BOSTON (May 1, 2017) — Jumpstart was recently featured on the education news website, Education Dive, highlighting the impact that the Jumpstart can have on college students who are interested in becoming teachers. Reporter Tara Garcia Mathewson visited a Jumpstart classroom at a preschool in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to observe a Jumpstart session first-hand, and interviewed University of Massachusetts–Boston education professor Lianna Pizzo, PhD, to discuss the benefits of Jumpstart’s program to the education students she teaches every day.
Jumpstart works in low-income urban early childhood centers across 14 states and the District of Columbia, helping prepare 4-year-olds for kindergarten. The vast majority of its nearly 4,000 volunteers are college students. And each year, they get about 300 hours of hands-on experience in the classroom and another 40 hours of additional training specific to language and literacy in early childhood education.
“And they bring that experience into the classroom,” Pizzo said. “When we’re talking about content, lesson planning, language and literacy development, and even bilingualism, they’ve experienced this with kids in the classroom. They have really thoughtful questions.”
Colleges across the country have turned to partnerships like UMass Boston’s with Jumpstart to offer their students more experiential learning opportunities. In addition to improving the quality of instruction when students bring that experience back to the classroom, colleges have looked to these partnerships as a way to increase student competitiveness in the job market.
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