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By Shannon Wendling

One Tuesday evening in Professor Amanda Kibler’s Teaching Writing class, Kristen Pollard and I were gathered with our classmates in a semicircle to review the lesson plans we had written.  We had crafted lesson plans that were designed to teach audience and purpose to English secondary students.

Mine fit into a larger unit on Villains, using Wicked and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigsas central texts. Kristen’s fit into a larger unit on workplace writing, using Working Days: Short Stories About Teenagers at Work and clips from The Office as texts.  I was so impressed with the lessons our other classmates had prepared, yet one thought haunted Kristen and me that night in Ruffner:  Where would all these great ideas go?  How would we remember them?

“Why don’t we take a 10-minute break?” Professor Kibler suggested, and students shuffled out of their chairs to the hallway.  Kristen and I didn’t move.  Instead, we started to share a growing frustration:  We generated dozens of ideas and lesson plans for the teacher education program but had no place to share those mini-epiphanies.  Suddenly it seemed so easy to change – for all our fellow teacher education students, and for the future teachers we hope to be.  We decided to start a blog.

Kristen and Shannon

Currypedia was born with the help of the Curry Foundation and countless long lunches where Kristen and I dreamed up ideas for the site.  Webmaster John Rhea scripted our dreams into web code. Soon after, Currypedia became a place where students could copy their lesson plans and ideas into simple templates for everyone’s use.  The heart of the site started pumping, slowly but steadily, and we searched for ways to make it stronger.

We tested the site’s usability on Jake Cohen’s Teaching with Technology class, Susan Mintz’s Management and Instruction students, and Margo Figgins’ Secondary English cohort.  We conducted surveys, drew logos, and asked hundreds of questions of ourselves and of our peers. What are you looking for in a lesson plan?  What happens in the classroom that is missing on our site?

We got help everywhere we looked.  Our biggest surge of assistance came when Jonathan Chang (M.T., English and Special Education) joined our team as the technology director, deftly managing all the nitty-gritty details and big-picture concerns that make a website work.  With Jonathan shaping the functionality of the site, and with the rock-solid support of our teachers and classmates, Currypedia grew up.

Now, Currypedia has matured into curryed away, an online community that allows Curry students and Curry teacher alumni to post not just lesson plans but also resources, ideas, questions, and stories to a shared and searchable space.

All Curry teacher education students are automatically registered; they need to only visit the site and login.  Students can post book reviews, behavioral management techniques, and lesson plans – and they can search for good ideas to use.

Kristen and I dreamed up a place where we would have access to the objectives-driven instruction and bounding creativity of our peers.  This goal has never changed.  Teaching our students content means nothing if they have not learned the content – and good ideas mean nothing if they are not shared.  We hope that all Curry students will continue to share their ideas and stories on the site, from the Ruffner hallways to their classrooms across the nation and the world.

We hope, in short, that they get carried away – and take curryed away with them.

Apply to be a Student Blogger by emailing curryed_away@virginia.edu

Suzanne Facone MacLehose (M.T. ’91 Engl Ed)

When we sit down to read before bed, two of my boys ask me if I’ll read with them. They’re old enough to read by themselves, and they don’t want to slow down to read out loud. Yet, they want me by their sides, on the same page.

Reading is funny that way. While we are alone in our heads as we read, we often want someone to live with us through what we read on the page.

I remember gifting a friend with Bridge to Terabithia, begging a friend to read Pride and Prejudice, and giving in to a friend who wanted me to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Though the experience of reading a text is a personal venture, we want to share these books with the people we love best. And we want them to love ”our book” too—to connect with what made us live larger, laugh out loud, feel more strongly, become more alive.

One afternoon, I released my students from our classroom to venture about the school to talk about books with anyone they could find.  This act of talking about books brought our reading community alive. There’s something about finding someone who has shared our experience— who has read about Captain Ahab, listened to Elizabeth Bennett, loved with Jane Eyre–that makes us light up. Perhaps it’s because we have such powerful feelings, and we celebrate when someone can feel what we feel—even when reading on our own is so vital.

Many evenings we pile on to the couch to read our “own books.” Last night, I picked my head up from my page and looked at our family reading. It was a rare moment of quiet, though, like a seismograph, I could feel the powerful movement under the surface.

