A history teacher helps middle schoolers chart their own course

In her first year at Fordham, Chantal Chevalier took a job in the admission office that showed her the kind of career she didn’t want to pursue.

“I realized that I did not like working in an office,” the Bronx native admits. “I talk too much, and I can’t look at a wall all day.”

When an opportunity arose for her to become a volunteer teacher with Generation Citizen, a group that partners with schools to provide civics lessons, she gave it a shot—and there was no turning back.

“I learned that I have a different connection with kids,” Chevalier says.

In her sophomore year, she began working as a college transition coach for the Student Leadership Network, helping juniors and seniors at In-Tech Academy in the Bronx apply to colleges, find financial aid opportunities, and plan for a big transition, potentially away from home.

Jump-Starting a Career in Education

Meanwhile, she switched her major from psychology to history and began looking into the Graduate School of Education’s accelerated Master of Science in Teaching program. That program, one of more than 30 dual-degree programs at Fordham, allowed her to take graduate-level courses as a senior and earn a master’s degree with only one additional year of study.

Now, after earning a bachelor’s degree in history at Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020 and her master’s in teaching the following year, she’s a seventh grade history teacher at the City College Academy of the Arts in upper Manhattan. She encourages her middle schoolers to start thinking about college as an option.

“That’s something that I’m really passionate about,” she says. “It’s very overwhelming for a lot of kids, especially if your parents didn’t go to college, or they went 40 years ago. It’s a completely different process now.”

Chevalier is just as passionate about teaching history, and she says that highlighting the human elements of past events is a key to keeping students engaged.

“I try to bring them together through the stories of people,” she explains. “I think that’s where you can learn a lot about human interaction and society, and what makes a society successful and what makes a society fail.”

She is also cognizant, she says, of how histories are told from specific perspectives.

“I think my approach is always to be as honest but as careful as possible, because I never want to put my own opinion into a student’s mind,” Chevalier says. “My job as an educator is to go in and to teach certain skills, to teach certain content, while also acknowledging who I am in this world.”

As a first-generation college graduate who was raised by a single mom, Chevalier is well aware of the challenges many middle school students and families face making ends meet.

“I want to be able to put my kids on to new opportunities, to tell them about the different things that they can do with their lives,” she says. “Where you are and where you were born is not the end-all be-all. You can create your own path, your own opportunity.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

They begin their term alongside new board chair Armando Nuñez, GABELLI ’82, who took office on July 1.

Read more about our new trustees below.

Donald “Don” Almeida, GABELLI ’73
Retired Vice Chairman, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC 

At PwC, Almeida was responsible for the firm’s global clients, markets, and industries. In addition to serving as a vice chairman, he worked as the client service vice chairman for the U.S. firm, a managing partner for several U.S. industry groups, and a member of the U.S. Board of Partners and PwC Global Board of Partners. In a career spanning four decades, he has served in several market-facing leadership roles with large multinational companies. He sits on the boards of multiple organizations, including WellDoc and Cardinal Hayes High School. 

Decades after graduating from the Gabelli School of Business with his bachelor’s degree in accounting, Almeida has continued to pay it forward at Fordham. He previously served as vice chairman of the Board of Trustees and is now a trustee, a member of the Gabelli School Advisory Board and Cura Personalis campaign cabinet, and a Gabelli School adjunct instructor. Almeida is also related to three Rams: his twin brother, David, GABELLI ’73; his nephew, David Almeida Jr., GABELLI ’03; and his cousin, Victor Frazao, FCRH ’70. 

Almeida lives in Armonk, New York, with his wife, Gail. They have two children, Gabriella and Matthew. 

Mandell L. Crawley, GABELLI ’09
Executive Vice President/Chief Human Resources Officer, Morgan Stanley

Crawley began his nearly 30-year career at Morgan Stanley when he was 17 years old. He rose in the ranks from a high school intern to a senior leader, in company positions that range from head of private wealth management and international wealth management, to global chief marketing officer, to head of U.S. fixed income sales and distribution for wealth management. Today he serves as Morgan Stanley’s chief human resources officer and as a member of several company committees and boards. In addition, he serves on the board of the national Boys and Girls Club and previously served on the board of Covenant House New York, an organization that helps youth experiencing homelessness. 

Crawley earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Northeastern Illinois University and an M.B.A. with honors from Fordham. Over the past decade, he has given back to the Fordham community in many ways—as a motivational speaker to student-athletes; as a special adviser for diversity, equity, and inclusion planning and programming at the Gabelli School of Business; and as a member of the Gabelli School’s centennial working committee, among other roles. In 2022, he served as a speaker at the Gabelli School’s graduate diploma ceremony, where he received an honorary doctor of humane letters. 

Crawley, who is originally from Chicago, now lives in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife, Allison, and their twin daughters, Jaedyn and Jordyn. 

