Two-time UNC School of Education alumna Elena Ashburn (’12 M.S.A., ’18 Ed.D.), principal of Broughton Magnet High School in Raleigh, is the 2021 Wells Fargo North Carolina Principal of the Year. While a doctoral student at Carolina, Ashburn was named the inaugural recipient of the Priddy Family Award. Photo by Paul Cory/Courtesy of Wake County Public School System
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Education SCHOOL OF EDUCATION THE UNIVERSIT Y OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
FALL 2021
Fellow Tar Heels, Each time I write the opening letter to Carolina Education and look through its pages, I am reminded of the incredible work happening both within the walls of Peabody Hall and in classrooms and school districts across North Carolina. I am inspired seeing the dedication each of you bring to the field of education and to learners day in and day out — all of this as we navigate through challenges that are defining our times. The COVID-19 pandemic still disrupts our daily lives. The return to campus for members of the UNC School of Education community largely has been successful. But like you in your own classrooms, schools, districts, and communities, we continue to learn as the pandemic delivers an ever-changing reality. I say this not to dwell on the disruption, but instead to serve as a reminder that even in the face of adversity — and we have experienced a great deal of it in the last year and a half — educators and education leaders continue to do important work. Even on days when we feel like we are just doing the best that we can, we are providing a foundation that will enable learners to thrive throughout their lives. Put simply: educators propel the world. I am energized by the UNC School of Education faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have faced challenges head-on, adapted to the needs of learners, and sought innovative, productive ways to continually improve and transform the communities and institutions in which they work and serve. I must also take the time to highlight some exciting news from the School. The Peabody Hall lobby renovation has been complete for some time, but we finally welcomed students into the new space this fall and dedicated it on Oct. 8, 2021, during a small gathering with members of the Tarver family. The first cohort of students in our Human Organizational Leadership and Development program are officially in the building, and we are excited to have director Jemilia Davis among our faculty ranks, leading this new program and leading students toward change-making careers. And naturally, our alumni and students are doing great work. James Michael Sapp (’21 M.A.T.) and Elena Ashburn (’12 M.S.A., ’18 Ed.D.) recently received high-profile, state-wide recognitions. You have already seen Elena on the cover. You can read more about James Michael in the pages within. And we have even more alumni out there doing important work on behalf of learners in districts across the state. It is an honor to work alongside such an outstanding community of educators and scholars, and I remain deeply grateful for the opportunity to serve as Dean of the UNC School of Education. Thank you for all that you do.
All my best,
Fouad Abd-El-Khalick Dean and Professor
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Faculty win NSF research funding totaling $3.5 million Five UNC School of Education faculty members — Thad Domina, Jill Hamm, Daniel Klasik, Kathryn Leech, Troy Sadler, and their collaborators — have won National Science Foundation awards to pursue high-impact research projects. Totaling $3.5 million, the projects will support investigations that promise to reveal new understandings that inform instructional practices and policies. One will produce and evaluate science instructional materials based on the COVID-19 pandemic, another will explore what we can learn from families’ responses to the pandemic, and the three remaining projects will investigate aspects of the STEM educational and career pipelines.
environment that fostered learning, excellence, and wellness.” Gibbs is a clinical assistant professor who teaches in the Master of Arts in Teaching and educational leadership programs. A student nominator recognized Gibbs as being “the most passionate, empathetic, and inspiring professor I’ve ever had.”
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Revamped N.C. Principal Fellows Program returns to Carolina The UNC School of Education was named among six UNC System schools to join the revamped N.C. Principal Fellows Program. Over six years, the School will receive $4.29 million, funding that’s expected to support the !"#$%&'#(()
participation of five cohorts of 12 students each in the Master of School Administration (MSA) program.
Cohen-Vogel, Gibbs win inaugural School of Education Teaching Excellence Awards Lora Cohen-Vogel, Ph.D., and Brian Gibbs, Ph.D., have been honored as the inaugural recipients of the UNC School of Education Teaching Excellence Awards.
The MSA program — led by Martinette Horner (’96 A.B.Ed., ’16 Ed.D.) who will serve as principal investigator for the grant — will welcome its first cohort of Principal Fellows in the summer of 2022. The N.C. Principal Fellows Program’s goal is to provide funds for the preparation and support of highly effective school principals in North Carolina.