I also witnessed this powerful shared silence in my English classroom when we spent a class period reading a “great” book we felt we had missed along the way.  After reading for the better part of the period, I asked the students if they wanted to comment on their reading experience. One student explained, “When you said, ‘Let’s read,’ it sounded like church when the priest says, ‘Let’s pray.’” Yes, there was a special quality in the classroom—an almost holy connection we shared. While I know how fulfilling it is to talk about books, I was reminded how powerful the simple act of reading together could be.

I notice in my adult life that a lull in conversation can be bridged by the question, “Have you read anything good lately?”  My son calls his far away grandfather to talk about The Hardy Boys. Reading helps us to talk with one another and, as we talk, we figure out what is important to us.

My six-year old son and I were reading together a story about a city dog and country frog who became friends. The words were simple and the pictures beautiful. We read about the frog and dog in summer and fall. Then, when we got to the section “Winter,” the dog was alone in the pictures.  My son could not continue to read the story. He took a short breath and held it as his eyes filled with tears. He could read no more, a visceral reaction to the realization that the frog would not return.

Together we sat on the couch and cried—both moved by the place that book took us. My six-year-old could not articulate adequately what he was feeling about the book—though we both knew the feelings were real and powerful.  What we could do, though, was to sit together and figure out how to respond to life and how to live—what really matters.

Not every book is for everyone.  Yet, like a workout that is often hard to start and hard to get through, rarely will we say that we wished we hadn’t read a book once we’re done.

“Only connect” is E.M. Forster’s epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End.  As I read that book, I kept looking for those words to emerge—to find on the page the place where “Only connect” would become clear. What Forster is telling us is that we must—and we can through reading—connect, especially in a world where we text rather than talk. Perhaps sharing this act of reading can be our talisman—a way for us to connect with each other as we purposefully explore what is important to us as individuals.

Along the way, won’t it be lovely when we find someone who is on the same page?

Suzanne with her sons

Suzanne has been teaching English at Darien High School in Connecticut since 1995.

Guest Blog by Nica Basuel

At the start of my job search this winter, I encountered a conflict. I felt I had to compromise my passion for travel with my passion for teaching. After some research, I found that most teaching abroad opportunities involved traditional schools with more privileged students. However, I’ve always imagined myself teaching in a challenging school filled with students with labels (like “at risk,” “special needs,” or “low SES”), guiding them to fight against those difficult labels and become successful through education.

I completed my student teaching semester in a nontraditional school for students who are “at risk” (whatever the label means is still up for debate in my mind) and truly felt that it was a setting in which I thrived, learned, and loved.

However, my professors helped me understand that each school has its own challenges and can serve as a valuable learning experience. I was also convinced that the time to explore international teaching would be when I was fresh out of college, before other life obligations interfered. Also, I figured I could use a broader worldview to shape my philosophy of teaching fully.

In February I traveled to Boston for an international school job fair. It was a chaotic weekend involving roughly 80 schools from every region in the world. Each school had a unique personality and sitting through all the presentations I found myself imagining myself in South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. I ended up doing nine interviews in less than 48 hours.

One school, Liger Learning Center of Cambodia, wildly stood out from the other international schools. Liger is a school with a mission to give disadvantaged Cambodian children a high-quality, progressive, and free education. The school aims to serve students from kindergarten to high school and give scholarships for students to attend prestigious universities anywhere in the world.

Also, Liger hopes to address the needs of the whole child while encouraging children to become the future leaders of Cambodia. The director of the school outlined its core values of integrity, stewardship, optimism, ingenuity, and determination. During the presentation, I felt goosebumps, and it was the only presentation that gave me such a strong psychosomatic reaction. I was eager to be part of a movement that hopes to instill these values in youth.

Furthermore, I learned that this is a completely new endeavor—the campus where students and teachers will live and learn together is only a few months old, and the director and his staff are still in the admissions process, traveling around Cambodia to find students who show potential to thrive at Liger. I was grateful to interview with the school. I felt comfortable explaining how the school aligned with my philosophies on education and how I could greatly benefit from an experience at Liger.

