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This purpliffic picture of Rochelle Duane and a Pullman youngster helps illustrate the WSU Today article about Megan Itani, special education teacher extraordinaire. Rochelle, a graduate student from Bremerton, Washington, says she went into her fall practicum in Megan’s classroom knowing virtually nothing about preschool:

“It was incredible to see the progress of each of the students and observe how the patience and strategies that Megan and the rest of the team implemented benefited every student.

“The most important thing I learned was that preschool is not simply a miniature elementary school.  After first grade, the classes focus on reading, writing, math, spelling, etc. Almost everything is academic.  In the preschool, everything revolved around experiences and preparing the kids to be successful.  It took me a while to realize that’s not only okay, but it’s necessary! Without these experiences, without learning which side of the book to start from, what sounds barnyard animals make, or what paint feels like between your fingers, they won’t be able to grow into the children and adults we are helping them become.”

Burnishing your political cred
Our superintendents’ certification students and anyone else interested in policymaking might want to read  “How to Influence Legislators” in the January 2010 edition of InterBusiness Issues. The article was written by Frank Mackaman, of the WSU/UW collaborative Dirksen Congressional Center, and advocacy guru Stephanie Vance.  It is the first in a series of quarterly articles about policy or legislative advocacy.  Future articles will explain the four principles for effective legislative advocacy, the six key questions you’ll want to answer before you ask a policymaker for something, and five key elements of effective messages.

You remember Drew Bledsoe, right? He’s the son of that fellow, Mac, who won an Advocate for Education Award last fall from the College of Education. Well, the younger Bledsoe (and NFL great) is the owner of a new winery in Walla Walla. In a recent Washington State Magazine article, he talks about caring for vines in his vineyard. “If you starve them for water, make the roots really dig, and then thin them out, the grapes that are left really develop some nice complexity and depth.”   So a plant, he says, is like a little kid.  Given everything it wants, “it grows up spoiled with no depth to it.”

Sounds like something his dad would say.

Whose news? Sorting out the WSU media scene
Speaking of Washington State Magazine, you probably know the publication, in its glossy and Web-based forms, is geared toward alumni readers. And you know the Daily Evergreen (and its West Side counterpart, the VanCougar) is a student newspaper.

But for some College of Education folks, the role of campus information sources gets a little fuzzy after that.  So here’s the scoop.

WSU Today is a weekday online newsletter that reports on news about and of interest to faculty, staff and graduate students.  The WSU News Service targets off-campus audiences by providing press releases, feature stories and news tips. The two enterprises often repurpose and  link to each other’s articles, however. And each relies heavily on submissions from communications and marketing staffers who work for WSU’s various colleges, units and campuses.

Professor Forrest Parkay is eager to introduce students to the friends and faculty he’s met off the beaten path in China’s mountainous southwestern Yunnan Province.  But first, he’s been getting lessons of his own in the complexities of setting up what would be the College of Education’s first study abroad course, Education in China.

At this week’s Education Abroad Fair in Pullman, Forrest spoke excitedly about the opportunity, which would start with a five-day stay in Beijing Normal University and even include a visit to Shangri-La.  But one of the most compelling attractions for any student would be the experience that Forrest would pack along on the May 15-June 18 adventure.  His connections to Asia began in 1996 as a Fulbright scholar in Thailand, where he has traveled two dozen times.

“My collaborative activities in China began in earnest around 2005,” he says. “I’ve been there about 10-12 times. One of my doctoral students, Vincent Nix, actually lives and works in Kunming, the location for most of our Education in China program this summer. About two months ago, he defended his dissertation here. Another one of my WSU doctoral students, Qi Li, is now a full professor at Beijing Normal University.”

Forrest’s many publications include co-authoring the  textbook Becoming a Teacher, now in its eight printing and being translated into Chinese. He’ll be talking about the study-abroad course (and offering free pizza) during the noon hour Friday, January 22,  in Room 202 of Pullman’s Education Addition.

Reading matter
We really do know what makes great teaching. Teach for America allows an Atlantic author access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results, she reports, are specific and surprising. “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.”

Understanding politics is, arguably, as important to a school superintendent as understanding education.  So students in WSU’s Superintendent Certification Program travel to Olympia before each legislative session for a primer on the making of laws that affect K-12 education.

The annual field trip is greatly aided by Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, a friend of program director Gene Sharratt. Owen opens up the Senate chamber (the lieutenant governor is president of the Senate when it is in session) and welcomes the WSU students. Last Friday’s packed agenda included policy updates from representatives of top education organizations, as well as state education officials.

The 54 students and four WSU faculty members heard about an upcoming legislative session that could hardly be more stressful. Education is one of many vital state services threatened by deep budget cuts.

The day’s take-home message? Gene summarized it this way:  “Solutions are possible if elected leaders work together to resolve short-term needs, while not losing sight of the long-term priorities.”

The value of the learning experience? Here’s what two of the students had to say:

“The Olympia seminar opened my eyes to new opportunities, future relationships, and how to impact political change.  I will be work on getting to know my legislative representatives and becoming more involved in my own professional organizations.” — Don Francis, elementary principal from the Quincy area.

