Meet Helen Sullivan

Helen Sullivan’s connection to Harvard University goes a long way back. “I was born and raised in Cambridge, attended public schools here, and remember walking through Harvard Yard every day of high school on my way home,” she says. “I never imagined I’d come back here as an HGSE student. But this program has been everything I wanted it to be and more. As a reading specialist intern, I’ve had the opportunity to apply the teaching strategies I learned in ways that actually make a difference to my students. And, throughout, I’ve received concrete and immediate feedback on my lesson plans and have been inspired to be more thoughtful and critical of my planning and lessons.”

Growing up, Helen was always interested in working with kids, in art (“I try and incorporate that into my classroom”), and in traveling. After graduating with a Spanish major with an elementary teaching certificate, she decided to combine all of those interests to create her own career path. “I taught a lot of different classes at several different elementary schools, just to get a better sense of the differences between them. A teaching internship in Argentina also sparked my curiosity about schools in different countries. So I traveled a fair bit, spent some time in Brazil, Uruguay, Scotland, England, Spain, and Portugal, and, finally ended up teaching for a few years in Mexico. But I constantly found myself wishing I was back in school so I could find answers to all of the education-related questions that kept coming up.

“This was a flexible, one-year program. It offered outstanding faculty and peers to guide me forward, regardless of the path I chose afterward. I could focus specifically on issues of literacy related to my interest in bilingual education. It emphasized a practical, applied approach. And, of course, it meant I could move back home. It was a great fit.”