Courtney Hattan: Supporting Students' Needs through Research on Reading
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Release Date: 09/14/2024
Mary Chris Finnigan: Director of Academics for Student-Athletes at the University of Utah
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
In the last episode we heard about the mental health needs of college athletes and how they are met at a Division I university. In this episode we hear about how their academic needs are met. An outstanding former high school and college student-athlete herself, Mary Chris Finnigan combines a love of the energy of sports with an extensive background in academic counseling. She played college basketball at the University of California Santa Barbara. She served as the head girls’ basketball coach for her former high school for eight years, where she also worked as a guidance counselor and...
info_outline
Nic Collins: Counseling College Athletes and Advocating for Mental Health Awareness
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
After 18 years working in corporate sales, Nic Collins decided to go back to school to pursue a graduate degree in counseling. He is now working in an internship for the athletics department at the University of South Carolina, where he is one of many resources on the Mental Health and Performance Team for student-athletes. Nic also advocates for mental health, writes, and is a talented musician, coach, and guest speaker. He is one of the two dynamic hosts of , which explores topics around personal growth and inspiration and how different people find them. In this episode, Nic shares about why...
info_outline
Sydney Parks: The Transformative Effects of the Flipped Classroom Model
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Sydney Parks completed a Masters program in Ecological Economics with a Flipped Classroom model at the University of Edinburgh last year. Before completing this program in Scotland, Sydney had earned a Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, and worked as a Synthetic Biology researcher in the biotechnology sector. In that work she encountered scientists who had an in-depth understanding of their subject area, confidence from that deep understanding, and fluidity in the way they could speak about it. She realized that the way she learned in...
info_outline
Dr. Bryan Hale: What's possible when looking at school culture through a wellness lens
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
In addition to hearing from people who are currently inside the classroom, I enjoy meeting, and hearing the stories of, people who are using their experiences and skills to try to make the educational system better in some way. Dr. Bryan Hale's career in the educational system spans over 25 years. He has been a high school math teacher in Ohio, an assistant principal in North Carolina, and a Principal of a K-8 school and then a charter high school in the Chicagoland area, where he considered becoming a superintendent. His doctoral research on Holistic Wellness in Education and the six domains...
info_outline
Amanda Wolff: UHSAA Girls' Cross-Country Coach of the Year 2024
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
We’re ending Season 2 with insights from a statewide-recognized coach of the year. Amanda Wolff is an English teacher and the Head Coach of both the Girls’ and Boys’ Cross-Country and Track programs at Cyprus High School, a Title I school in the Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah. Under her leadership over the past five years, the team has grown from 55 participating athletes to 130. The Girls’ Cross-Country team took Regionals last year, and the team placed 6th overall in the State. The Girls’ Track and Field team took Regionals for the first time since 1978! Amanda was...
info_outline
Rachel Bartholomew: Impacting Student Learning through Instructional Coaching for Educators
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Rachel Bartholomew is currently an instructional coach for both an elementary school and a Title I junior high school in the Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah. Before that Rachel taught reading for 20 years in all three levels of school: elementary, middle school/junior high, and high school, and in three different states: North Carolina, Washington state, and Utah. Rachel also coached volleyball, basketball, and track and field at the junior high level for 10 years. In this episode, Rachel shares about what has kept her going through 20+ years as an educator. She discusses...
info_outline
Jimmy D. Hart Presents the R.A.I. (Respect/Affirmation/Inclusion) Framework
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Jimmy D. Hart, Chief Empowerment Officer of Hart Global Industries is an author, coach, speaker and trainer. He has been involved in education for 31 years, in roles ranging from teacher and coach, to site administrator, middle school and high school principal, and district administrator. Now he uses his extensive experience to help school districts put the R.A.I. framework, which stands for Respect, Affirmation, and Inclusion, into practice. He offers leadership training and coaching for adults, and is committed to facilitating consistent and equitable access to resources and...
info_outline
Hailey Anderson: Providing and Fighting for Safe Spaces
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Hailey Anderson is a registered nurse at the University of Utah hospital. She is a parent of three kids in the Salt Lake City School District and a fierce advocate for their human rights. I reached out to Rainbow Club of SLC after hearing about it from an educator at Bonneville Elementary School in the Salt Lake City School District. Hailey helped start an Equity Committee at Bonneville about four years ago, and then, in partnership with one of the elementary teachers, helped start Rainbow Club of SLC there. As described on their website, Rainbow Club “is a safe supportive space for young...
info_outline
Coach Dru Jones: "It's about the love that you give to another person"
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Coach Dru Jones is a special education teacher in English and biology, the Head football coach, and the Head Unified Sports Coach at Viewmont High School in the Davis School District in Utah. He has been teaching since 2008 and was recognized recently as the Davis School District’s Teacher of the Year. He was also named one of the finalists for the 2025 Utah Teacher of the Year. In this episode Coach Dru shares about the challenges he faced throughout his own education, and how that motivated him to break the cycle and be the first on his father’s side to graduate from high school and...
info_outline
Carrie Miller: From Meeting Resistance to Building Relationships and the Challenges and Rewards of Educational Consulting
Beyond the Roles: Voices in Education
Find out more about the role of an educational consultant through this conversation with Carrie Miller, who is a Vice President for MGT of America in their Education Solutions Group, on the team for Academic Transformation. Carrie was an educator in a number of roles for 12 years, from an English and French teacher, to a Dean of Students, to a Director of Admissions, at various school settings, including rural, urban, Title I, and independent schools in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. Since 2015 she has been working in management consulting. In 2022 she earned her doctorate of education...
info_outlineDr. Courtney Hattan is an assistant professor in the science of reading with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Maryland and her reading specialist degree from Johns Hopkins University. She has seen many facets of the educational system, having started out as a language arts and social studies teacher at the elementary and middle school levels. Hattan’s work centers on equitable and evidence-based instruction that supports students in activating and building their background knowledge during reading. She was the 2019 recipient of the Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award and was named a Reading Hall of Fame Emerging Scholars Fellow. Her research is published in outlets such as Review of Educational Research, Reading Research Quarterly, and Journal of Educational Psychology.
In this episode, Courtney provides insights into the life of a tenure-track professor at a top research university. She shares how her teaching experiences with the KWL chart informed her dissertation research. She describes how she combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods to form a fuller picture of the whole story. Courtney also shares about the research she is conducting in partnership with certain rural schools in North Carolina and Illinois to help bridge the gap between research and evidence-based practices that educators can use. She is committed to telling the full story on literacy assessment in particular, in order to best support students’ needs.
Find out more about Courtney’s education, areas of expertise, background, and research at https://ed.unc.edu/people/courtney-hattan/
And you can read Courtney’s dissertation study at
Hattan, C. (2019). Prompting rural students’ use of background knowledge and experience to support comprehension of unfamiliar content. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 451-455. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.270