I never thought I would find a place like Liger at the international school fair. I had come in with certain expectations about working for an international school primarily as a means for travel. Never had I thought that I would end up at a school that would give me an opportunity both to explore the world and to explore innovative education, especially in a country with a difficult history like Cambodia’s.

I am set to leave in late July, only two months after graduation. Admittedly, I am nervous but eager. I know that my move to Cambodia will be something new and completely unfamiliar, frightening, and exhilarating all at once—as every adventure and travel experience should be. I am ready to take on international teaching, to respect and learn from the paths laid out by others before me, and to make my own tracks.

Learn more about Liger Learning Center.

Go to: Curry Alumni Magazine: Alumni Abroad Feature

My First Year as a Teacher

My first memory of becoming a new teacher is the distinct, literal sense of skin burning. After being hired 2,000 miles away from home, the Florida sun and humidity seemed brutal just walking within the courtyard of the school complex. The principal and I stepped into the building that was to house the new charter middle and high school— an old, open-style building—only to find dripping wet walls and missing stairs. “This will be your room,” she said, turning on the single fluorescent light. One chalkboard hung off of the wall; broken desks stood like hunched old men in the center of the floor. I swallowed hard and thought, was this what all my years of schooling and training had led me to?

A few short weeks later, I found myself sitting in a cafeteria full of other new teachers. The founder of the charter school system stood before us, his back straight and smile bright. I expected the same old “go get ‘em” speech I had heard in so many teacher-themed movies. Instead, as he spoke, he began to click LEGOs together into a tiny, solid wall: “Imagine this is a good education that every child deserves. Now imagine, for instance, I take this brick out…and then a few more. What happens to that education?” The wall looked like Swiss cheese. “It is your job—no, your mission—to make sure this doesn’t happen. If it has, you have to teach like never before. Each child is a precious gift.”

In that instant, he had my immediate respect. This man that I had never met had brought me to examine a wonderful, challenging reality: The task of teaching is not just about how much effort you have put into becoming a teacher, but how much effort you put into making sure each child receives the best of that training.

That message was fresh in my mind as I welcomed my first set of students to the classroom. Once in heavy disrepair, the combined work of parents, teachers, and even students had made the building and classroom seem more like a place to learn and grow. As my colleagues became more like family over the course of the year, I grew more thankful for the opportunity just to be around a group of educators that had the same goal in mind—teaching our future—with love (and a bit of insomnia).

Even on days that seemed impossible, the true test was keeping myself in check for the sake of teaching the children—a lesson in humility and compassion. Could I remain calm when a ninth grader used inappropriate jokes in class? How could I deal with the occasional visit by our friend Mickey the Mouse during seventh period? Would the rain ever stop coming through the ceiling? These were things people dealt with everyday around the world. Now, in my classroom it was no longer okay to leave the hole in the wall, but fill it with the ideas of respect and humility for those who had even less while dealing with much more.

By the end of school year, despite the trials and frustrations of being a first-year teacher, I felt happy and fulfilled not just by what I was doing, but in the growth I saw in each of my students. They had worked so hard during the school year. Essays went from average to excellent, effort was taken to earn an A rather than being content with a C. I am more proud of the students and staff than I could ever have imagined.

As I cleaned the chalkboards and stacked the desks for closeout, I stopped and thought about how my ideas about being a teacher changed in the past year. It wasn’t about the building, or the meticulous over-planning as it was when I first arrived.

As cliché as it may sound, teaching is about learning to share, grow, and learn with others. It is about learning to love idiosyncrasies and helping wherever and whenever you can. Most of all, it is about watching your students become masons as they learn to help build their own educational foundations.

This year Kira (MT ’09 Soc Stud Ed) is teaching social studies at Washington Lee High School in Arlington, Va.

An Unconventional Career Path for a Curry School Graduate

Many graduates of the Curry School of Education have successful careers as public or private school teachers, school principals and superintendents, and as college professors.  My career path was different.

Twenty-five years ago, at the ripe old age of 43, I earned a Master’s of Education Degree in the field of Instructional Technology from the Curry School of Education. While working towards this degree, I was employed as a FBI Supervisory Special Agent assigned to the FBI Laboratory’s Forensic Science Training Unit, at the FBI Academy, in Quantico, Virginia, as an Instructor. Twice a week, for several years, four of us FBI instructors enrolled in the Master’s Degree program would drive to Charlottesville to attend evening classes with students half our age.

