Peabody College

Finding one’s passion is the key to a fulfilling life, says Betsy Wills, and helping young people tap into their passions has become one of hers. Read More

Rawlings executives John and Robert Parish carry on the family tradition of working in the sporting goods industry. Read More

Cover Illustration by Christiane Beauregard Visit Peabody College’s website at peabody.vanderbilt.edu Joan Brasher, Editor Jan Read, Senior Director, Integrated Communications Donna Pritchett, Art Director Chris Collins, Designer Bonnie Arant Ertelt, Class Notes Editor Contributors: Kurt Brobeck, Lisa A. Dubois, Bonnie Arant Ertelt, Jennifer Johnston, Kathleen Russell,… Read More

In a fragmented world, education can build bridges across oceans, mountains and deserts; it can draw connections between cultures that seemingly have little in common; and it can break the knots of tightly bound prejudices through shared experiences and mutual concerns. For these reasons, Peabody College has embarked on a journey of robust international exchange. For more than a decade, Peabody faculty members have been crisscrossing the globe to study and teach best educational practices. They have invested in programs to bring teachers and education leaders from other countries to the Vanderbilt campus and have collaborated with education researchers abroad to find solutions to the most impregnable problems facing schools today. Read More

Nearly 50 years later, Chong-Moon Lee recalls the generosity he encountered during his first visit to the Peabody Library. Read More

Ava Foster Sellers, who in her nearly 50 years at Vanderbilt helped transform the university’s job placement office into a full-scale career planning service with a holistic approach for preparing students for the working world, died Nov. 25 in Nashville. Read More

Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development has named Carol R. Johnson, former superintendent of Boston Public Schools, a visiting professor in its Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations beginning in January 2014. Read More

More than 400 top journalists, scholars, communications professionals and newsmakers from across the country will converge on the Vanderbilt University campus in spring 2014 for the national Education Writers Association’s annual gathering. Read More

Educators from far-flung lands will share favorite childhood folktales with third- and fourth-graders at Eakin Elementary School in Nashville, Tenn., on Thursday, Dec. 5. Read More

A new approach to teaching pre-kindergarten could take a bite out of the achievement gap and level the playing field for America’s growing population of English language learners, according to a published study by researchers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development. Read More

Positive interactions in a pre-kindergarten classroom may be equally or more important to the future academic development of 4-year-olds than learning letters and numbers, according to Dale Farran, senior associate director of the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Read More

Peabody professors Paul Yoder and Ann Kaiser are recipients of new grants from the National Institutes of Health Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE). Yoder and Kaiser of Vanderbilt have received ACE grants to study language interventions for young children. “Early intervention with autism is one of the big success stories,”… Read More

  Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement; Joseph Murphy; Corwin, 2012 More than 2 million children in the United States are now homeschooled, up from only 15,000 40 years ago, but little research has been done on the academic and social outcomes of this student population. In… Read More

Kindergarten teachers report spending much of their math instructional time teaching students basic counting skills and how to recognize geometric shapes—skills the students have already mastered before setting foot in the kindergarten classroom, new research finds. Read More

A common reading disorder goes undiagnosed until it becomes problematic, according to the results of five years of study by researchers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College in collaboration with the Kennedy Krieger Institute/Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Results of the study were recently published online by the National Institutes of Health. Read More

Exceptional spatial ability at age 13 predicts creative and scholarly achievements more than 30 years later, according to results from a Vanderbilt University longitudinal study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Read More

Matthew Springer In recent years, policymakers concerned with how to compensate teachers have increasingly sought to tie teacher pay to student outcomes. Market-minded education reformers have also begun to experiment by offering incentives to teachers who demonstrably add value to students’ education. But how effective are such programs? Does altering… Read More

Sun-Joo Cho Leonard Bickman was named professor of psychology, emeritus. Vera A. Stevens Chatman was named professor of human and organizational development, emerita. Chatman will also be inducted into the Academy for Women of Achievement by the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee and First Tennessee. Sun-Joo Cho, assistant professor… Read More

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) presented its 2013 Outstanding Book Award to Vanderbilt University professor Christopher Loss for Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2012) in April. Loss’s book tracks the dramatic results of the federal government’s… Read More

Donna Ford Donna Ford, professor of special education, is one of 14 university professors recognized by the Southeastern Conference for achievement in research and scholarship. The SEC announced April 10 the winners of its 2013 Faculty Achievement Awards. These annual awards honor professors from the SEC’s 14 member universities who… Read More