“The seminar was packed with information regarding funding issues.  The opportunity to hear from practitioners and the difficult dilemma that they are in as we face a huge budget shortfall makes me rethink the political passion one must have for this work.” — Krestin Bahr, middle school principal from Tacoma.

Reading matter, politics edition
Legislature weighs giving up control over university tuition hikes. The Seattle Times reports that a proposal to allow the state’s public universities to raise tuition without legislative approval is gaining momentum in Olympia.

Online publications are inexpensive, simple to update, and never clog up the recycle bin.

But quality printed materials provide a presence and tactile pleasure that digital publications lack.  Take the College of Education’s new research brochure, for instance.  The eight-page pamphlet provides a snapshot of our scholarly landscape.  And it does serve a digital function by directing readers to our research Web pages, which include searchable rosters of topics and faculty members.

The brochures will arrive on all campuses this week.  If you need more copies for recruiting, conferences and such, a limited supply is available in the dean’s office.

Reading matter, re: research
Matching teaching style to learning style may not help students. Four psychologists argue that teaching methods should jibe with the subject, not the students. Others beg to differ.
Experience matters for new principals, says new study. Having graduated from a highly selective university or spending time as a classroom teacher seemed to be less important for the principals in this analysis quoted on the blog Inside Education Research.
Reading practice can strengthen ‘brain highways.’ Intensive reading programs can produce measurable changes in the structure of a child’s brain, according to a study in the journal Neuron.
Studying young minds, and how to teach them. For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math before the age of 5 because their brains were not ready. Recent research has turned that assumption on its head.

The College of Education, spread as it is across four campuses, is bound to latch on to Elluminate, a desktop virtual meeting and collaboration tool that will be available for free university-wide starting spring semester.  What a boon for research teams and far-flung administrators.  And for teachers:  “Elluminate provides video, audio, Web and application sharing for faculty interested in providing courses in a real-time, online, interactive, virtual classroom environment.”

That’s a lot of adjectives. They’re backed up by one educator’s rave review of Elluminate, which notes that teachers and students are able to speak to one another via headset microphones, use direct messaging or chat, draw on a whiteboard, stream video, and share files. Students click buttons to raise their hands,  ask questions or indicate they’ve stepped away.  Sessions are recorded and archived. Perhaps most notably, Elluminate compresses data without loss of audio. Translation: Regardless of Internet connection speeds, there are no annoying delays between what’s said at one end and what’s heard at the other.

Taps for 2009
Reminisce with the New Yorker’s best-of-year lists. And ponder the past with Reuters’ decade in pictures.

Guy Westhoff couldn’t make it to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology conference, where he was slated to receive an award for outstanding service to the group’s Teacher Education Division.  True to its mission, the association solved the problem with technology.  Guy accepted his award via a Skype video call.  (The new “next best thing to being there”?) A clinical assistant professor in Pullman, he served for four years on the association’s board.   His research efforts include using blogs as a means to increase technology integration with pre-service teachers … something the EduCoug  heartily endorses.

The expertise of another faculty member has been recognized by the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, which elected Amy Roth McDuffie to its board of directors. Amy, an associate professor in the Tri-Cities, believes passionately that classroom lessons should reflect current research and theory on how students come to understand mathematics.  She is a key  player in curriculum development at the new Delta High School.

Facebookers: Become a fan of WSUCOE
The Washington State University College of Education has had a Facebook page for less than a week, and the number of fans is growing daily.  Because fan page posts show up in their news feeds, users are finding it a lot more visible than the soon-to-be-phased-out college Facebook group that’s been online since last February.

Good experience and good vibes converged this fall, when sport management students in Assistant Professor John Wong‘s Facility and Event Management course organized events– from bowling to poker tournaments–that raised money and collected food for charity.  The students, divided into six groups,  raked in more than $1,100 for organizations as well as 270 pounds of food for the Pullman Food Bank.  Their dollar contributions broke down thusly:  Sport Management Club, $275;  YMCA , $400; Grey “W” club, $117;  Coy McKay Fund, $257;  Pullman Parks and Recreation,  $200.

T&L folks, have a little spare time over the holidays?
Surf this: The top 101 Web sites for teachers.

Many people in India don’t see the value of teaching disabled children, whose handicaps are often perceived as a sort of spiritual penalty for ancestral sins. Yet despite the lack of understanding back home for his career choice,  Pavan John Antony remains laser-focused on special education.

Pavan was one of six College of Education doctoral graduates at WSU’s fall commencement, where he was honored as the college’s highlight graduate.

So how did this determined fellow find his way from Kerala to Pullman? With the support of John Brewer, a retired WSU professor of German. John tells the story:

“I first met Pavan in 2003, when I went to India to distribute 330 wheelchairs to needy persons, a project funded by Rotary Clubs in our district. At the time Pavan was managing a school for children with disabilities. He was assigned to me to be my guide during the wheelchair distributions in seven different venues, which took at least two weeks.

