Helping Hands
Experiential learning supports clinics, schools, and community at large
Glow and grow
Allison Gross flourishes as a student teacher, despite pandemic
Instead of driving to Winder, Georgia for her first day of student teaching, Allison Gross (B.S.Ed. ’21) logged onto her laptop and launched Google Meet where she worked in a virtual classroom setting for a semester.
During the fall of 2020, the College moved some student teaching experiences online to minimize face-to-face contact during the pandemic. So, not only was Gross learning how to adapt to her new life as a full-time student teacher, she was also learning how to use a new video-communication tool to teach and engage her second-grade students at County Line Elementary School in Barrow County.
“It was difficult because I had to play catch up with them since young students really were hit hard by the pandemic,” says Gross, who graduated this spring with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. “The focus isn’t always there, and just trying to get them back into the mindset of being in school to take their assessments and everything was hard.”
Despite these challenges, she continued teaching, building relationships, and helping her young students learn on an individual level, with some students requiring more assistance than others.
This past March, student teachers returned to the classroom—with masks and regular hand-washing—to complete their program’s experiential learning component. Gross spent a few weeks student teaching a new group of fifth-grade students via Zoom during the spring semester but completed her experience in the classroom at Whit Davis Elementary School in Athens, Georgia. She worked collaboratively with the class to address specific student needs, often assigning them to groups to exchange ideas and solve problems.
“I’m a really big proponent of collaboration in the classroom, and I think students like to work together,” says Gross, who will pursue her master’s degree in elementary education this fall as part of UGA’s Double Dawgs program. “I like to include some group work, so they can bounce ideas off each other. I always like to include sharing time, so we can go over how to solve math problems or an idea for a research project that they’re working on.”
For one lesson on different points of view, Gross’ class read “The Three Little Pigs” and then read “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, which is written from the perspective of the wolf. Afterward, the class discussed how the shift in perspective made them rethink the story. Gross then asked them to write their own version of a story from the perspective of a different character.
“I like hearing them read their writing and show what they’re proud of,” says Gross. “I was really lucky with my class. They’re all so nice to each other. We do ‘glows’ and ‘grows,’ so for a glow, they give each other compliments and say what they did well, and for a grow, they highlight what they can work on. They know no one is being mean—they’re just trying to help each other.”
Thanks to the student learning experience she received at UGA, both virtual and in-person, Gross feels prepared to lead her own classroom in the future—hopefully, in her home state of Maryland, where she can instill her love of learning and cooperative teamwork in young students.
—Kathryn Kao
Allison Gross (B.S.Ed. ’21)
Allison Gross (B.S.Ed. ’21)
Making student teaching work during the pandemic
Taiesha Smith created a system that helped make sense of a giant logistics puzzle
After Taiesha Smith accepted the job as director of the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Office of Experiential Learning a year and a half ago, she set about modernizing the office.
“All forms required for field placement approval were converted into documents that could be completed online,” she says. She didn’t realize that she was creating a perfect platform to deal with the onslaught of changes, cancellations, and volume of information that would soon be necessary to leave the office quickly during a pandemic.
In regular, non-COVID times, her office oversees placing students in real-life teaching situations and internships throughout Georgia. She works with seven of the 20 teacher prep programs in the College. Smith and her team are responsible for matching teacher candidates and interns with the right mentor, so they can complete their clinical practice and earn credit hours toward certification.
Getting approximately 300 UGA students placed at one of more than 180 partner sites is like a giant logistics puzzle. Not only that, placements need to be in the right field among an array of offerings, including counseling and special education.
Then COVID hit and a whole different level of challenges arrived in the form of new policies, changing schedules, and school closings. Some students had to have their placements rescheduled as many as five times. But they did indeed find their places, thanks to Smith’s calm efficiency and the digital system she’d already put in place.
Taiesha Smith, director of experiential learning
Taiesha Smith, director of experiential learning
“We went live document crazy,” she says. The system she created tracks real-time information on a huge number of variables, including which schools require masks, which are virtual or hybrid, and who is going where. Faculty can track changes as they happen and if a placement is canceled, they can immediately see what other options might be open for their students. Putting the forms online eliminated paper forms, phone calls, and other low-tech slowdowns in the office’s ability to respond quickly. “Had I not switched it all online before COVID, it would have been a lot more hectic.”
Smith and her team reacted swiftly to the ever-shifting circumstances that arose because of the pandemic. “Initially, there were students who were not able to be placed, so we thought about placements differently. We started reaching out and making partnerships with state institutions that had virtual teaching and internship opportunities for our students,” says Smith, who made sure to credit her team—Anna Hiers and Sarah Tschari—for the smooth rollout under bumpy conditions.
What’s her secret to doing her job with, as one co-worker described it, “incredible efficiency, grace, and good humor”?
“My secret is that I’m an educator at heart,” says Smith, who wanted to be a teacher since childhood. “My mom told me I was always teaching my baby dolls something,” she says. “I can sympathize with the teachers who we work with in our partner districts, so I’m always trying to think about how to help make our partnership more mutually beneficial. I’m able to see what we can do on our end to make things better and ultimately prepare these students to go out into the world and become the next generation of teachers, counselors, and speech language pathologists.”
