English adjunct Kelly Cecchini has been actively involved and in the forefront of bridging the gap between high school readiness and college requirements. Her work in this field has been recognized on a local, state and national level.
She was asked to contribute a chapter to the newly published collaborative book, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom.
Kelly was invited to speak on two panels at last year’s National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference in St. Louis. The first panel concerned authors’ respective chapters in Deep Reading. This included Kelly, Dr. Jason Courtmanche from UConn, and Dr. Sheridan Blau from Teacher’s College at Columbia University. The second was a National Writing Project panel which examined the grant (written by Kelly, Jason Courtmanche, and Amanda Lister from Manchester High School) to provide professional development for argument writing at Manchester High School.
Kelly is currently working on getting grant funding for a new project (with Patrick Sullivan from MCC’s English department and Dr. Ellen Carrillo, director of first year writing at UConn, Waterbury), in which they hope to conduct interviews with high school students, community college students, and UConn seniors to examine when confidence in reading and writing ability – and love of reading/writing – falls off and why.