Students Making a Difference
Christopher Salem finds MSPE is 'The perfect blend'
Christopher Salem is a public schoolteacher who hopes to become an administrator one day, so he decided to pursue a master’s degree. The tricky part is that he wanted to do so while continuing to teach fulltime.
Salem found the flexibility he needed in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Master of Science for Professional Educators program.
“I appreciated that the program is a mix of online classes with some in-person experiences on campus during the summer,” Salem says. “It seemed like the perfect blend because I was able to do the work when it fit for me.”
How Richard Irvan turned into an 'Agent of change'
Richard Irvan wants students from all walks of life to succeed in the classroom and beyond. That’s one reason he decided to enroll in the Master of Science for Professional Educators (MSPE) program at UW-Madison.
Irvan works for Democracy Prep, a network of New York City charter schools that prepares students to succeed in college and lead lives of active citizenship. In addition to cofounding one of its middle schools, he has taught sixth graders and now serves as a history curriculum specialist.
The MSPE program gave Irvan many opportunities to study diverse learners—and the types of achievement gaps Democracy Prep aims to close.
Keith Miller leads with healing as "Village-builder" at Georgia nonprofit
“I wasn’t the ideal student,” begins Keith Miller’s essay in the online platform Medium. “I was either asleep in class or glaring at my teachers from across the room as I struggled to find the relevance in what they were teaching me.”
In Confessions of an “At-Risk” Black Boy Turned Educator, he continues, “To some of the teachers, especially those who didn’t look like me, I was the stereotype of every other misunderstood young, Black male student in the traditional classroom environment: a troublemaker who came to school to give his teachers grief, while struggling with some untold trauma at home, as his single parent struggles to make ends meet.
