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TRRE Faculty Focus - Kathryn McCurdy, Ph.D.

 

Kathryn with her oldest son, Eli.

Kathryn McCurdy Ph.D. is the Director of Induction and Mentoring for the Teacher Residency for Rural Education program. She also is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the UNH Education Department where she serves as the Director of Field Experiences for the University’s Manchester campus. As a former middle school math teacher, Kathryn teaches Exploring Mathematics with Young Children to TRRE residents. Both her practical expertise and research backgrounds are in the field of beginning teacher learning, mentoring, and induction.

In her role as Director of Induction and Mentoring, Kathryn collaborates with the TRRE Management Team and school partners to develop programming that supports TRRE graduates in their first two years of teaching through mentoring, virtual networks, and continued professional development.

Examples of 2020-2021 induction and mentoring activities include:

  •  Graduates from Cohort 1 (M.Ed. 2018), Cohort 2 (M.Ed. 2019) and Cohort 3 (M.Ed. 2020) meet virtually once a month and remain engaged with the TRRE program for peer and faculty mentor support.
  • TRRE graduates and TRRE Teaching Mentors will participate in a STEM Inquiry in an online course with our partner, UNH Cooperative Extension, between November 2020 and April 2021.
  • TRRE is piloting a virtual platform and subscription service called Eduplanet21 to support ongoing professional learning of TRRE graduates.
  • As an alternative to the cancelled June 2020 TRRE Community Connection Series Conference,  speakers will be presenting remotely to TRRE audiences approximately once a month for the academic year.

o   Mike Anderson (Aug. 10 and 17, 2020): Mike Anderson presented “Getting Off to a Great Start: The First Weeks of School.” These sessions offered practical approaches to classroom management to Cohorts 3 and 4. These sessions were organized, in part, due to feedback from TRRE residents, graduates, and school partners.

o   Bill Wilmot (October 6, 2020): Bill Wilmot, CAST Implementation Specialist, will present virtually to TRRE residents, graduates and teaching mentors on the intersection of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). To address the TRRE focus on these concepts, Bill will discuss how Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (Ross Greene, Ph.D. @ Lives in the Balance), an approach to social emotional learning that moves away from a behaviorist approach to embrace social and emotional growth as a process of skill development, and Universal Design for Learning complement each other as he also addresses the role of emotion and social-emotional skills in learning.

“For me, working with TRRE has been the perfect combination of programmatic, theory, and practice that I love engaging in. I’ve had the opportunity over the past 4 years to work with such creative and adventurous people: residents, teaching mentors, school and community partners, and UNH colleagues.”

– Kathryn McCurdy


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