School-Based Professional Development

Recent Projects:

• Facilitating staff development prior to the start of the school year at a Washington Heights preschool.
• Coaching teachers of grades 1-4 to support literacy instruction in a Jewish day school in Brooklyn.
• Expanding the capacity of math teachers of grades 3 through 8 at a public school in Manhattan.
• Staff development days for 200 Pre-K staff around language acquisition, Funds of Knowledge and family engagement.
• Improving the capacity of teachers in a NYC transfer high school to meet the needs of students with an IEP.
• Supporting Kindergarten and First Grade teachers as they implement Choice Time in a Brooklyn charter school.
• Supporting a network of early childhood educators and home visiting staff from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on the topics of language acquisition, anti-biased education, child development. Content includes application in the classroom and building community with families. The work expanded to support informal caretakers with workshops offered in Mandarin and Spanish.
• Increasing the capacity of K-5 teachers to meet the needs of students learning English as a New Language in a public school in Brooklyn.
• Providing an 2-3 day program for visiting scholars. Programs include observations in a variety of local schools followed by facilitated discussion around participants observations and the implications for their teaching practice. Programs have been developed with a variety of schools and CBOs from the US and abroad.

Staff Developers:

Mila Costa earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies in Early Childhood Education, from Indiana University—Bloomington. Mila’s dissertation research examined how young children from a Native American community constructed the meaning of their lived experiences through an arts-informed method. At Bank Street, Mila is an instructor teaching Child Development and an advisorof supervised fieldwork in the Teaching & Learning Department. She also has a MA in Infant-Family Practice from Arizona State University. She worked for eight years at the ASU Child Development Lab where she also led a school-based home visiting program.

Carmen Colón, MA, is an Advisor and Instructor at the graduate school at Bank Street College of Education. She has been an Educational Consultant in Curriculum Development in Dual language, General and Special Education practice and previously taught K-2nd grades. In addition, Ms. Colón has been an Instructional Coach for NYC Summer Quest and a Professional Development facilitator for the NYC Department of Education. She earned an MS Degree in Dual Language/Bilingual Early Childhood Special & General Education from Bank Street College of Education. She holds a BA in Management Information Systems from Pace University.

Abigail Kerlin is an adjunct professor at Bank Street Graduate School of Education, where she teaches child development and curriculum courses and is the Academic Director of the Long Trips. In addition, she teaches courses at Hunter College and has supervised student teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. Previously, Kerlin was a K–3rd grade Head Teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. She holds an MA in Human Development from Teachers College, Columbia University and an MSEd in Early Childhood Education from Bank Street College.

Genevieve Lowry, MS.Ed, CCLS, CEIM, is currently a faculty member and advisor in the graduate school at Bank Street College of Education. She has worked as a Certified Child Life Specialist for over 20 years, preparing and supervising students training to become Child Life Specialists. She writes, presents, and provides consultation to a variety of organizations both locally and internationally. Lowry writes and presents on topics related to children and families with a focus on early childhood, such as a presentation titled Developing Tools for Transformation: An introduction to racial literacy and its impact on health disparities, ACLP Conference (2018). Her MSEd is from Fordham University in Curriculum and Teaching. She earned her BS in from Wheelock College in Early Childhood Education and Child life.

For more than 40 years, Wendy Pollock was a principal and director of early childhood centers and elementary schools in Yonkers, New York, and the Director of the Riverdale Y Early Childhood Programs in Riverdale, New York. Pollock was a facilitator for the 2014 Summer Institute for Teachers and served as the Project Director for the Pre-K for All professional development collaboration between Bank Street and the NYC DOE during the 2015–16 school year. Previously, she was the director of Bank Street’s Early Childhood Leadership program and has been an instructor in that program for 27 years. Pollock earned an EdD in Curriculum and Teaching and an MA in Psychology of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an MEd in Educational Leadership from Bank Street College, and a BA in early childhood education/child development from Sarah Lawrence College.

Susie Rolander is an advisor and instructor at Bank Street College in the Reading and Literacy program. Previously, she taught Kindergarten in a Spanish-English dual language program and was a literacy coach for grades K-5 in a NYC public school. She co-presented Empowering Students to Do the Work at the International Literacy Association in Boston, MA, July 2016. She holds an MSED from Bank Street College of Education.