WiNK

A few weeks ago, Ms. Taraz officially became Dr. Taraz! What you may not know about, now, Dr. Taraz, is that for the past five years she has been working to the degree, "Doctor of Education in Instructional Leadership" or an "EdD." Starting in the Fall of 2015, she started taking classes at Western Connecticut State University. Just down the road from Wooster, she says "I had such a great experience there. I was part of a cohort of 25 people and have forged some life-long friendships through the program."

For three years she had four hours of class weekly and then the last two years she worked on her dissertation. This meant "developing and proposing a study, getting approval for that study, conducting the study, and then analyzing the results and findings. I then wrote a dissertation, which essentially recapped everything that happened in my study." Hers was titled: The Effect of Mindfulness Coaching on Preservice Teachers' Sense of Self-efficacy and Mindfulness Utilizing a Mixed-reality Simulation Learning Environment. What this meant was testing to see if teaching college students, who were studying to be teachers, about mindfulness helped them to be more confident about their ability to teach.

Here is her abstract:

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of mindfulness

coaching on preservice teachers' self-efficacy and mindfulness, utilizing a mixed-reality simulation environment. Data was collected via a concurrent embedded mixed methods design. This study involved a treatment group of preservice teacher participants that received mindfulness coaching and a comparison group of preservice teacher participants that did not receive mindfulness coaching, within a mixed-reality simulation environment. Each preservice teacher participant completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale to measure mindfulness and the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale to measure self-efficacy as pretests and posttests. Participants were also interviewed. Findings were then analyzed and while there were no statistically significant quantitative results, qualitative analysis resulted in the following finding statement: Participating in a mixed-reality simulation environment influenced the teaching self-efficacy beliefs of preservice teachers and learning about mindfulness strategies while engaging in that process enabled preservice teachers to cope with in-the-moment stressors and consider ways to utilize mindfulness as classroom teachers.

On May 7th, she did a 30-minute presentation on it; unfortunately it had to be done on Zoom. Faculty from WCSU then asked her questions during a discussion period. She passed and then had her graduation, also unfortunately on Zoom.

Congratulations Dr. Taraz!