The awards, which will be given annually, recognize faculty members who demonstrate expertise, creativity, and innovation in their classrooms, and whose work and accomplishments set a standard of excellence. Cohen-Vogel teaches primarily in the Ed.D. in Educational Leadership program and the Ph.D. concentration in Policy, Leadership, and School Improvement. One student nominator recognized Cohen-Vogel because she “created a respectful, understanding, and supportive class
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Reimagining how we teach science Troy Sadler, Ph.D., knows how difficult it can be to capture and to hold the attention of middle and high school students.
A case in point: The coronavirus pandemic.
Sadler, the Thomas James Distinguished Professor of Experiential Learning, taught science to middle and high school students early in his career. It’s an experience that for 20 years has informed his work finding ways to develop teaching methods and curricula that engage students in science classrooms.
In 2020, they applied for and won a $200,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research program grant with which they produced a set of lessons that have students engage in science concepts centered on the virus, produce models about its behavior, and wrestle with questions around how a society works to slow and eventually contain a pandemic.
One of the answers: Build science lessons around topics students care about. Sadler and a team of researchers and teachers have worked for years developing and refining a framework for creating engaging and effective science lessons. The framework relies upon “issues-based” instruction involving hot topics, or socio-scientific issues, for students, such as sexually transmitted diseases, vaping, fracking, and climate change. The framework also features modeling as a central activity the team has shown to be effective in engaging students in science learning.
When the pandemic arose, Sadler and his team saw a teachable moment.
A more recent $1.9 million NSF grant will extend this work over the next four years to develop lesson plans in which students create scientific models to study complex issues in science, then to study the effectiveness of the modeling on student learning. The project will include an emphasis on studying how effective the lessons are in helping Latino students. The team plans to share results, lesson plans, and modules, and has already published resources focused on teaching COVID-19 at epiclearning.web.unc.edu
Leading essential conversations
James Michael Sapp, a 2021 MAT graduate, is North Carolina’s Student Teacher of the Year.
“W
hat is a just war?”
That’s the essential question James Michael Sapp (’21 M.A.T.) posed to his seventh grade social studies students at a Chatham County middle school this past spring during his student-teaching internship. “I’ve never been asked that question,” said Sapp, a 2021 Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program graduate who encountered the question in faculty member Brian Gibbs’s “Social Studies Methods” class. “But I thought, ‘I can develop this for seventh graders studying world history and engage them in a really cool conversation over six weeks.’” Over those six weeks, daily lessons included their own focus questions such as “Is war just if it requires people in our hometown to change their lives?,” incorporated local and regional history in the context of world history, and enabled students to engage through multiple forms of discourse. “It was a big shakeup for the students,” Sapp said. “But incredible conversations came out of these lessons. I was impressed by the students every day.” Sapp was named the 2021 Student Teacher of the Year by the N.C. Association for Colleges of Teacher Educators.
ENGAGING IN A CHALLENGE For Sapp, a career in education seemed like a natural path. He grew up in Swannanoa, N.C., a small town just outside of Asheville. His mother taught at the middle school; his father at the high school. He lived within walking distance to the elementary school. When he arrived at Carolina in 2015, he joined the marching band and considered majoring in music education. But his history classes — the readings and subsequent discussions — challenged him.
He switched his major but held on to a potential career in education. That same sense of challenge that drew Sapp to major in history drove him to challenge himself and his students in the classroom. At the time he took over as the full-time teacher, the class — which had been taught chronologically — was approaching the 20th century. Sapp saw an opportunity to try a different, thematic approach. World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War provided an opportunity for students to explore a question about history that couldn’t be answered in a class period or that even had a definitive answer. What is a just war? “I would take an idea from each war and alternate it throughout the week,” Sapp said. “The students started to run with it and were able to connect themes across these different wars.”
"I want students to be proud of where they come from and to feel like they can make positive change where they grow up."
all of the special-needs students he taught. He differentiated everything he produced as a student teacher. He collaborated directly with our school’s seventh grade [exceptional children] teacher in order to ensure these students’ needs were provided for. To my mind, that thoroughness is indicative of a teacher well into their teaching career, let alone one just starting out on the career path.” His attention and care for every student ultimately created a strong community and a thriving classroom culture.
