Alumni & Careers
School Leadership
Alumni Profiles
Sonya Irving, Ed.M.’07
Sonya Irving served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa before joining Teach For America in 2000. She taught sixth grade self-contained at Burnet Elementary School in Houston's historic East End community. After three years at Burnet, she moved to YES Prep Public Schools. YES is a free, open-enrollment public school system that serves low-income minority students in 6th-12th grades. While at YES, Sonya taught sixth-grade math; Academic, Personal and Social Development (APSD); Middle School Math Lab; and Algebra I. She also designed math and APSD curricula and developed district math assessments while serving as a grade level chair and mentor. At HGSE, Sonya earned a master's degree in the teacher leadership strand of the School Leadership Program. She is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on middle school mathematics. She plans to return to YES Prep to serve as the district’s first mathematics coach.
Brendan Randall, Ed.M.’07
Brendan is a lawyer from Minnesota who switched gears to become a history teacher at an all-girls boarding school in upstate New York. In addition to standard history surveys, Brendan taught applied ethics and comparative religion. Interested in studying leadership and moral development, Brendan returned to school himself to pursue degrees both at HGSE and the Harvard Divinity School. "I was drawn to the teacher leadership program at HGSE because I wanted to return to the classroom after completing my graduate studies. I considered other leadership programs, but they focused on administrative leadership." Brendan currently is in the Program for Religion and Secondary Education at Harvard Divinity School, where he is studying spiritual development and comparative religious ethics.
Katie Rocker, Ed.M.‘07
Prior to coming to HGSE, Katie spent three years teaching fourth grade at the Brearley School in New York City. She recalls, “At Brearley, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to join various faculty committees. I found that becoming involved in the school as a whole – rather than compromising my classroom teaching – enriched my development as both a teacher and as a member of a professional community.” With this experience in mind, when researching graduate programs, Katie searched for one that would both allow her to study curriculum and pedagogy as well as learn more about leadership roles for teachers. She found the perfect fit in the teacher leadership strand of the School Leadership Program. As Katie attests, “Under the mentorship of Kitty Boles, my classmates and I quickly came to appreciate the vital role that teachers, working together, can play in improving our nation’s schools. With the benefit of research and practice – enriched through our consistent interaction with one another as well as with the other members of the SLP Program – we left HGSE inspired to return to our classrooms, and determined to make a difference.” Post-HGSE, Katie is thrilled to be teaching fourth grade as part of a teaching team at the Meadowbrook School in Weston, Mass.
Amy Smith, Ed.M.‘07
Amy Smith now teaches English at Boston Community Leadership Academy, a pilot school in the Boston Public Schools. Before her year at HGSE, Amy taught four years at Charlestown High, also in the Boston Public School system. She chose to study teacher leadership at Harvard because she was committed to teaching after the SLP program, but also wanted to broaden her understanding of how schools and districts work. She reflects, “My coursework in the teacher leadership program helped me develop my teaching philosophy, but also showed me what roles I could play as a teacher to bring the ideas I think are important to my larger school community.”
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Thomas Hehir |
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