We were particularly interested in the field of Instructional Technology because it focused on effectively using media such as slides, films, video tapes, photographs, and audio recordings for classroom presentations.  Our students were adult learners consisting of seasoned police officers from around the world attending the FBI’s National Academy.  The National Academy was and remains the flagship of schools for mid-level law enforcement officers who hope to advance their careers within their respective agencies.  All students attending this 10 week school were required to take a course called the Management of Forensic and Technical Services.

Many of these students balked at taking the course since they held management positions and were no longer involved in processing crime scenes.  As instructors, we faced the prospect of teaching 20 forensic science topics to individuals who, for the most part, had little interest in forensic archeology, forensic anthropology, mineralogical evidence, etc., and crime scene management techniques.  Our dilemma: How do we convince these managers that this course is valuable for their career; and how do we make some very basic topics interesting so the students looked forward to coming to class?

One approach advocated by the Curry School was for the instructor to “walk in the shoes” of the student and ask the question: “What’s in it for me if I take the course?”  I answered the question regarding the value of the course by remembering the leadership skills I learned in Vietnam as a 2^nd Lieutenant, U.S. Army Combat Photography Officer.

RULE #1: As a supervisor, you are responsible for everything your personnel do or fail to do.

RULE #2:  If you take care of your people, they will take care of you.

Consequently, when I taught “Crime Scene Processing Techniques,” I introduced cases where the investigators and evidence technicians mishandled the crime scene and discussed the impact their failure had on the investigation and the reputations of their supervisors.  I then presented cases where the CSI personnel acted professionally.  My message: If you don’t know what your personnel are doing, how can you measure their performance?  If your employees know you have knowledge of their expertise and you express appreciation for their efforts, they will work more diligently in the future.  Sometimes, fear of failure can be a tremendous motivator for a student to learn.

The second question on how to make the topics more interesting was resolved by having several brainstorming sessions with my fellow FBI Academy faculty members comparing instructional techniques we had used in the past. One of our group assignments was to create a 10 minute instructional video on a topic of our choice.  We decided to produce a video about Ballistics and Firearms Identification.  A part of the video featured a demonstration of the bullet recovery tank where a weapon is fired into a stainless-steel tank, 10 feet long and 5 feet high, filled with water.  The water absorbs the velocity of the test bullet and enables a Firearms Examiner to compare this undamaged bullet with one discovered at a crime scene to determine if the same weapon fired both bullets.

After the instructor fired the test shot into the tank, we drained the tank and another student climbed inside.  We then resumed filming the instructor explaining the procedure.  At some point during the instructor’s lecture, the lid of the tank slowly opened, a hand emerged and delivered the bullet to the instructor, who continued to speak as if nothing unusual had happened.  In reality, there would never be a person in the tank when a shot was fired, but the shock effect on the audience was profound and after the laughter subsided we had the full attention of the audience.

The moral of this story is that if you can introduce humor or something unexpected into your presentation, you can retain the attention of adult learners.

After serving several years in the Forensic Science Training Unit, I became one of the original FBI Criminal Profilers. As a Criminal Profiler, and now as a retired Agent and member of the Academy Group Inc. in Manassas, Virginia, I have trained law enforcement officers from around the world in the art of Criminal Profiling Techniques. As a police instructor, I am confronted with a different instructional problem:  How to provide meaningful training to both inexperienced and experienced homicide detectives simultaneously, when I was never a homicide detective. Once again, I rely upon an instructional philosophy advocated by my professors. Before any presentation it is imperative to conduct a “needs assessment.” I learn everything I can about my audience, i.e., what is the ratio of experienced to inexperienced homicide detectives, how many represent large police agencies versus small town departments, and how many of my students are women, etc. (experience has taught me that female detectives frequently have greater intuition and insight than their male counterparts).