—Jill Hamilton
Community reach for FY20
2,153
Number of hands-on learning experiences for students in schools, clinics, hospitals, and community settings
268
Number of schools, clinics, and community organizations across Georgia that have partnered with the College to provide experiential learning opportunities for students
Daphne Wolfe (M.Ed. ’20)
Daphne Wolfe (M.Ed. ’20)
“I was on spring break visiting some friends, and I didn’t really know anything about COVID yet. And then I realized I wasn’t coming back to campus. My return was delayed for two weeks, and then two weeks became a month. I needed to move out of my apartment in Athens. That’s when the College of Education’s student emergency scholarship came into play. I wasn’t living in Georgia anymore, but I still had to pay rent. My assistantship was still active, but it was ending, and I had already used those funds to move. The scholarship alleviated my financial stress and allowed me to move back to my parents’ house in Fort Worth, Texas to finish the rest of the semester.”
Commit to our students
To support students who have suffered a temporary crisis due to COVID-19, as well as students with more general financial needs, please contribute to the College of Education General Scholarship Fund, the Abigail Reddic Student Teaching Emergency Fund, or the College of Education Fund for Excellence with a gift of any size. For more information, contact Molly Thomas, director of development and alumni relations, at 706-542-2893 or molly2@uga.edu.
An advocate for students
From graduate student to career advisor, Daphne Wolfe is focused on student success
First-generation college student and alumna Daphne Wolfe (M.Ed. ’20) says she was regularly involved on campus while attending Texas A&M University as an undergraduate. The experiences she gained while interning for the university’s Career Center eventually led her to UGA, where she graduated last spring with a master’s degree in college student affairs administration.
“I’m a huge advocate for involvement on campus because that was one of the most important aspects of my own college experience,” says Wolfe, a career advisor and liaison to the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Texas State University. “The people I met, the unique experiences I had with student organizations, and the leadership skills I gained were all valid and important, and so that led me back to student affairs and career services at UGA.”
For two years, Wolfe served as a graduate assistant for UGA’s Center for Student Activities and Involvement, now the Department of Engagement, Leadership, and Services (ELS). In this role, she helped eight directors of UGA’s First Year Programs housed in the Student Government Association develop leadership and service curriculum for 150 students.
Additionally, Wolfe served on a campus-wide committee to improve the experience of transfer students, coordinated Presidential Summits for executive officers of student organizations, conducted weekly meetings with program directors and peer leaders, and more.
“The College has a very rigorous program in student affairs, but it's one where the practice that we received in our assistantships combined with the classroom experience is invaluable,” says Wolfe, who received a general scholarship from the College of Education during her last semester at UGA. “I have that experience in student activities, and now I can apply those skills to my professional life.”
While Wolfe started her new position at Texas State University last fall, most of her work thus far—from conducting advising meetings with students to working with supervisors on providing students with professional development opportunities—has taken place online. In fact, because of the pandemic—which impacted her last semester at UGA—Wolfe spent the last few months of graduate school with her parents in Fort Worth, Texas and attended a virtual hooding ceremony for graduation.
Despite these unfortunate circumstances, Wolfe is looking forward to not only meeting her students and co-workers face-to-face for the first time this summer, but also to reunite with the 19 people in her cohort, so they can walk together as a group under the Arch.
“Truthfully, while graduate school is hard for everyone, I am very grateful for the experience. I’m grateful for my cohort because we were always really close, and I think because of the pandemic, I had the opportunity to maintain those relationships a little bit better. So honestly, without them, I would not have been able to persist as well as I did.”
—Kathryn Kao
Improving community access
UGA’s Speech and Hearing Clinic creates inclusive content through partnership
When T.J. Ragan (B.S.Ed. ’00, M.A. ’02) became the director of UGA’s Speech and Hearing Clinic last spring, she prioritized building partnerships and creating a space that is welcoming to all.
To do this, she partnered with UGA’s Department of Linguistics and with American Sign Language (ASL) instructors in the College of Education to create trilingual content that is more inclusive of Spanish-speaking populations and ASL users.
“Our goal for the spring 2021 semester was to intensely focus on getting all of our patient documentation translated,” she says. “Additionally, we are working to increase inter-professional education opportunities for our speech-language pathology graduate students.”
To bring this vision to life, Ragan collaborated with UGA’s Department of Linguistics to create external-facing content in Spanish. She recruited two students who are minoring in Spanish— Britney Kazibwe and Danielle Obijeski—to assist with this effort. Both students have been trained in medical interpretation at UGA.
“We’re currently working on social media posts that are bilingual, in English and Spanish, about child development for hearing, speech, and language—what to expect at different ages, and what families can do to help their child,” she says.
Additionally, the clinic completed three introductory videos in Spanish, English, and ASL to highlight the clinic’s offerings.
“Our ultimate goal is that the UGA Speech and Hearing Clinic is a place that is accessible and welcoming to everyone and that our services benefit our entire community,” Ragan says. “We want to provide services not just to those who have the privilege of speaking the language of the majority, but to anyone who needs speech, language, or hearing supports.”
—Lauren Leathers
T.J. Ragan with students Britney Kazibwe and Danielle Obijeski.
T.J. Ragan with students Britney Kazibwe and Danielle Obijeski.
T.J. Ragan with students Britney Kazibwe and Danielle Obijeski.
T.J. Ragan with students Britney Kazibwe and Danielle Obijeski.
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