Author: Caroline Rogers

The Teaching Fellows Gazette
What’s Happening? — Spring Semester 2017

The Spadoni College of Education Spring Gala 2017
The Spadoni College of Education hosted their 2nd annual Spring Gala this semester on Friday, April 7th. This event was a great chance for the Teaching Fellows to network and build relationships with other education majors and professionals within the community. The night consisted of a dinner catered by Carrabba’s Italian Grill and several engaging speakers. The Dean of the Spadoni College of Education, Dr. Edward Jadallah started the night on a high note as he welcomed everyone to the gala. After a delicious dinner was served, the guests listened to a presentation by Mr. Michael Bonner from South Greenville Elementary who was also featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The room was silent as everyone was completely engaged in the stories that Michael Bonner had to share of his classroom. His entire presentation was inspiring and motivated all of the future educators in the room to want to leave the kind of impact that Mr. Bonner certainly has. The Spring Gala concluded with desserts that were accompanied by music and dancing. All in all, the 2nd annual Spring Gala was a huge success and a night of fun had by all!

Homewood Elementary Professional Learning Community
This 2016-2017 school year the Teaching Fellows at Coastal Carolina University have teamed up with local Homewood Elementary in Conway, SC. Each fellow has been assigned a mentor teacher and is required to spend at least two hours a week volunteering in their classroom. For the first couple weeks, the fellows observed the way that the teacher taught and interacted with their students, then as time went on the fellows gradually worked their way up to teaching small and even whole group lessons.
Working inside the classrooms at Homewood Elementary the CCU Teaching Fellows are getting incredible learning opportunities much earlier on and are able to spend their volunteer hours doing something that they are truly passionate about. This opportunity allows the fellows to network within the school and also create lasting bonds with their mentor teacher and students!

The Teaching Fellows Gazette
What’s Happening? — Spring Semester 2017

Teaching Fellows Bowling Night
The Coastal Carolina University Teaching Fellows enjoyed an event of bowling and bonding on February 19, 2017. The day started in the Kline Hospitality Suite on Coastal Carolina’s campus with dinner provided by one of the local fellows family. After eating, the Teaching Fellows participated in a very informative presentation on Hot Topics in Education, given by the Dean of the Spadoni College of Education, Dr. Edward Jadallah. The fellows were very engaged in this presentation because they are seeing some of these issues first hand in their placements at Homewood Elementary in Conway, SC.
Next, the group of Teaching Fellows all carpooled to Myrtle Beach Bowl for a fun evening of friendly competition and bonding in a relaxed environment. The fellows were split into groups of six to play against each other at the same lanes. Mentor and mentee pairs were encouraged to play with the same group so that they could develop on their individual relationships as well as relationships throughout the entire cohort. The Coastal Carolina University Teaching Fellows really enjoyed being able to spend time together outside of a professional atmosphere and get to know different sides of each other. The fellows look forward to another wonderful event like this in the future!

Sophomore Conference
This spring, the Sophomore cohort of Teaching Fellows at Coastal Carolina University traveled to Charleston, SC to attend the statewide Sophomore conference. CERRA hosted a two day conference full of professional development, bonding activities, and fun for all!
The event started with dinner and icebreaker activities at the South Carolina Aquarium in South Carolina. After everyone got to know each other a little, the Fellows were allowed to explore the aquarium at their leisure. Fellows had the opportunity to view all of the exhibits and even touch live sharks and stingrays! Once the time at the aquarium had concluded, all of the fellows from the state headed to their hotel for the night. Fellows were assigned rooms with Teaching Fellows from other institutions in order to encourage networking!
On the last day of the conference, the Fellows were provided with numerous professional development breakout sessions to choose from, where they could learn about a wide variety of things dealing with education. During a lunch break, the Fellows listened to an engaging keynote speaker Steven Connolly. The conference ended with an “unconference”, where Fellows lead discussions about topics that they thought were a big issue in education. Overall the Sophomore conference was a success and a good time had by all!

The Teaching Fellows Gazette
Student Spotlights! — Spring Semester 2017

Student Spotlight: Hannah M.
One of our sophomore fellows, Hannah McKinney, has been chosen for a mentor spotlight! Hannah is currently mentoring a group of first grade students at Kingston Elementary in Conway, South Carolina. She works on various different activities with her students and is always eager to jump in and help them with what they need.
Hannah spends a lot of time at Kingston Elementary assisting one of her students who has both learning and developmental disabilities. She works hard to help him learn to read. Hannah is also being very creative and coming up with fun interactive ways to engage some of her other students in learning. For example when she was working to teach them about directions (North, South, East, West), Hannah came up with a game to make it as fun as possible for her students! She paired them off and blind folded one of them, while their partner lead them through the classroom to a particular spot using the directions they were learning! This activity allowed the students to be active inside their classroom and to utilize the skills that they were learning.
All of Hannah’s hard work is not only benefitting the students that she is mentoring, but it is allowing her to grow into an incredible future teacher leader! Hannah believes that she is gathering useful tools from this experience that will help her when she has her own classroom someday. She would love to “teach other education majors these tools so they are successful in the classroom”. Keep up the great work Hannah!

Introducing: CCU’s new
Teaching Fellows Logo
Congrats, Brianna Gerald for winning our Teaching Fellows Logo contest!
The logo was chosen by the following
panel of judges:
Dr. Ed Jadallah, Mr. Alex Fegely, &
Mrs. Lynn Millard
Thank you to all of the other applicants for your creative logo submissions!

The Teaching Fellows Gazette
Student Spotlights! — Spring Semester 2017

Congratulations to our Spring Teaching Fellows of the Month!
These students were selected by their peers due to their outstanding work and dedication within the Teaching Fellows Program at CCU. Thank you for all you do for our program!
January — Alex Del Castillo
February — Ben Flo
March — Bailey Lewis
April — Samantha Hogan

Homewood Elementary Pictures

Student Spotlight: Alex D.
Freshman fellow, Alex Del Castillo has been hard at work to make a difference on our campus since he got here last fall. In this short time Alex has started two different clubs: Ecology Club and the American Sign Language Club.
Alex created Ecology Club because he recognized the importance of sustainability and wanted to share and educate this with people on Coastal’s campus. He wanted to “create an outlet for students to have the opportunity to join in community clean ups, environmental awareness projects, and begin to get informed on environmental issue that they may not know of”. Alex’s passion for our community and our earth shines through as he works to organize community clean ups, educational meetings, and environmental movie nights. From this, Alex is gaining incredible teacher leader skills like communication, leadership, and personal and social responsibility. He hopes to be able to someday encourage his students to help the planet and its sustainability by getting involved in environmental issues. Alex believes that “It is our responsibility to preserve, protect, and promote our planet” and he is certainly helping others to do this through his club!
Alex also created the American Sign Language Club here at Coastal Carolina! The purpose of this club is to get our community more acclimated with the deaf community. Alex believes the best way to do this is to meet them half way! By learning a few simple signs, hearing people could help to better include deaf people within our community. This club works together to learn sign language and then practices it amongst themselves. Creating this incredible club will help Alex in the future by allowing him to show his students how important it is to “meet others half way and to go the extra mile for those who need it”. Way to go Alex, keep up the good work!