One technique which has proven to be effective is getting students involved in their own training.  It would be very easy to tell countless war stories about unsolved cases that were resolved by using Criminal Profiling, but presenting these cases to the class to analyze in small groups has proven to be a very beneficial approach.  Detectives with varying degrees of experience from large and small departments can work together, share ideas, and the cumulative effect is the increase in knowledge about criminal behavior by every student.

For over 40 years, I have had the privilege of training law enforcement officers in a wide variety of topics.  I continue to learn from my students and consider it an honor to give something back to the law enforcement community that serves us all. My master’s degree in Instructional Technology has been of tremendous value to me in my unconventional educational career path.

Today’s guest post is by Lynne Streyer Noble (M.Ed. ’74, Ed.D. ’80 Elem Ed), professor of early childhood education at Columbia College in South Carolina. Noble is a Fulbright Scholar. Read her blog about her 2011 trip to Mongolia.

Become A Global Citizen

J. William Fulbright wrote, “In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.”  His legacy is a myriad of programs all designed to provide that global understanding.  I would commend to all Curry School grads any of the Fulbright programs available to you.  As graduates of UVa, I know you are life-long learners, full of curiosity about the wider world, and you have a lot to share, as well.  Fulbright programs offer you the opportunity to satisfy all these characteristics.

As I write this, I am sitting in my apartment in Ulaanbaatar (UB), Mongolia nearing the end of my six-month tenure as a Fulbright Scholar at the Mongolian State University of Education.  This has been an amazing adventure – each day brings new places, new people, new ideas, new possibilities. My colleagues and I revel in the opportunities to teach each other.  Together, we work on English and Mongolian.  I introduce new teaching methods and they “Mongolize” them, as they call it. I show them how to teach the application of theory to the classroom, and they then eagerly develop their own activities.  I try to get them to plan ahead, and they try to get me to go with the flow.  We have accomplished a lot, including signing a five-year agreement to exchange faculty and students between my Columbia College and the MSUE.

I have been involved in teaching, research, writing and, of course, learning.   I have been able to travel to the north, south, east and west of UB – sometimes for business (teaching) and always for pleasure.  Family, friends, colleagues and students have visited me here – after it warmed up, of course! They share my love of Mongolia.

I have also had the chance to see other Fulbright programs in action.  There are a number of Fulbright English Teaching Assistants here in UB, recent college grads who are able to live abroad and teach English, while honing language skills, increasing knowledge of the host country and continuing their own research and study.   In addition, our Embassy me to participate in reading applications from and conducting interviews with Mongolian professionals wishing to pursue a Master’s degree at an American institution.  I know that the women and men we chose for this opportunity will make a positive impact on their American hosts, and will come to be important players in Mongolia’s future when they return.

All educators have the opportunity to participate in the Fulbright-Hays program.  In 2004, I was fortunate to be chosen as a group member for a month in Lithuania, Latvia and St. Petersburg.  In our group were faculty from several colleges and universities, and many public school classroom teachers – all grades, as well as school administrators.  Faculty from local universities in the cities we visited delivered lectures, hosts arranged wonderful traveling experiences, and we made connections to our own fields of study as we went.  Some were gathering folk tales, some were accumulating musical instruments, and others were focusing on the history or current social status as fodder for courses.  I pursued the current role of women in these countries in order to develop a seminar for our honors program. And, of course, I took special note of educational policy and practice in each place.

School teachers, in particular, have the opportunity to participate in the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.  This is a direct exchange of job, house, etc. While living in Northern Ireland in 1996, I met a teacher from New York who had “exchanged” with a teacher in NI.  We were both taking bodhran (drum) lessons, and she was thoroughly enjoying and being challenged by her new teaching and living situation, as was her exchange mate, then in America.

Fulbright was clearly ahead of his time.  He recognized the need for global understanding – real hands-on experiences, not just academic knowledge.  He made it possible for, by now, thousands of educators to be exposed to new and inspiring cultures, forge strong and lasting relationships across the world, and use knowledge of these places and people in their work. You already have the distinction of being a Curry School graduate.  Now, I strongly encourage you to take the opportunity to become a global citizen and pursue participation in a Fulbright program.

Lynne’s post was submitted last June to the Fall 2011 Curry Alumni Writing Contest. To submit an entry in the next contest round, go to curry.virginia.edu/writing-contest