Sheryl M. Sillery Dellapina,
FCRH ’87, PAR ’24
Officer, Dellapina Family Foundation 

After an early career in media production at Grey Advertising, Dellapina raised three children in London. Dellapina is now engaged in philanthropic work through the Dellapina Family Foundation.

Dellapina earned her bachelor’s degree in communications from Fordham. She now serves on Fordham College at Rose Hill’s Board of Visitors. She and her husband, Jeffrey, are also members of the Cura Personalis campaign cabinet and the Parents’ Leadership Council. Her husband, Jeffrey, is the chief financial officer of Vitol Group, a multinational energy and commodity trading organization.

The couple have three sons: Spencer; Connor; and Ian, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who plays club rugby.

Dellapina and her family split their time between England, New Jersey, and Florida, but she is a Fordham Ram at heart. Last year, instead of staying in London to attend the Platinum Jubilee celebrations honoring Queen Elizabeth II, she decided to attend her 35th Fordham Jubilee reunion.

Lori Cruz Doty, PAR ’20, ’21, ’23, ’26
Secretary and Treasurer, Doty Family Foundation 

Doty is secretary and treasurer of the Doty Family Foundation, a civic activist, and a California rancher who grows coffee beans, avocados, and grapes. 

She and her husband, Steve, are proud Fordham parents. They have four daughters, including three who have either graduated from or currently attend Fordham: Tara, FCRH ’20, GABELLI ’21; Jessica, who graduated from the Gabelli School of Business this year; and Gabrielle, a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. At Fordham, Doty serves as a member of the Cura Personalis campaign cabinet and the executive committee of the President’s Council. She and her husband serve as vice chairs of the Parents’ Leadership Council. The couple has also hosted a summer send-off reception in their Southern California home. 

Doty is originally from California and graduated from the University of La Verne. She and her family split their time between California and New York City. 

Joseph G. Marina, S.J., GSE ’99
President of The University of Scranton 

Father Marina has served as president of The University of Scranton since 2021. He was previously the provost and vice president for academic affairs and professor of education at Le Moyne College (where he also briefly served as acting president), dean of Providence College’s School of Continuing Education, assistant dean at Montclair State University’s College of Science and Mathematics, and an assistant dean at St. John’s University, among other positions. He has also served on the boards of multiple institutions, including St. Thomas Aquinas College, Regis University, Canisius College, Canisius High School, Xavier High School, Le Moyne College, and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, New York. 

Father Marina holds five degrees: a Ph.D. in administration and supervision from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education, a Master of Divinity and a master’s degree in theology from Boston College, and a master’s degree in secondary education and bachelor’s degree in physical sciences from St. John’s University. His research interests include leadership and organizational change, as well as scripture and the question of non-belief. Father Marina entered the Society of Jesus in 2004 and was ordained to the priesthood in 2012. 

Thomas J. Scirghi, S.J., GSAS ’80
Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham

Father Scirghi is an associate professor of theology at Fordham, where he specializes in the theology of sacraments and liturgy, as well as the theory and practice of preaching. He has taught courses and workshops on preaching for priests, deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers in locations around the world, including Africa, Asia, and Australia. He has taught at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Jesuit College of Theology in Melbourne, Australia. He also served as the Thomas More Chair of Catholic Studies, in a joint appointment between the University of Western Australia and the University of Notre Dame Australia. In addition, he has published several texts, including Everything Is Sacred: An Introduction to the Sacrament of Baptism (Paraclete Press, 2012) and Living Beauty: The Art of Liturgy (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007) with his colleague Alejandro Garcia-Rivera. He holds five degrees, including a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham; a Master of Divinity degree from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California; an S.T.L. from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, formerly known as the Weston Jesuit School of Theology; a doctor of theology from Boston University; and a bachelor’s degree from Le Moyne College. 

David M. Tanen, LAW ’96
Co-founder and Partner, Two River, LLC 

Tanen is a co-founder and partner of Two River, a New York-based venture capital firm focused on creating, financing, and operating development stage life sciences companies. In addition, he is a co-founder of a number of biotechnology companies, including Kite Pharma, Inc., where he served as corporate secretary and general counsel until its acquisition by Gilead Sciences in 2017. Tanen also serves on the board of directors of Kronos Bio, Inc., and as corporate secretary of Allogene Therapeutics, Inc., each a publicly traded life science company. Tanen also serves as an officer and director of several privately-held biotechnology companies and as an adviser to Vida Ventures, LLC, a life science investment firm. 

Tanen earned his J.D. from Fordham’s School of Law. He now serves on the school’s Dean’s Planning Council and the Entrepreneurial Law Advisory Council. Tanen, who is originally from Massachusetts, earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from George Washington University. He now lives in New Jersey and has three children.

