HGSE in the Media

December 2007

The Alpha Effect
"In the early '80s Carol Gilligan, who held the first chair in gender studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, lamented that girls in their teens compromised their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby 'losing their voice.'" (Newsweek, 1/2/08)

Opposing View: Program "Deadens" Vitality
"Harvard's [Professor] Howard Gardner, an expert on cognition, is right: Core Knowledge 'seems destined to deaden... the vitality of the culture for most students.'" (USA Today, 12/26/07)

New School of the Arts All Set for Operations in the New Year
"Singapore's new School of the Arts starts operations from its interim campus in the new year, and teachers have been busy attending workshops on topics like student assessment and curriculum planning." (Channel New Asia, 12/20/07)

Gateway Teacher Goes to Harvard to Learn How Kids Brains Function
"Kaia Huseby is convinced students learn better when they know how they learn. The new third-grade teacher at Gateway School in Santa Cruz has been showing her students the simple basics of what she learned in a Harvard University graduate program that studies how the brain learns and stores information." (Santa Cruz Sentinel, 12/20/07)

Software Group Aims to Help Ed. Tech. Startups Grow
"Jody Clarke, a Harvard University education researcher, was showing off the River City Project, a digital multiplayer game that teaches about science and history. Clarke wanted a company to take over the game." (Education Week, 12/19/07, Registration required)

New Teachers Outdo Peers of Last Decade on Academic Scales
"Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University, cautioned that academic records do not closely correlate with teacher effectiveness, and for that reason, recruiting academically stronger teachers may not be as important as assessing performance on the job." (Education Week, 12/19/07, Registration required)

Ray Williams Appointed First Director of Education
"In November, the Harvard University Art Museums released a collaborative report on study center learning with Project Zero, a research group at Harvard's Graduate School of Education." (Art Daily.com, 12/14/07)

Survey Reveals Best Places for Junior Faculty to Work
"Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities and Dartmouth College are among the institutions of higher education that junior faculty members say treat new scholars especially well, says a report released last week by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, ...which is based at Harvard's Graduate School of Education." (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/14/07, Paid registration required)

From Neuroscience to Childhood Policy
"The healthy development of children is really the foundation for economic productivity, responsible citizenship, and lifelong physical and mental health. Science can add new insights into how health, learning, and competencies develop over time, beyond just the social and political contextual factors." - Professor Jack Shonkoff (The Harvard Gazette, 12/13/07)

Experts Praise Classroom Media
"For Casey E. O'Sullivan, 25, a middle school teacher in Dover, MA, the event was an opportunity to consider new approaches to teaching." (The Harvard Crimson, 12/13/07)

The Importance of Early Education
"It's no longer an issue in the scientific community about whether early experiences shape brain circuitry. But it's still a very complex question in the scientific community when you get beyond the why question, of what should we do, and when should we begin." - Professor Jack Shonkoff (Harvard Gazette, 12/6/07)

The Heinz Dilemma
"Helen Haste, Bob Selman, and others discuss Lawrence Kohlberg and 'the first experiment to quantify the human capacity for ethical reasoning.'" (BBC Radio, 12/5/07)

Slow Reading in Dyslexia Tied to Disorganized Brain Tracts
"Dyslexia marked by poor reading fluency - slow and choppy reading - may be caused by disorganized, meandering tracts of nerve fibers in the brain, according to researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education." (Newswire, 12/5/07)

Bringing Change Through Changement
"[Professor Howard] Gardner, who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences - the idea that there exist different kinds of human intelligence, including bodily, musical, linguistic, and spatial - said he hopes that the series will provide glimpses of how different creative minds work." (The Harvard Crimson, 11/29/07)

Trends in Student Use of Information Technology: A Sea Change?
"[Professor] Chris Dede writes that 'Our ways of thinking and knowing, teaching and learning are undergoing a sea change...' but that more research is yet needed to fully understand and appreciate the options and opportunities that technology can provide to higher education." (Bulletin News, 11/28/07)

Good Work in Psychology
"When a scholarly discipline involves human beings - as researchers or subjects, as clinicians or patients - ethical issues are certain to loom large." (The Psychologist, 11/07, Paid registration required)

"Universal Design" Concept Pushed for Education
"Over time, those accommodations have become useful to people who do not have mobility or hearing problems, advocates point out. And both are so common now that they're practically invisible, said David H. Rose, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Special Technology, in Wakefield, Mass. Founded in 1984, CAST has spearheaded the development of classroom materials based on universal-design principles." (Education Week, 10/31/07, Registration required)

Partners For Change: Public Schools and Community-Based Organizations
"Community-based organizations can play important mediating roles to break down isolation and connect schools and the communities they serve." - Associate Professor of Education Mark Warren (Voices in Urban Education, Fall 2007)