Middle School Education

Dr. Lawton came to early childhood education/child psychology through her commitment to equity and social justice. She believes that a safe, accepting learning environment enables risk-taking, growth and learning. Dr. Lawton views students as co-constructors of knowledge and draws on their wisdom and prior learning experiences in order to “lead out,” from the Latin definition for education “educare”. She think it is important for prospective teachers and those in the helping professions to reflect on their own familial, cultural, and educational experience in order to become mindful, reflective educators, and healers.

She has a B.S. from Colby College, M.S. from Wheelock College, CAGS from University of Vermont, and Ed.D. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Mary Ann teaches in the graduate literacy and specialist teacher of reading programs. She is passionate about providing children and young adults with authentic reading, writing, listening, and speaking opportunities in and outside of the classroom. She spent over a decade teaching language arts and the humanities in public schools in New York and New England. In her literacy courses at Lesley, Mary Ann transforms theory into practice, asking teachers to engage deeply with content, examine pedagogical choices, and consider a range of perspectives.

Her research interests include teaching with children’s literature, particularly nonfiction/informational text; the production of school knowledge; the history of children’s and young adult literature; the role of multimodal texts as scaffolds for comprehension; and critical literacy. In collaboration with Lesley colleague and coauthor Erika Thulin Dawes, Mary Ann has created instructional models for strategically organizing children’s and young adult literature of all genres, along with multimodal digital texts, at the center of inquiry-based curriculum in language arts and the content areas in Teaching with Text Sets (Shell, 2012).

She is also the coauthor of Teaching to Complexity: An Evaluation Framework for Literary and Content-Area Texts (Shell, 2013), blogs at “The Classroom Bookshelf,” a School Library Journal blog, and chairs the National Council of Teachers of English Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Committee through 2018. 

Mary Ann presents regionally and nationally, partners with museums and libraries, has appeared on public radio and consults with public television. She also coordinates Lesley’s Collaborative Internship Program, a public and private residency-based partnership for preservice teachers now in its fifth decade.

Education

BA, Haverford College
MA and Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University

Brook Eisenbach's areas of academic focus and expertise are English Education, Middle Level Education, Virtual Education, Relational Care in the Classroom, Teacher Empowerment, and Arts-based Qualitative Research. 

She has a Ph.D. in English Education: Curriculum and Instruction from the University of South Florida, M.Ed. in Reading Education from the University of South Florida, and B.A. in English Education from the University of South Florida. 

Janet Sauer draws on her own experiences teaching young children, adolescents, and adults in multiple contexts to prepare educators for inclusive education. Her scholarship is based in the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies and focuses on family engagement. She believes advocacy for the inclusion of students with disabilities in community and educational contexts is a social justice issue and is necessary for a healthy democracy. 

Dr. Sauer has a B.A. from Emerson College, M.Ed. from Ohio University, and Ed.D. from the University of Northern Iowa.

Valerie Harlow Shinas is an associate dean in the Graduate School of Education and a faculty member in the graduate literacy programs.

I joined the faculty in the Graduate School of Education in 2012 after more than a decade working with middle school students and teachers.  In many ways, I still consider myself a middle school teacher – I care deeply about how we engage and motivate young adolescents to become lifelong learners. 

As a teacher educator, I use my teaching experiences to make visible the connections between theory and practice for my students.  Much of my work at Lesley University has centered on preparing teachers and teacher candidates to develop and deliver effective literacy and disciplinary literacy instruction.  With expertise in the areas of technology-integrated literacy instruction and the TPACK theoretical framework, my research interests include integration of digital tools to support literacy and learning in K-12 classrooms.  In addition, recent scholarly work has focused on teacher development and assessment of teacher practice.

Education: BA, Anna Maria College; M.Ed., University of Massachusetts-Lowell; PhD, University of Delaware.

As an assistant professor of education and core faculty in the Middle and High School programs in the Graduate School of Education, I help prepare the next generation of secondary school teachers to engage their students in learning, finding more effective alternatives to traditional lecture-based, skill-and-drill pedagogy.

I have taught high school humanities for 17 years, and have had the privilege to work in suburban, urban, and international teaching and learning environments. My dissertation, A study of the effects of peace education on academic achievement in an urban middle school, exemplifies my research focus: looking at ways in which student-centered, interdisciplinary, project based learning can aid both student learning and student socio-emotional well-being.

I am coordinator for the G.L.O.B.E. (Global Learning Opportunities in Boston Area Education) consortium. We are currently running an interdisciplinary after school course in Green Technology - check out our promotional video here:

Comparative international education, and international school exchange in particular, are other passions of mine. You can follow some of my work with schools in Japan and in Turkmenistan.

I consult for Boston area middle and high schools - please contact me if you are interested in how I can help work with your school or district to meet your goals.

Education: BA, Brandeis University; MA,Tufts University; PhD, Lesley University

Roser’s current research focuses on understanding how students make sense of mathematics in the context of the classroom, with a focus on classroom discourse developed through the interaction of students, teacher, and curriculum artifacts. She brings academic expertise in the following areas: methods of teaching mathematics at the secondary school level; mathematics professional development for teachers; discourse analysis for understanding meaning making in mathematics; socio-cultural theories and their appropriation in the learning of mathematics.

Roser holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an M.Ed. from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an Ed.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Amy Gooden is passionate about the intersection of language, culture, and education. She has investigated cultural pluralism in a Bribri indigenous and Jamaican descendent community in Costa Rica. She has also directed and conducted international English as a foreign language teacher training programs for K-12 teachers in China. 

Her area of work at Lesley is TESOL and Bilingual Education. 

She has an Ed.D. from Boston University School of Education, Ed.M. from Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and B.A. from Emerson College.