Category: About Us
“We wondered when you’d figure it out.” Once David Oyler decided to be a teacher, his friends and colleagues wondered what had taken him so long. They understood his heart lay in teaching long before he did.
Barbara Algarin was a chemistry major who also tutored other students in chemistry while in college and afterwards. “I had always dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but I felt I was good at helping others in school. Then my mom mentioned that New York City was looking for people to become teachers,” she explains. Feeling at a crossroads and wanting a change, Barbara applied for a New York City Teaching Fellowship, a program that prepares applicants to teach high-needs subjects such as science in New York City classrooms. The first time she applied, they lost her application. She persisted, and applied again the following year and was accepted.
Christine Fernandes began as a horticulture major at Pennsylvania State University, but transferred to agricultural education so she could become a teacher. She absolutely loves her career choice. She learned about the Concord Consortium through a listserv from her alma mater. We’re collaborating with Penn State on our GEODE project to develop new geodynamic plate tectonic modeling software for middle school students. The software is designed to allow students to observe and describe the formation of surface geologic features in terms of plate interactions. Christine explains, “It really clicked for the students, seeing what was happening below the ground in relation to the size and magnitude of the earthquakes along the western coast of South America.”
We started in a quaint but nondescript little bungalow with brown siding on a street named after Concord’s hometown boy: Henry David Thoreau. The incongruous sign out front announced: “educational technology lab.” At the time, it was anyone’s guess what that was. It was 1994 and the beginning of the Concord Consortium. In the historical […]
“Getting out of the classroom and into the world.” That’s the most exciting thing about education today, explains Andrew Njaa. A philosophy major at a liberal arts college isn’t the most obvious path to teaching physics. But after graduating from St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 1984, a new fellowship collaboration between St. John’s, the University of New Mexico, and Santa Fe Public Schools changed the course of his career plans. Andrew completed an internship learning how to teach and teaching math at Santa Fe Technical High School. He was convinced that he wanted to be in the classroom.
While a sophomore at Ithaca College, Julia LaCava wrote a novel in a month. Though she had written full-length scripts for homework, this was not a typical class assignment. She had had a story in her head for over a year, complete with a storyboard of all the characters’ emotions and playlists of songs that […]
When Kiley told her father that she had a new position as the Concord Consortium’s scrum master, he asked if she would have to tackle people at work. He calls her the rugby master, but Kiley is used to bad dad jokes. Thanks to recent training, Kiley is indeed a certified scrum master. For the […]
Our East and West Coast offices got together for two days of team building and brainstorming. We demoed our newest technologies, dreamed up new projects, and solved a (fake) murder mystery. We had a great time celebrating our 25th anniversary! Forty-five enthusiastic staff converged at the beautiful Lyman Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, where we enjoyed […]
The Concord Consortium celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. This milestone occasion coincides with another notable event: ten years ago Chad Dorsey became only the second President and CEO in the organization’s history. He followed in the footsteps of our founder, Bob Tinker, who, like Chad, was a physicist.
The latest news from the Concord Consortium in fall 2016: data science education technology conference, middle grades students’ understanding of big math ideas, zoom in to data literacy, and more.