Sapp engaged in multiple modes of assessment — audio recordings, writing, Socratic seminars, and Taylor Schmidt, School doctoral student and art. One assessment focused on war opposition university supervisor, wrote: figures and required students to create life-like “James Michael took concepts of experiential representations, in detail and size, on paper of education, intentional classroom culture, placefigures including Bella Abzug, Daniel Ellsberg, and based education, racial and economic justice, Martin Luther King Jr. Students “X-rayed” those figures, creating metaphors of body parts to connect multicultural education, differentiation, and 21stcentury learning skills and integrated them into his to the figure’s perspectives or actions. An X-ray of the heart might describe how the person might have planning for student teaching, allowing for creative interplay between concepts, unique planning, and felt about the war; an X-ray of the eyes enabled extraordinary student experiences in virtual, hybrid, students to talk about things the figure might and in-person teaching. He invested deeply in his have seen. students, whether they were online or in-person, Sapp created clear expectations, and his students constantly adapting his plans to best serve his knew that art could be rigorous and that they must students according to their needs and situations.” treat their art with attention to detail. Students — Sapp returned to his hometown this fall to lead and Sapp — proudly displayed their art outside of his first classroom, prepared to help his middle the classroom once finished. schoolers navigate difficult questions and to challenge them to look closely at history so they DEDICATED TO EVERY STUDENT take pride in their community. In addition to pursuing grades 6-12 social studies “I want to let students engage in these cool licensure through the MAT program, Sapp also conversations,” he said. “I want them to be proud of pursued special education add-on coursework, where they come from and to feel like they can make which provided him with tools to best address each positive change where they grow up.” student’s needs. In a nomination for Sapp, clinical educator Michael Charles wrote: “I would like to praise Mr. Sapp for his dutiful adherence to the accommodations provided for
Newly Endowed Professors and Scholars Ahead of the 2021-22 academic year, the School honored the following five faculty members with endowed distinctions — made possible by some of the School’s most generous supporters.
Sherick A. Hughes Samuel M. Holton Distinguished Professor Hughes, Ph.D., is a pre-eminent scholar of critical race studies and Black education and social context of schooling. He has spent more than 20 years investigating and addressing equity issues at the intersection of theory, policy, and practice. Matthew Bernacki Donald & Justeen Tarbet Distinguished Scholar Bernacki, Ph.D., is an expert in educational psychology and learning sciences whose work focuses on students’ motivational and metacognitive processes when learning with technology; the development of AI interventions to promote effective learning strategies; and the development of materials and environments that personalize learning to students’ interests.
Dionne Cross Francis Joseph R. Neikirk Professor Cross Francis, Ph.D., is a leading scholar and teacher educator in mathematics education whose work investigates the relationships among psychological constructs and how the interplay between these constructs influences math teachers’ instructional decision-making. Thurston “Thad” Domina Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Professor in Educational Leadership Domina, Ph.D., has spent more than 20 years seeking educational policies and strategies that help to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive society.
Kihyun “Kelly” Ryoo Donald & Justeen Tarbet Distinguished Scholar Ryoo, Ph.D., specializes in designing technologies to promote science learning for historically underserved students, particularly students who speak English as a second language.
Honoring the impact of unmatched mentorship When talking about his time as a doctoral student in the UNC School of Education, Malbert Smith III (’77 M.Ed., ’80 Ph.D.) remembers the professors — namely Richard “Dick” Coop, Gary Stuck, and Kin White — who provided him with guidance that led him to a successful career as an educational innovator and entrepreneur. To honor those professors’ mentorship, Smith and his wife, Alisa Edwards Smith, have made a gift to create three faculty scholar funds, each individually named for Coop, Stuck, and White, and each carrying an endowment of $100,000. Coop
The funds will provide invaluable resources to help advance the research of three early career scholars at the School. The scholars will bear the titles the Richard “Dick” Coop Faculty Scholar, the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar, and the Kinnard White Faculty Scholar.
Stuck
Professors emeriti Richard H. “Dick” Coop, Ph.D.; Gary B. Stuck, Ed.D.; and Kinnard White, Ph.D. — who all served on Smith’s dissertation committee — were each distinguished and prolific researchers in the field of educational psychology who served the School, the University, and school districts across North Carolina. White
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