In their new book Organizations for People: Caring Cultures, Basic Needs, and Better Lives (Stanford University Press, 2020), William F. Baker, Ph.D., an Emmy Award winner; president emeritus of WNET-Thirteen, New York’s public television station; and journalist in residence at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education, and industrial psychologist Michael O’Malley explored how to create respectful workplace cultures and meet the basic needs of employees. 

Their findings are backed by more than 450 citations and months of interviews. They spoke with executives, human resource workers, and other employees from companies that have been cited as “best places to work.” Their questions focused on how the companies put their employees’ interests and needs first—an increasingly important task in today’s corporate world, said Baker. 

“[These are] times in which more and more people are less and less satisfied with their work. There are statistics like 36% of employees say they have dysfunctional managers; 75% of workers say their boss is the most stressful part of work,” Baker said in a phone interview. (He offers more detail in a Stanford University Press blog post.) “And we wanted to see, one, if that’s the case, and number two, if there are examples where that’s not the case and how they are doing.”

Baker and O’Malley transcribed their findings in their new book. In less than 200 pages, they focused on how managers can create a healthier and happier working environment over the long haul. 

“One method that I’m a big believer in is the German word ‘vergonnen,’” Baker said. “It means celebrating other people. When something good happens to somebody in your company, celebrate it. Celebrate them.” 

Another strategy is paying attention to people’s basic needs—for example, their lives outside of work, he added. 

“There may have been all kinds of things that happened to you over the weekend. You may have had a sick mother; you may have had an accident. You may have performed in a play and been a big star. And if somebody doesn’t pay attention to the fact that you are unique and special and have your own needs, then you won’t thrive at work. And if you can’t praise and accept people, and if they can’t feel empowered, then they won’t deliver to their maximum capacity—it’s that simple,” Baker said.  

The people who will find the book most useful are corporate managers from companies, both big and small, and students training to become managers, said Baker. But the book is valuable for “leaders at all levels,” said Donna M. Rapaccioli, dean of the Gabelli School of Business. 

“Leaders are looking for simple, impactful practices that they can implement—and this book is filled with them. By demanding better leadership, this timely work lays out human-centered processes and practices that leaders at all levels can use to meet business goals,” Rapaccioli wrote on the book’s back cover. 

Baker and O’Malley aren’t the only ones embracing the idea of a people-centric workplace. A recent statement from the chair of Business Roundtable, a group that represents “the most powerful CEOs in America and their thinking,” according to The Chicago Tribune, asked corporations to put people before profits.

“Respect is really the way to manage people,” Baker said. “And if America is going to succeed, it’s going to have to start thinking about management in that way.”

“I was in a job that I enjoy,” said McIntosh, the assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and assessment at Scarsdale Public Schools. “I didn’t necessarily need to go for a doctorate—it was aspirational.”

While the degree would help him with his career, McIntosh said he didn’t think pursuing a doctorate was something he could do, until he met Toby Tetenbaum, Ph.D., a professor in Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE).

“She was really the tipping point in many ways,” he said. “She just kind of gave me this sense of confidence, not only that I should do it but that I could do it. She just kind of looked in my eyes and said, ‘you can do this.’”

Her charisma, generosity, humor, and honesty have helped him even when he felt like he was struggling. 

“I was waffling between my topics (for my dissertation) and every class she would say, ‘plant the flag Edgar! Plant the flag,’” McIntosh recalled. “She quite literally changed the course of my life.”

Tetenbaum, a licensed psychologist, touched the lives of hundreds of students over her 45 years with the University, where she held teaching roles in both the Division of Psychological and Educational Services and the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration and Policy at GSE.

But McIntosh, who is on track to complete his doctoral program in May 2020, will be one of her last. At age 80, Tetenbaum, is preparing to retire.

“I’m proud of probably having over 1,000 doctoral student mentees—I have 8 to go,” she said. “The best part of my job is seeing these people grow. My reward comes from an email that says, ‘thanks to you and the program, I got promoted,’ or ‘I got the job I was looking for.’”

Lasting Legacy

Tetenbaum’s legacy at Fordham almost didn’t happen. She got her Ph.D. in educational psychology at New York University (NYU) in 1974 and had been working as an adjunct professor at NYU and City College of New York (CCNY), when she heard about a full-time opening in GSE. She was hesitant at first, but her mentor suggested she go for the interview. 

Tetenbaum followed her mentor’s advice, got the job, and stayed for more than four decades. She credits the connections she has made with her students as the main reason she stayed so long.

Grant Grastorf, Ph.D., GSE ’18, is one of those students who stays in touch with his mentor.

“One of Toby’s best traits is staying in touch after graduation,” said Grastorf, the academic operations administrator at Fordham’s Westchester campus. “Toby continues the relationships with her students by remembering special occasions like birthdays, hosting gatherings at her house for her former students—holiday parties and summer pool parties, meeting for lunch just to get caught up, and letting you know that you’re special. She always asks how you’re doing.”

Virginia Roach, Ed.D., dean of GSE, said Tetenbaum has left an impact on many former students.

