2022 Staff Innovation Award Winners

Recipients: Kaycee Rogers, Mark Olson, Tom Owenby, Joey Lubasi, Dawn Lemirand-Poepping & Jennifer Murphy

The Secondary Education teacher preparation program begins with an innovative community-engaged practicum experience, in contrast to many traditional programs that may include an early school-based practicum. This community-engaged practicum is concurrent with an introductory course in social justice. We want to learn more about mediating and assessing teacher candidates’ learning around socially just teacher preparation through community engagement. In doing so, we aim to strengthen our community partnerships and better sustain and grow these reciprocal and sustainable relationships. With this grant, through a cycle of learning, planning, and action, we seek to understand: where teacher candidates enter our program in relation to socially just community engagement; what growth teacher candidates make over the course of the community engaged experience; and how the program can support a productive trajectory of teacher candidates’ development as socially just community-engaged educators in the subsequent semesters. This project will support learning opportunities for each team member organized around the trajectory of learning previously specified. In support of these learning goals, team members will design their own professional learning plan to include activities such as conference attendance, site- based visits, collaboration with experts, literature reviews, etc. The next phase of the project will be an internal team-based learning symposium. At the symposium, each team member will share their learning and implications for program-related action. Together, the team will identify next steps. Over the course of the academic year, the team will meet several times to plan next steps related to socially just community-engaged teaching and learning. The team will create an action plan to be put into practice for the community-engaged experience in summer of 2023. Throughout the course of the project, we will seek opportunities to share our work with wider audiences through both informal and formal presentations and publications.

Recipients: Heather Good & Jennifer Krug

Department Administrators in the School of Education request funding to develop a web-based toolbox of resources that will support staff from across the 10 academic departments in doing our jobs more effectively, efficiently, and joyfully. Our proposal includes two components:
1) The creation of a process map with a business analyst through the Office of Strategic Consulting to develop a dynamic, interactive toolkit of relevant, accurate job aids that are easy to find and use. The end goal is to create a web-based tool (through a program such as IBM’s Blueworks or similar) that would be a living document of policies and procedures.
2) Supported group work days once per quarter that will bring together department administrators to work alongside each other in the development of the toolkit. We envision these in-person meetings taking place in a computer lab with a content expert in the room who can provide guidance, plus team building time before or after the work session. Our first work session, in late spring, will focus on summer hires and contract processing.
We are consummate multi-taskers who must navigate a huge number of systems that touch on every aspect of our departments’ logistical frameworks. To do our jobs successfully, we must:
–Develop routines that allow for flexibility in the face of ever-changing systems and policies.
–Hold a big picture view of our department’s needs while attending to and supervising countless small tasks.
–Make outdated, bureaucratic structures accessible to our colleagues and students. We are driven by a strong desire to help the School of Education, our departments, and our colleagues make the world a better place. The quality of our tools and the resources at our disposal have a huge impact on our ability to succeed at this

Recipients: Sarah Maughan, Todd Finkelmeyer and Felipe Gacharna

There is a perception that UW-Madison only cares about people in and around the Madison area. While we know that isn’t the case, we do focus a lot of our attention and efforts on what is closest to us geographically. Sarah Maughan, Todd Finkelmeyer, and Felipe Gacharná, storytellers from the Office of Communications and Advancement, would like to team up and create a video series featuring School of Education alumni outside of the Dane County bubble. The team would like to spotlight the School’s graduates and the impact they are having on their communities. While the office of Communications and Advancement has told stories of talented alumni in the past, it has done so primarily via email and phone interviews. More importantly, the office has not taken the step of learning more from these graduates in their current settings. Such efforts will enable the team to create more authentic, representative, and impactful stories to share. By visiting and learning more about the communities where our alumni reside, we can also learn how to better connect with groups of people who don’t always feel like the benefits of the Wisconsin Idea are reaching their corner of the world. These video stories would be showcased and widely distributed through a variety of channels, including: the School’s website; social media; e-newsletters; and emailed marketing materials. Funding this project would create an opportunity for the team, and for the School writ large, to determine if this type of immersive storytelling utilizing video can be done efficiently and effectively — and, if so, if this is something that the Office of Communications and Advancement should consider doing more frequently in the future.