Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award

2011 Fulbright Cognition Scholar in Education Research Announced

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Mentoring required for new teachers and education leaders

Victoria University of Wellington academic Kate Thornton will explore the role of mentoring in supporting new teachers and developing education leadership at an American non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of teacher and school leader effectiveness. As recipient of the 2012 Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award in Education Research, Kate will spend three months from August 2012 at the New Teacher Center in Santa Barbara, California, observing the Center’s teacher induction and school leadership development programmes.

The use of mentoring to support teacher leadership is well established and the subject of considerable research in the United States, and the New Teacher Center has served nearly 50,000 teachers and 5,000 mentors since its establishment in 1998. By observing the Center’s programmes and interviewing both mentor and teacher participants, Kate hopes to identify factors for the training and support of effective teacher mentors that could be applied in the New Zealand education sector, where an ability to show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning is required of all registered teachers.

Roads that rise as butterflies

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In response to ‘Life Cycles and Sigmoid Curves’ by Rosemary Hipkins

Selina Tusitala Marsh

If you be butterfly

and utterly flutter by, pass by,

never wonder why these horizontal moments exist,

what you think is stagnation

could by chrysalis contemplation

and you might just miss

that yearned for destination.

as long as it keeps on rising.

For beneath the opalescent stillness

there’s blissful solitude

an attitudinal slow-shift

embryonic sac of potential

enfolded wings holding in their wherewithal.

If you be butterfly and utterly flutter by

you might not see

that play works

and a road that unexpectedly swerves

might just be a sigmoid curve

Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award

“We must try and expand the boundaries of human wisdom, and there is no way of doing that except through education.” Senator J. William Fulbright (1905 - 1995)

Fulbright New Zealand and the Cognition Institute have partnered to offer a unique opportunity for New Zealand educators or educationalists to pursue research in the United States of America.

The Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award in Education Research award is designed to have an impact on New Zealand schooling and student achievement.

The award is valued at up to US$32,500 (plus travel expenses), and provides for three to five months of research at an American host institution of the grantee’s choice.