“She’s had a substantial impact on the careers of many people who have gone on [to success]in the greater metro area and beyond,” she said. “She will be missed.”

A Different Start

Tetenbaum got her bachelor’s degree in 1960 in psychology from Hunter College and started teaching in elementary and middle school. She soon realized she needed a different challenge.

“I said, ‘no, no I can’t do this—I need to work with adults,” she said. 

She received her master’s in education from CCNY in 1970, before going for her Ph.D. at NYU.

Since then, during her career at Fordham, Tetenbaum has taught and conducted research in organizational behavior, chaos theory in leadership, creativity and innovation in organizations, and women in leadership.

One of her biggest accomplishments was designing, implementing, and running a human resource master’s program at GSE for 20 years.

“The students from that master’s program are still a community that give one another jobs, so they’ve stayed in touch, which I think is a really good mark of the program,” Tetenbaum said.

An Evolving World

During her time at Fordham, Tetenbaum said she’s seen the world, particularly the business world, change dramatically.

“We talk a lot about the ‘VUCA’ world, which is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Students need to learn how to manage themselves and manage people in a VUCA world,” she said.

Tetenbaum saw those changes up close, working for more than 20 years as a trainer, coach, and consultant for corporations. She helped them integrate company cultures, evaluate their programs, and develop talent management systems. She said her experience in the industry helped her as a teacher and gave her students a leg up.

“I can bring the real world into my academic world, and I can bring the theories and models of my academic world into the business world,” she said. “It was a nice mesh, and my students appreciated it.”

During her time coaching and consulting, Tetenbaum said she’s seen an increase in the amount of companies investing in emotional intelligence, or “people skills.”

“Workers were technically skilled, but when they had to join teams and work with other people they weren’t as skilled,” she said. “The company said, ‘we have to do something about this,’ and that’s why emotional intelligence, which would never two decades ago have been in business arenas, is very big in all of them.”

Supporting Women

Despite the longevity of her career, Tetenbaum said it hasn’t always been easy, particularly when she first started as the only woman in her department.

“When I came, it was very patriarchal,” she said. “Maybe in retrospect, no worse than any other place.”

She’s focused a lot of her time and effort on mentoring women and studying female leadership. 

“Women do not have a lot of female mentors; we want to see how executive women handle issues in the workplace but there aren’t that many executive women to look up to to find those cues,” she said.

Because of her work, Tetenbaum was asked to lead a workshop on “imposter syndrome” at Fordham’s Women’s Philanthropy Summit held on Oct. 23.

Tetenbaum described the syndrome as often “feeling you’re fooling people—it’s not genuine that you have succeeded.” She said that she even felt it during that session.

“I found out I was doing my workshop in this room … with three screens, and although I’ve done tons of presentations in my 50 years in academia and in business, I got totally intimidated,” she told her audience. 

Tetenbaum called on those in attendance to continue to push against challenges and not wait for those in power to make changes.

“I think it’s one of the reasons I never liked the term ’empowerment’—that we empower you,” she said. “Because in all honesty, whatever you’re being empowered to do is minimal, whoever empowered you still holds the power.”

She said she hopes one of her lasting legacies will be encouraging women to take matters into their own hands and fight through the “imposter syndrome” so they can succeed. 

“You want to advance your career, you step up,” she said. “One of these should be your mantra —I don’t care whether it’s lean in, step in, or just do it—when you face those barriers.”

One of her current doctoral students, Sarah Ruback, said that Tetenbaum has served as a mentor for her and has inspired her to push herself.

“I want to make her proud,” said Ruback, director of professional development and leadership at St. Christopher’s Inc., a nonprofit agency that serves at-risk adolescents in Westchester and Orange counties in New York. “There are people who come in and change the trajectory of your life and I think she’s that person.” 

Encouraging Innovation in Academia

Tetenbaum also said she wanted to leave behind a message of encouraging people across academia to embrace innovation.

“We need more academics who are innovative, creative, looking to the future,” she said.

Roach said that Tetenbaum’s vision for the future has helped guide the department forward and will be a part of her legacy at the university.

“She has been a futurist—looking at the futurist literature and what implications that had for education and training,” Roach said. “It’s that sort of level of thinking into the future that is a gift from Toby and something that we will continue.”

While she’s preparing to leave her full-time position, Tetenbaum’s not done working just yet. She’ll be teaching classes as an adjunct at the University of Connecticut-Stamford campus and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, both closer to her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, while continuing her work as a consultant and coach for businesses.  

As she prepares to say goodbye to the university she called home for more than four decades, Tetenbaum said she hopes her students can carry on her lessons. 

“I hope I leave behind a large group of committed, dedicated educators and business people who care about their work, but more so the people around them with whom they work,” she said.

