confidential. What is important here is that we strive to attain a high level of participation, not that we give a particular amount of money. Laura Roop is our SOE community representative in the campus-wide campaign and will be leading our efforts to step up to the challenge of giving back to the organizations and causes who are doing much- needed work in our community.  She’ll provide updates on our progress toward our goal across the next weeks. Please help the School of Education to participate strongly and visibly as a group in this year’s United Way campaign.

The Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education will host a reception at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education on Friday, November 6, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre, Finback Room, Vancouver, B.C.  All are welcome to attend.

On Wednesday, November 4, 2009, the Combined Program in Education and Psychology and the Joint Program in English and Education, sponsored by the Office of Student Affairs, are presenting an informational webinar about their programs.  The webinar begins at 7:00 p.m.  Interested prospective students should register at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/education.osadata/webinar&mode=add.

The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) will provide an intensive teaching orientation program for new, returning, and future graduate student instructors (GSIs). The event provides an opportunity for GSIs to gain teaching skills, make connections with other GSIs, allay fears concerning teaching, and learn about helpful CRLT resources. The orientation is from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on January 4, 2010. For more information and to register, please visit the CRLT website or contact Chris Groscurth.

At 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, Daylight Savings Time will end–clocks will need to be set back one hour.

The university’s Information Technology Services recommends that all U-M affiliates change their Kerberos passwords twice a year and they suggest using the time change as a reminder.  For more information and requirements about Kerberos passwords, visit the safe-password website.

Brian Rowan

David Cohen

Brian Rowan, Burke A. Hinsdale Collegiate Professor in Education, and David Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education, School of Education, and the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy, have been awarded a grant from the University of Pennsylvania/Hewlett, William and Flora Foundation, for a project entitled “Center on Continuous Instructional Improvement (CCII) – Issues in Scaling.” The grant amount of $142,308 is for the period February 1, 2009, to November 17, 2011.

This project will extend an existing collaboration among CCII researchers and Agile Mind (AM) begun in December 2006 with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In the collaboration, CCII researchers at the U-M have worked with AM staff and researchers at the Dana Center to study implementation of AM’s Algebra I services in more than 250 Texas schools and to estimate the association between school-wide use of AM services and students’ mathematics achievement.

The school’s Staff Development Committee has arranged for a Weight Watchers at Work program to be offered to SOE staff on Thursdays from 11:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m., beginning with registration on November 5, 2009.

Interested staff members should contact Kathryn Taylor by email or telephone (6-5321) by Tuesday, November 3, 2009.

Because this program represents a significant investment for the school and attendance at meetings is expected, employees who sign up and miss more than three weeks of weigh-ins/meetings will be expected to reimburse the Staff Development Committee for the school’s portion of the registration fee ($95). There will be no meetings on Thanksgiving (11/26), Christmas Eve (12/24), or New Year’s Eve (12/31).

Lisa Kurtz (2008 CERT, AB)

Lisa Kurtz, a 2008 SOE alumna, has been selected by the Alliance for Excellent Education, a federal policy and advocacy organization, to speak at an event on November 3, 2009, at which they will release a brief on the need to reform teacher education. The group’s focus is on advocating for underserved secondary students. The brief is titled Teaching for a New World: Preparing High School Educators to Deliver College-and Career-Ready Instruction.

Kurtz teaches mathematics at Grosse Pointe South High School. At the event, she plans to focus on how the University of Michigan prepared her, especially in methods and literacy, and on how she implements her education and training in her classroom.

Update on November 6, 2009: Materials, including audio and video, are available.

Magdalene Lampert

Magdalene Lampert, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in Education, has been selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as one of five senior partners who will guide the development of the program’s agenda. The first topic is expected to be high failure rates among students in developmental mathematics in community colleges.

The other partners are Louis M. Gomez, the Faison Chair in Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh; James W. Stigler, professor of psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A Dana Center and professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin; and Guadalupe Valdés, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Stanford University.

“With the help of these partners, each of whom brings expertise to the work, Carnegie will convene the right mix of practitioners, researchers, social entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other stakeholders—including students—to map the dimensions of a problem, identify promising solutions, and to advocate and support the efforts of a community engaged in continuous evidence-based improvement,” Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk said. “These five partners will be integral to these efforts.”

Lampert’s research has focused on understanding and portraying the world of classroom practice to the academic community, providing images of teaching practice that make the proposed reforms in mathematics education concrete, identifying elements of teaching that novices need to learn to do, and experimenting with interactive multimedia tools for both analyzing and representing the work of teaching. She is assisting the Carnegie Foundation in focusing its attention on learning teaching, drawing from her current work investigating how teacher education can be structured to enable learning in, from, and for practice.