Faculty Specialities
For additional information, including publications, please click on a faculty member's name.
John Pierre Ameer
Professor Ameer's current research work is on secondary school reform in the United States, and on a continuing exploration of multicultural education. He has had articles and book chapters published on multicultural education, including A Mosaic of Multicultural Achievement (1991) for the Massachusetts Department of Education. Professor Ameer has a book currently in press—a memoir of the Assyrian community in Yonkers, New York, and is working on two additional books. The first is about the effort of American missionaries to open schools in Iran, in the 19th century, an expansion of his doctoral thesis. The second is on the use of films in elementary and secondary classrooms, an expansion of a teacher's guide that he wrote for McGraw-Hill, Instructor's Manual and Film/Video Guide (2000).
Tom Del Prete
Professor Del Prete's interests include university-school partnership, models of urban teacher education,
educational discourse, history curriculum and learning, and spirituality and education. He has been recognized
for his scholarship on Thomas Merton and education. His book Thomas Merton and the Education of the Whole Person
earned the first scholarship award given by the International Thomas Merton Society in 1991. He has published
about twenty articles and reviews in Merton studies. He was elected President of the International Thomas Merton
Society for a two year term in 1997.
Professor Del Prete founded and oversees continuing development of the Hiatt Center "K-17 Professional Development School Collaborative," a partnership comprising the Goddard and Hiatt elementary schools and the A.L.L., South High and University Park Campus secondary schools. The Collaborative is dedicated to the joint development of learning environments and practices that serve all the students in Main South, a diverse and low income area of Worcester. Likewise, the partnership is committed to developing exemplary models of urban teacher preparation, professional development and school reform, and to learning from the effort. Professor Del Prete developed the "rounds" model, a collaborative learning model for teachers, as well as the curriculum team model that bridges and integrates arts and sciences and practitioner perspectives-two signature Hiatt Center programs. He co-chairs the Hiatt Center History Curriculum Team.
Sharon Griffin
For information, please visit http://www.edletter.org/insights/griffin.shtml and http://clarku.edu/numberworlds/
Letina Jeranyama
Professor Jeranyama's clinical work is focused at the secondary level. She works primarily with Math &
Science pre-service teachers in the Hiatt Main South Secondary School Collaborative with the Worcester Public
Schools. She facilitates an on site seminar for both student teachers and their mentor teachers. Letina also
facilitates monthly meetings for math teachers as co-chair of the Hiatt Center K-17 Mathematics Curriculum Team.
Her current research focuses on using the "rounds" model of teacher professional development instituted but the Hiatt Center. She presented her work on this research to the NARST (National Association of Researchers in Science Teaching) in 2006.
Holly Kapuscienski
Professor Kapuscienski's clinical work is focused at the Elementary level, and currently centers on the
Jacob Hiatt Magnet School, a partner in the Clark-Worcester Public Schools Collaborative. Holly spends a
considerable amount of time at the Hiatt School supervising Clark practicum and pre-practicum students and
facilitating on-site seminars for both the students and their mentor teachers on a range of topics including:
"Mentoring Pre-Service Teachers", "Integrating Primary Sources into the Social Studies Curriculum", and "Ways
of Knowing: History."
Her current research focuses on facilitating the integration of the specially designed pre-K Number Worlds™ math program with "Accountable Talk" in several pre-school classrooms in Springfield, MA. She has been working for the past few years as a mentor and coach for the pre-school teachers involved in the program. She has led numerous training and development workshops as well as provided on-site demonstrations in the pre-school classrooms.
James McDermott
Professor McDermott's clinical work focuses on schools in the Hiatt Main South Secondary School
Collaborative: University Park Campus School (where he taught for 6 years, creating the secondary English
program), South High Community School (where he taught and coached for 25 years), and the new secondary ALL
school. Professor McDermott works with MA and MAT students, supervising and facilitating on-site seminars for
students and for teachers. He encourages student teachers to develop classrooms that engage all urban students
in rigorous content in a warm and inviting environment. Reading, writing and thinking are at the center of
Professor McDermott's pedagogy.
Professor McDermott has presented numerous workshops locally and nationally. His focus is on creating classrooms that engage all students as thinking and feeling human beings through using low stakes writing to help even the most at-risk students to think deeply and to understand rigorous content.
Sarah Michaels
Professor Michaels is Professor of Education and Senior Research Scholar at the Jacob Hiatt Center for
Urban Education at Clark University. A sociolinguist by training, she has been actively involved in teaching
and research in the area of language, culture, "multi-literacies," and the discourses of math and science.
She was the founding Director of the Hiatt Center for Urban Education and works to bring together teacher
education, educational research on classroom discourse, and district-based efforts at educational reform.
She is currently involved in a variety of research projects which focus on academically productive talk in math, science, and English language arts, from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade. In these projects, she is working on curriculum and professional development so that it focuses central attention on rigorous, coherent, and equitable classroom discourse. As one example of this work, she has just completed a book for the National Research Council (co-authored with Andy Shouse and Heidi Schweingruber) called Ready, Set, Science!: Putting Research to Work in the K-8 Science Classroom. Ready, Set, Science! is filled with classroom case studies that bring to life the research findings and help readers to replicate success. Most of these stories are based on real classroom experiences that illustrate the complexities that teachers grapple with every day. They show how teachers work to select and design rigorous and engaging instructional tasks, manage classrooms, orchestrate productive discussions with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of students, and help students make their thinking visible using a variety of representational tools.
Michaels is also a co-author of the CD-ROM suite of tools, Accountable Talk: Classroom Conversation that Works (in collaboration with the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh), which is currently being used in large urban districts throughout the country. In promoting teacher research, she works to support teachers as theorizers, curriculum innovators, and educational leaders who use the tools of ethnography and discourse analysis in generating new and useable knowledge for improving instruction and student learning in their own and others' classrooms.
Maureen Reddy
Professor Reddy's interests include the development of reading, writing and spelling, classroom discourse,
children's literature and teacher research. Her current research focuses on children's understanding of the
complex literary narratives represented by postmodern picture books.
Professor Reddy's clinical work is focused at the Elementary level, and currently centers on the Goddard School, a partner in the Clark-Worcester Public Schools Collaborative, where she supervises Clark practicum and pre-practicum students, and works with mentor teachers on mentoring issues and the development of their own teaching practice.
Heather Roberts
Professor Roberts' interests include literature and writing, developing critical literacy across the
disciplines, school-university partnerships, collaborative curriculum development, and urban school reform.
Professor Roberts' clinical work is focused at the secondary level. She works primarily with English, Foreign Language and History pre-service teachers at secondary schools within the Hiatt Main South Secondary School Collaborative. She regularly facilitates an on-site seminar for student and mentor teachers at South High School and co-chairs Hiatt Center K-16 curriculum teams in literacy and the humanities with teacher colleagues. She has also taught an English seminar for 11th and 12th graders at the University Park Campus School, and currently co-teaches a seminar on "Best Practice" for teachers and staff members at the new secondary ALL School.
Her present research focuses on developing effective university-high school partnerships and supporting secondary students from Clark's Main South community in their transition to college. She has been centrally involved in laying the groundwork for Clark University's new partnership with the ALL School and in expanding Clark's long-standing and highly successful partnership with the University Park Campus School. She will be co-presenting a paper on this work entitled "When the Community is a School: Strategies for Partnership Success," at a CITA conference on University-School Partnerships at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell this April.