If it does succeed, one of the reasons will be teachers’ abilities to simultaneously teach students of different levels of academic proficiency in the same classroom. Akane Zusho, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology in Fordham’s Graduate School of Education, and author of Differentiated Instruction Made Practical (Routledge, 2018), says when students are properly motivated, it can be done.

Listen here

Full transcript below:

Akane Zusho: Everyone wants the best for their kids and when they’re concerned that that might not actually be the case, then people react in different ways, and I think that leads to some of the problems that we see in New York City public schools right now.

Patrick Verel: In education, few topics are more fraught with tension than school integration. Recent studies have confirmed that when students who are struggling academically are taught alongside those that are thriving, both groups do better in the long run. There is still fierce resistance though, and in New York City, a new plan being promoted in District 15 in Brooklyn that does away with admissions screenings processes for middle schools is being closely watched by experts and parents alike. If it does succeed, one of the reasons will be teachers abilities to simultaneously teach students of different levels of academic proficiency in the same classroom.

Akane Zusho, a professor of educational psychology in Fordham’s Graduate School of Education says that when students are properly motivated, it can be done. I’m Patrick Verel and this is Fordham News.

How do we know all students do better when their schools are socially and economically integrated?

Akane Zusho: From the social sciences and psychology in particular, there is evidence to suggest that when students are integrated, that they do learn from each other. Particularly when it comes to racial integrations, there is research that suggests that it does reduce prejudice. And not only that, it actually improves engagement among students. There is a particular theory called inner group contact theory. If we’re always friends with a particular type of person and then all of a sudden you get a different kind of friends and let’s say you had some preconceived notions about what that friend might represent ahead of time, the more you get to know this new friend, you’re more likely to appreciate them and value them and then that reduces prejudice.

Patrick Verel: If the research backs it up, why is there such strong resistance to it?

Akane Zusho: From a parents’ perspective, I think there is often a concern that the quality of education may go down if the schools are integrated. Whether or not that’s true is a different story. But everyone wants the best for their kids and when they’re concerned that that might not actually be the case, then people react in different ways. And I think that leads to some of the problems that we see in New York City public schools right now.

Patrick Verel: What is differentiated instruction?

Akane Zusho: Differentiated instruction is basically this idea that you would adjust your instruction to meet the needs of the students in the class. And in a class of 30 and especially in New York City public schools, oftentimes we hear teachers complain that the students that are excelling are very different than the students that are really struggling in the class. And so this idea of differentiated instruction is how do you attend to everybody’s needs and stretch them too.

Patrick Verel: Is there a maximum number of students in a classroom that this technique can work for?

Akane Zusho: So to be honest, I don’t think it’s the number of students that is as critical. I mean, obviously, some of the strategies that we teach teachers require group work and there are some physical challenges sometimes when it comes to the setup of New York City classrooms that sometimes make it difficult. A lot of times I think it really depends on the teacher and the teachers’ comfort with using some of the strategies that we teach them.

So, for example, there’s a lot of group learning work and teachers vary in their comfort level with facilitating that kind of instructional strategy. There’s also I think it varies too on teachers content knowledge. We found that teachers sometimes … Well, we know that teachers vary in how much expertise they have in the content that they’re teaching and that impacts whether or not they can sort of see the big picture ideas that they want to get across to the students because that’s what you really need to differentiate on. In a racially integrated classroom, I think it also depends on teachers own self-awareness and their cultural knowledge of their students.

Patrick Verel: If the new plan in Brooklyn succeeds, teachers who are used to teaching only the “academically gifted students” will have to quickly learn how to teach those that are also struggling academically and visa verse. And I wonder, do you think they can benefit from Differentiated Instruction Made Practical, which you and your colleague Ronda Bondi published earlier this year?

Akane Zusho: Of course, I’m biased, but I definitely think that they could they could learn something. Because, like I said before, to differentiate instruction effectively, I think it’s not an easy task. A lot of what we’re really trying to promote is this idea of teachers finding time in their lesson to look and listen for diversity because I feel like teachers, if you’re a teacher and you’re lecturing all the time, what we find in that is that usually, there’s some students are going to get it and then there’s obviously a handful students that won’t get it. And unless you make the students thinking visible to them and to you, you won’t be able to sort of know that some of the kids are not getting it.

And then we also have a lot of, like I said previously, group learning routines because we feel like that allows teachers to listen to kids because they’ll be talking with each other. And then it becomes clear to the students and to the teacher if they are getting it. What our book is really focusing on is getting teachers to engage the extremes because if you engage the extremes, then most likely you’re engaging everybody.

For differentiation of instruction to work, you have to have a supportive learning environment, an environment where students perceive that they belong and that they are valued members of the classroom because a lot of what we ask teachers to do does require students to feel comfortable voicing their opinions especially when they’re struggling and not being embarrassed by that. And then most importantly, confidence is key to motivation. And in fact, I think it’s probably the most important aspect of feeling motivated. If you don’t feel like you are competent, the quality of your behavior usually suffers.

