Your MAT students and colleagues often praise you for the integration of professional learning opportunities into the fabric of your coursework. Why do you think it is important to create meaningful opportunities outside the Trinity classroom for your students?

I believe strongly in trying to create authentic and relevant experiences for students from which they can construct meaning and learning. One way I’ve found I can build intellectual and professional rigor, relevance, and meaningful accountability into courses is to design performance assessments with authentic work for authentic audiences (a great resource for authentic intellectual work and pedagogy is the work of Fred Newmann). This provides experiential learning, usually cooperative learning, and often service-learning. It’s important to me to try to integrate theory and practice, action, and reflection. For example, our Master of Arts in Teaching internship assessment is focused on developing an evidence-based portfolio that addresses standards and skills; students provide description, analysis, and reflection within each entry. In the Sport in England course, we enacted a digital storytelling project for reflection and meaning-making; we learned about digital storytelling from Mario Gonzalez-Fuentes and our Trinity colleagues, including in a Collaborative session, and then as faculty we engaged in that creation along with our students to reflect on our experiences before, during, and after the London-based experiences. We all can learn so much from well-constructed and facilitated experiential learning, and I’ll add that it makes every course and experience a shared, unique, authentic, and engaging learning experience for all of us.

You were recognized by Trinity with an Excellence in Advising Award in 2003 and a “Best of the Best” Award in 2020. What are your tips for creating meaningful and impactful advising relationships with your students?

As a former middle and high school teacher who worked to get high school students to college, now on the other side of the hand-off I take seriously the responsibility and opportunity of being an entrusted advisor and guide for first-year students, undergraduates, and graduate students. I remember the first time I became a first-year advisor at Trinity “back in the day” when we received our hard copy manila advising files. I was as nervous as they were, poring over their files to learn who my advisees were and what they were interested in studying. I also worried about making a big mistake and holding up someone’s graduation. I learned quickly to ask colleagues for help and also how amazing our community is in terms of support for students and advisors. My biggest advice would be mutual advising - learn together and together ask one another and others for help, ideas, resources, and guidance. I feel a huge amount of empathy for this developmental age/stage, with all of the hopes and fears (I read this early on and now there is so much more, including great offerings like Rich Reddick's Workshop [Champion for BIPOC] from the Collaborative - we can learn to be good and better advisor and mentors). I also remember the challenge of navigating a new context and system, especially as a first-generation college student. I try to help bolster confidence, competence, trust, and self-advocacy along with shared vulnerability - how can we be on the path together and also taking a bird’s eye view to go “meta” and look at/learn about the navigation process too.

This past month you attended Dr. Mark’s Lewis workshop on Gather.town, which is video-conferencing software that spatially simulates buildings and classrooms: students, professors, and teaching assistants can interact with one another through personal avatars. What is the potential of this software for your work in the Education Department?

Gather.town blew me away and I think it (or models like it) can be a game-changer. The potential is there for K-12 classrooms, undergraduate and graduate education, and professional learning communities. We can’t “bump into each other” in the hallway or on the walking across campus right now while we are dispersed - and - in Gather.town you really can run into someone in the hallway, conference room, lounge, etc. I am fascinated by the better small group conversation abilities, including for participants and the facilitator to more easily move between groups! And the ability to design/tailor contexts as Mark showed us (he re-created the Computer Science department offices!). We started talking in his session about possibilities for student organization gatherings, admissions events, faculty meetings - all sorts of convenings. And that’s just higher ed. For K-12 I think students would be so engaged with this as a more imaginative, interactive, interpersonal way of “being together.”

Along the lines of maintaining community virtually, I heard you did something really cool with some Trinity alumni last year. Could you tell us a bit about it?

As a department we try to stay connected with our alumni via a variety of efforts and approaches. I learn so much from our alumni and they inspire me - so while it may be good for them, it’s good for me as a learner, colleague, friend, and mentor. And advocate - we can’t advocate with - be allies and accomplices with - teachers, schools and communities - if we’re not listening to and learning from them. In particular our department tries to give attention to our recent graduates - first year teachers, emerging school leaders, and school psychologists - to support them during the critical induction years and experiences. Last year as our first year teachers were ending the year in COVID and starting the new year in COVID, we checked in with them even more: sharing ideas and technology success and challenges, connecting them with the graduates ahead of them and our current MATs, and continuing the peer support of the cohort structure. I shared this with Molly Bruni and loved the Trinity Magazine story we developed. This past year is the closest I’ve ever seen K-12 and higher ed work together - for example, we were all talking about FlipGrid, Jamboards, Perusal, and more. I feel so fortunate to be immersed in learning contexts with my K-12 colleagues in our professional development schools and other settings and at the same time at Trinity, especially via the Collaborative (I sign up for just about every session), Academic Technology, informal collaboration with colleagues, and in our department.