2010

Faculty & Staff Achievements
Program Notes and News

Faculty & Staff 2009-2010

Tom Brunzell

Tom Brunzell (Ed.M. '07 School Leadership) works as the Dean of Students at KIPP Infinity Charter School in Harlem.  He was the proud recipient of the 2009 KIPP National Excellence in Teaching Award, a $10,000 prize for his work with both KIPP NYC and the national organization.  Based on the work seeded in his Bank Street research class, Tom's work in childhood resiliency along with character education for the KIPP organization has led the organization towards deeping conversations around the social and emotional development of KIPP's students.

Sue Carbary

Sue Carbary (GS) started a series of workshops through the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services (JBFCS) on Classroom Strategies for Working with Children on the Autistic Spectrum. Aimed at teachers and directors, the series took place in four early childhood settings in Brooklyn from December 14, 2009 through March 18, 2010.

Stan Chu

Stan Chu, '72 (GS) did in-service teacher training with teachers of the Tsinghua International School in Beijing, China, during Bank Street's spring break, March 28 - April 2, 2010.

Stan also is consulting with the Rwanda Education Assistance Project >>> in an effort to help improve primary education in Rwanda. As a result of the 1994 genocide and the AIDS pandemic, Rwanda has over 600,000 orphans out of a population of ten million. By age eighteen, many children face having to leave an orphanage without any family support (nuclear or extended), an unfinished education, few or no skills, and no employment. Of the 2.15 million students who attend primary school, about 266,000 (10%) are in secondary school. Student/teacher ratio is 71/1, one of the highest in Africa. Most primary schools lack sufficient infrastructure, libraries, and scholastic materials, as well as trained teachers.

In January 2009, Stan led a five-day in-service workshop in Kigali, Rwanda, and returned to Rwanda in July 2009 with Ed Ballen, Executive Director of REAP. Bank Street College and REAP have a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which is a hopeful basis for future collaborative work in Rwanda. REAP's mission is to help vulnerable youth and their families gain competence, express their capabilities, sustain community by becoming active participants in their education, and learn the social, emotional, and cognitive skills to shape the emerging future of Rwanda. REAP and UNICEF/Rwanda will conduct a five day inservice teacher education program in Rwanda July 26-30, 2010. For more information see: www.rwandaedu.org

Lia Gelb

Lia Gelb, '59 (GS), Director of Non-Traditional & School Based Programs, reports that this is the Gradute School's twentieth year doing professional development in the Yonkers Public Schools. Betsy Grob, '72 (GS), Margaret Martinez-Deluca (GS), Davia Brown-Franklyn (GS) and Cora Miles are working in six Yonkers schools this year. In addition, last July the team was invited to lead a professional development effort in an "Early Childhood Learning Lab." This brought together 5, 6, and 7-year-olds in nine classrooms, with teachers recruited from six schools in the district. The team acted as facilitators in introducing the teachers and children to a more open curriculum-rich environment and the activities that support that goal. The Learning Lab was so successful that the teachers asked for followup, and the districted has secured funding to repeat the program in July 2010. Also, we will be working in more Yonkers schools during the coming academic year.

Betsy Grob

Betsy Grob, '72 (GS) gave a workshop on Block Building to the teachers and administrators of the Brotherhood Synagogue Nursery School in Gramercy Park, NYC, on November 6, 2009.

On March 13, 2010, at City College of New York (CCNY), Betsy Grob facilitated a workshop on Block Building at "In Defense of Childhood - Play and Active Learning in Urban Schools," a conference being held in honor of the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and dedicated to the memory of Professor Lillian Weber, a greatly-respected progressive educator at CCNY.

Toni Porter

Toni Porter, (DCE) Director of the Institute for a Child Care Continuum (ICCC) in Bank Street's Division of Continuing Education, is a co-author of a chapter, "Family-sensitive Caregiving: A Key Component of Quality in Early Care and Education," in a volume on measurement issues in child care, Next Steps in The Measurement of Quality in Early Childhood Settings, to be published by Brookes Publishing in 2010.

The ICCC, with its partner Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., has completed four products in its federally-funded Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) project, "Supporting Quality in Home-based Child Care." These four are: a comprehensive review of the literature on family child care and family, friend and neighbor care; a compilation of 90 initiatives across the country that aim to improve quality in home-based child care settings; a compendium of detailed profiles of 23 initiatives; and a paper for practitioners on designing and evaluating efforts to support home-based child care. The publications will be available in early 2010 through OPRE and also through Research Connections, the child care research archive (www.researchconnections.org) as well as through the Institute's and Mathematica policy Research, Inc.'s web sites.

Toni Porter and Diane Paulsell, partners on the OPRE-funded project, gave a presentation on the preliminary findings at the National Association for Family Child Care Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on June 26, 2009.

Toni Porter was the invited keynote speaker at the Arizona Association for Supportive Child Care's (AASCC) 10th Anniversary Celebration of its Kith and Kin Project on August 6, 2009, in Phoenix. The project, which uses support groups as a strategy, was based on initial work by the Institute. During the August visit, ICCC staff also trained AASCC staff how to use the CCAT-R for the evaluation of its two-year statewide expansion of the Project this year.

The Institute for a Child Care Continuum staff trained a cohort of staff from Illinois Action for Children and the National Center for Children in Poverty to use the Child Care Assessment Tool for Relatives (CCAT-R) - an observation instrument that was developed by the ICCC for measuring quality in family, friend and neighbor care - in an evaluation of Community Connections, a Chicago-based project to improve quality in home-based child care. The two-and-a-half-day training was offered by ICCC from October 19-21, 2009, at Bank Street North.

In August 2009, ICCC staff completed a slightly more than two-year evaluation of Step-Up, a multi-pronged effort to support family, friend and neighbor caregivers through Play and Learn groups, home visiting, and a resource van offered by Choices for Children, a community organization in San Jose, California. The project was funded by the James L. Knight Foundation. The evaluation used a pre/post test design with a sample of 51 caregivers. Findings indicated statistically significant improvements in quality, as measured by the CCAT-R, in caregiver support for children's cognitve, language, and social-emotional development.

Toni Porter was an invited presenter on home-based child care at the Annual Child Care Policy Research Consortium Research Meeting on October 29, 2009, in Washington, D.C. Her paper, "Support for Families in Home-based Child Care: What are We Learning?," was given in the session on "Emerging Issues in Home-based Child Care."

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