I teach statistics here at Fordham and I also face this all the time where some students get it and other students don’t. I often break up the class into groups at one point so that students who need more personalized attention can have me for five or 10 minutes so that they feel confident enough to go back to their groups and engage in there. But for that to work, they need to actually feel like they’re not embarrassed and that they can come to me.

Patrick Verel: So what advice would you give to people who want to see this new plan being put into action in Brooklyn actually succeed?

Akane Zusho: You need to shift the culture of the schools to one that is embracing of all students. And so what that might require is changing policies so that there’s not so much a focus on awards, let’s say and certain groups excelling. Because usually, when you do that, when you heighten awareness about one group excelling, you’re implicitly giving a message that the other kids can’t, or they’re not at that level. They could get rid of screeners but if they’re still tracking students into different like classes, that’s problematic.

Two, I think professional development is probably going to be key where teachers are going to need to become better versed in differentiated instruction or personalized instruction. I think the teachers need to … and the kids too, they need to see that they can learn from each other. It’s not going to be easy. The problem is that I don’t think there’s one specific thing that will ensure that this will be a success, but the fact that they’re willing to do this I think is a positive move in the right direction.

“It’s ok to say to our kids, you can read a book that’s a little harder than what you’re normally comfortable with,” she says. “They’re getting a lot of books at school that they’re supposed to read, and so having home be a place where they can read a graphic novel, or informational text, is fine.”

In the podcast below, the associate professor of curriculum and teaching at the Graduate School of Education, walks us through “Think Alouds,” the topic of her new book, Think Big With Think Alouds: Grades K-5 (Sage, 2017).

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel. And today I’m speaking with Molly Ness, an associate professor of childhood education in the graduate school of education at Fordham. Now your new book Think Big With Think Alouds came out this year. And as I understand it, the big take-away from research you conducted in New York City schools is that teachers and parents can really benefit from what’s called a “Think Aloud”. Can you tell me a little bit about what this is?

Molly Ness: So, a Think Aloud is when a proficient reader, a teacher or a parent gives a verbal dialogue of the thought process that they are using to counter a text. So they stop periodically and reflect on their understanding, they think through places that they may be struggling to understand and they use eye language so that they really show kids what the thought processes are that are going on in their head. So they might stop and say, “I’m really confused here. Let me re-read to see if I can find my answer.”

Typically what happens in Read Alouds book, at home and at school is, we ask kids literal comprehension questions that are things like, “Where does the story take place?” and “What do you think might happen next?”. And really what that is, is that is a check for comprehension. So it’s a way for us to gauge whether or not a kid is understanding the text. But children that way don’t get a reflection of what they should be doing to understand the text.

So when we as proficient readers take the responsibility for showing kids how we are thinking, they’re more likely to internalize those thought processes and apply them to their independent reading.

So there’s a fair amount of research that shows that Think Aloud’s are highly effective, but yet they’re not really commonplace in classrooms today. And the reason that teachers are not doing them as much as they can is, it’s often hard for us as proficient readers to look at a second grade book or a fourth grade book and pinpoint where a child might fail to understand. The purpose of my book is really to make the Think Aloud process visible, easy and enjoyable for teachers and children.

Patrick Verel: And you learned this by conducting the research in New York City schools?

Molly Ness: I worked with a group of pre-service and in-service teachers who were all Fordham graduate students, all in the school of education. And we, over a year long period, we did a whole lot of work around Think Alouds. And what we saw was that most of the participants were really able to say, “Wow. An effective Think Aloud doesn’t emerge off the cuff. It’s not an extemporaneous thing that I can just open up a book, sit in front of my class of kids and viola, here’s an efficient, effective Read Aloud. Really it takes advance preparation.”

Patrick Verel: Now when it comes to reading comprehension, you’re a big fan of encouraging children to ask questions and in using expository text to answer the questions. And how does this help exactly, when it comes to reading?

Molly Ness: Sure. My interest in asking questions as a comprehension skill really stem from my home life. I am the mother of a second grader. And when she was in pre-school at age three and four, I would wake up every morning and she would just pepper me with questions. And that’s pretty common, if you look at the research. Kids ages four to ten ask about 288 questions a day. And so, what that shows is that kids are naturally inquisitive. They’re naturally curious about the world around us. And what happens is, they get to school and the questions that they are asking are shut down. Instead teachers are the ones generating questions. We find that when kids are the ones who hold responsible for generating questions, they’re more motivated to answer their questions, to use learning as a tool to answer their questions, their reading is much more purposeful.

For example, when my daughter was in kindergarten, we had a slew of snow storms in the town where I live. And she was seeing all of these snow plows go by and wanted to understand how snow plows work. And I of course know nothing about this. So we used that natural stopping point where she was generating her own questions as a opportunity to go to the library and check out snow plow books and use informational text to answer the questions that she was naturally asking.