“Pavan was a bundle of energy, full of ideas for raising funds and helping the children with disabilities in the school. The founder of the school suggested that Pavan would benefit greatly if he could experience what was being done for disabled children in other countries. I therefore offered to sponsor Pavan for one year at WSU, provided there was a course of study that would broaden his outlook and enhance his abilities in the special education field. Although I sponsored Pavan only for his first year, he continued his studies on the graduate level, leading to a doctorate in education.

“Pavan lived in my home for four and a half years, and I have followed his intellectual growth with deep interest. His work with Professor Paulette Mills and others in the College of Education has revolutionized his conception of special education, and I have no doubt that he will one day return to India and make substantial contributions to implementing humane, inclusive policies of education for all children, including those with special needs.”

Like so many WSU College of Education doctoral graduates, Pavan heaps praise upon faculty, including  Paulie Mills.  During the stress of prelims and dissertation writing for his Ed.D. degree, he says,  “I could call Paulie at any hour and say `Hey, I’m freaking out, I don’t know what to do.’ ”

Congrats and good luck to Pavan and to all of our fall semester grads.  For more on the pomp and circumstance, you can view commencement photos and watch the ceremony video.

Sometimes opportunity knocks, and sometimes it makes a phone call.

A parent in the Kennewick School District rang up WSU Tri-Cities last year, looking for someone who might be willing to help out in Hawthorne Elementary School’s dual-language program. The query found its way to Assistant Professor Eric Johnson, a bilingual education expert who jumped at the chance to be involved in classrooms where children spend half the day studying in Spanish, half in English.  It wasn’t long before he enlisted WSU teacher preparation students to join him as volunteers and boost their career prospects in the process.  Eric is clearly a popular fellow at Hawthorne, where he banters with students in both languages. Read about the dual-language program, which is coordinated by adjunct faculty member Abby Cooper, and see more classroom photos in WSU Today.

Another feather in Eric’s professorial cap is publication of The Teaching Roadmap: A Pocket Guide for High School and College Teachers, which he co-authored with Nora Haenn.  Reports Eric: “Nora was a professor in the Arizona State University anthropology department while I was a graduate student (she’s now at North Carolina State).  We bounced ideas off each other for teaching activities while I was teaching some anthropology courses, and finally decided that we should put something together to help new instructors, since college doesn’t require you to have a teaching certificate and a lot of new professors haven’t been trained in pedagogy.  The publisher liked the idea and suggested that we cater to new high school teachers, too—which worked out well with my K-12 teaching experiences.”  Despite the title, he added, the strategies can be applied to all teaching levels.

Good Fulbright news
Tonda Liggett, another assistant professor with expertise in teaching English as a second language, has been accepted onto the Fulbright Scholars list as a potential research collaborator with  scholars abroad. That means she will get to work with researchers in her area if they make such a request within the next five years — in which case, she said, “I’ll get a grant to go work with them (wherever that might be).”

Reading matter from other edu-blogs
Study: Teacher Exchanges Are Pipeline for Bilingual Teachers.  International teacher exchanges as a  strategy for alleviating shortages are still relatively unexplored, according to a new report.
A Washington State Fight, a Nationwide Debate.  An explanation of the battle over tough new graduation requirements in math, science, speaking, and writing.

A skit about medical appointments.  One of Ingmar Bergman’s dramatic Scenes from a Marriage. Woody Allen’s comic take on mortality.

Unlikely video illustrations for a lecture on mathematics education? Not if you are Shlomo Vinner and want to discuss how teachers can and should integrate discussions of a broad view of life into their lessons.  In “The Mathematics Teacher: Between solving equations and the meaning of it all”–  one of two talks he gave this week in Pullman — the Hebrew University professor recommended that teachers use by-the-way moments in their lessons to create interest and context.  The teacher should look for those moments, Vinner said, “as a hunter looks for prey.”

Vinner’s multidisciplinary focus reflects his own life.  In her introduction, Assistant Professor Jo Clay Olson noted that the Israeli educator is an accomplished violinist and poet as well as a key player in the relatively new field of mathematics education.   The two met at a Psychology of Mathematics Education conference in Greece, and their rapport led to Vinner’s visit this week to WSU. But his impact on the state arrived long before his plane did. Vinner’s groundbreaking work is reflected in Washington State Mathematics Standards.

Reading matter

The Creator of Wikipedia Turns to Education Videos. Larry Sanger says his  new site, www.watchknow.org, will allow students and teachers to sort through a library of online videos by content, and pick out what they need. There are already enough videos linked there to consume the curiosity and time of K-12 teachers.

A faculty member ponders how to interact with students on her Facebook page: “So perhaps for students, Facebook truly is an extension of the classroom, something like a grad-student lounge in which all kinds of connections take place, some routine and some substantial.”

Educators argue endlessly about the merits of one idea or another to improve schools. But with billions of dollars at stake, the Obama administration lays out a novel federal system for keeping score.

Teacher sees all: Does technology make student cheating impossible?