Patrick Verel: Now, for you, what is the most exciting development in education these days?

Molly Ness: So what I’m really excited about is a trend called visible learning. And it comes originally out of Australia. A professor and researcher in Australia named John Hattie. And he has written a series of books that looks at all the education strategies. Not just in literacy where I’m interested in, but classroom strategies across the age level and across content area. And what he’s done is he’s compiled effect sizes, which measure the effectiveness of a particular strategy. We’re always talking in education about using data to make decisions. And this was an instance where he really was able to say, “A strategy like cooperative learning or having kids work in groups, here’s the effect size for that strategy”, so that we really have some hard data that can actually really say, “These are the strategies that are worth our instructional time.”

I’m working on a book now where we’re taking that approach of visible learning and translating it into literacy education for kids K through 5.

Patrick Verel: What advice would you give to parents who want to start the new year off right with their children?

Molly Ness: So the number one thing I think parents can be doing is encouraging reading at home. I think during the summer, we are much more on top of our kids reading at home, because we know there’s a summer slide for kids who are not reading at home and we tend to think that really young kids are the ones who should be read to. Well, there are benefits to reading to kids in seventh grade and eleventh grade.

The other thing that I would encourage is to allow kids some choice of what they read at home. Typically what will happen is a kid will come home with a book that their teacher has assigned, it’s a guided reading level C book. And really what I think should happen at home is that kids should be able to choose the books that they read. It’s okay for kids to read a book at home that is a bit above their instructional level. If they’re motivated to read it, their motivation to read that for whatever reason will close the gap of what they might not understand.

Patrick Verel: So if I were to ask you, what should they read? The answer is?

Molly Ness: Anything. It’s hard for us as parents to look at books that we think as sort of low quality books. This past summer, a movie came out out of the Captain Underpants books. And if you look at the Captain Underpants books, they’re not high quality books. They’re not necessarily rich with story and character and vocabulary. But kids are absolutely drawn to them. And so there was a pretty big conversation in the field of education about whether kids should be reading these kind of books. And my answer is always, “If kids want to read them, let them read them.”

The other advice I would give to parents is, have kids see you reading an actual book. So putting away the Kindle. Putting away the iPad. Because kids don’t necessarily know … my husband for example, he is always reading on his phone. So he’s reading, but he reads through a Kindle app on his phone. If my daughter looks at him and says, “Why are you on your phone so much, that’s device time.” And she doesn’t necessarily equate that he’s reading text. So having kids see you reading, whatever you’re reading. A magazine, it can be the New York Times, it can be whatever beach read, but really having them see you read an authentic book that isn’t a digital text, is valuable and priceless.

The paper’s lead editorial writer, Francis P. Church, a 58-year-old journalist who’d been a Civil War correspondent, received O’Hanlon’s handwritten note from his boss. He reportedly “bristled and pooh-poohed” when asked to respond. Yet he quickly crafted a 417-word reply (first published anonymously) that has moved millions of people, becoming history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong,” Church began. “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”

He continued in a manner both cosmic and direct: “In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

O’Hanlon’s letter and Church’s wise, generous reply first appeared on the editorial page of the Sun on September 21, 1897. Since then, they have been translated into dozens of languages and appeared, in whole or part, in countless books, movies, and newspapers.

A Grown-Up Virginia’s Fordham Dissertation: ‘The Importance of Play’

The experience had a profound effect on young Virginia O’Hanlon, and it clearly influenced her doctoral dissertation, “The Importance of Play,” which she presented at Fordham in 1930.

By that time, she was using her given name, Laura, and her married name, Douglas. Laura V. Douglas had a daughter of her own, Laura Virginia, and was working as a New York City public school teacher after having earned a BA at Hunter College in 1910 and an MA at Columbia University the following year.

As her dissertation title suggests, she remained a child at heart—a child with a sense of social justice.

In her thesis, she called play “one of the chief educational factors in the small child’s world” and expressed particular concern with conditions among immigrant communities in Lower Manhattan, where, she felt, poverty contributed to an anemic play life and kept children from developing the “spontaneity and intelligence which make quick learners and apt scholars.”

In discussing the shortage of toys in certain neighborhoods, she wrote, “The pushcart displays an occasional doll or tea set for sale but not such as make glad the heart of childhood”—drawing the last phrase from the final line of Church’s famous editorial. (Santa “lives, and he lives forever,” Church wrote, and “ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”)

Douglas traced the history of play, from Plato to the Bible to Elizabethan England to her own time. And she devised a “play program” for children, using “an experimental and control group” to “test whether or not play is important in quickening the development of intelligence and enhancing the changes of greater happiness for the child both in school and in life.”

Her conclusion: “The writer, of course, realizes that too wide or too sweeping conclusions cannot be drawn from this study. She does, however, feel that it offers quite conclusive evidence that through play a child may reach fuller development than without it.”

In closing she quoted the Gospel of Matthew. “‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’” she wrote. “[A]nd how can they come to Him more beautifully than thru innocent, normal, childish play, which if their home cannot give them, their school should!”

A Message for Children of Yesterday: ‘Seek Out These Trusting Children’

During the 1930s, 40 years after her letter first appeared in the Sun, Douglas published a follow-up letter in a booklet titled Is There a Santa Claus? A Little Girl’s Question Answered. She wrote:

Dear children of yesterday and today, when that question was asked, I, a little girl, was interested in finding out the answer just for myself. Now, grown up and a teacher, I want so much that all little children believe there really is a Santa Claus. For, I understand how essential a belief in Santa Claus, and in fairies too, is to a happy childhood.

Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters, for one reason or another, never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others.

Dear children of yesterday, won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

That, I think, is the best way of proving there is a Santa Claus, both for ourselves and for the children. Do you remember how Peter Pan once asked us to show our belief in fairies? You will of course do it a little differently, but you will each understand how. So, like Peter, I say, “Show you believe, please show you do,” and I shall always be gratefully yours,

Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas

Virginia’s Legacy: ‘A Wonderfully Full Life’

Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died on May 13, 1971, in a nursing home near Albany, New York. She was 81. But the message she elicited through Francis Church lives on, as does her own faith in the spirit of Christmas.

In December 1960, one year after she retired from the New York public school system, she appeared as a guest on the Perry Como Show. She spoke about her career as an educator and her family, saying she’s had “a wonderfully full life.”

“In other words, you’re convinced, really convinced there is a Santa Claus,” Como says.

“Absolutely,” she responds, before proceeding to read the words that made her famous. “This letter has been answered for me thousands of times.”

AUDIO: In 1937, a 48-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas spoke with WNYC’s Seymour Siegel about her letter, her belief in Santa Claus, and her daughter, Laura Virginia.

VIDEO: Watch a clip of Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas’ appearance on the Perry Como Show.

“I’m going back home as a challenged human being, looking for what I can actually do to improve my country and my sphere of influence,” said Rahulani, an economist who now wants to work on improving local government in South Africa.

His classmates reported the same kind of changed outlook after taking part in the growing, thriving summer program run by Fordham and the University of Pretoria. Ending in early July, the program immersed the students in all things New York—from the diversity of the Bronx to the rarefied precincts of international business, where they got to directly question the people who run world-famous companies.

“It’s companies that we work with, but we’re so far removed from them,” said Lulama Booi, a chartered accountant whose study tour was arranged by the African Women Chartered Accountants Forum. “The mix of the theoretical classwork that we do and the site visits has been amazing.”

Begun five years ago with nine economics students, this summer the program hosted 24 students and grew more diverse. While some were pursuing fourth-year honors undergraduate studies (college is three years in South Africa), others were professionals who were sent by their employers.

Most took classes in strategic financial management and political risk analysis through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. But six took classes at the Graduate School of Education, and next year some will attend the Graduate School of Social Service, said Booi Themeli, PhD, economics professor and director of Fordham’s collaborations with the University of Pretoria.

“Everybody is thinking of how we can broaden the collaboration,” he said.

The six-week program is one of many educational exchanges between the two universities—including the semester-long Ubuntu program for Fordham students at the University of Pretoria—that are growing Fordham’s reputation in South Africa, Themeli said.

“The Fordham brand in South Africa is much bigger than maybe even Harvard,” he said.

Harvard, in fact, was one of the students’ stops during an excursion to Boston. They also traveled to Washington, D.C., visiting the International Monetary Fund and seeing other sights. In New York they visited companies including Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase, and Moody’s, where they spoke to the analyst responsible for South Africa’s credit rating.

Seeing their country from the outside gave some of them new ideas about what they want for it. Anri Oberholzer, an aspiring trader, learned that she’d like to eventually play a role in enhancing the country’s educational system. Rahulani, an economist with the South African Reserve Bank, wants to start an institute to help local governments deliver better services.

“With the sort of exposure that I’m getting here, and with the people that I’m meeting here in lectures, they inspire that confidence that actually I can do this,” he said.

In addition to visiting business sites, they soaked up the city through visits to Yankee Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, and other landmark locations. Some of Fordham’s summertime rites also made an impression, like the pie-eating contest at the University’s Dagger John Day, an employee party held in June. “In South Africa we don’t have things like that,” said Nick Mamabolo, who won.

Also interesting to the South Africans was Fordham’s Jubilee reunion weekend, in which alumni from as far back as 1959 returned to campus.

“It has been an eye-opening experience,” said Theriso Pete, an investment analyst. “It was unbelievable, seeing people who were here so long ago and they still love this place, they still come back to this place.”

“We realize how fortunate we’ve been to be here at Fordham,” said Lulama Booi. “What I’ve realized, being here, is that Fordham is maybe a great picture for us of New York.”