Scaling Social-Emotional Learning: A Student’s Practicum at City Hall.
Corryn Barter. Photo courtesy of Corryn Barter.
Scaling Social-Emotional Learning: A Student’s Practicum at City Hall
As a 2025 summer fellow in the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, MPH student Corryn Barter drew on her experience as a former high school health teacher to create communications materials for Boston Public Schools.
For two-and-a-half years before enrolling at SPH, Corryn Barter taught at Match, a charter public high school located next to Agganis Arena on BU’s Charles River Campus. First, she taught physics, and then she pivoted to teaching health. She found that while her students overwhelmingly struggled with math problems, they were deeply empathetic and skilled in reading a room. But with such a rich emotional life comes challenges, she says, and without a specific curriculum targeting their social-emotional development, her students were struggling to achieve personal and academic well-being.
As a health teacher, Barter experienced a glimpse of what a curriculum that incorporates social emotional learning could do for young people. She was able to help her students build important life skills, including self-awareness, self-regulation, self-management, healthy relationship maintenance, and responsible decision-making. So, when Barter decided to leave her job to return to graduate school, she enrolled in the MPH program at SPH to study Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation (CAPDIE) in the hope of one day working full-time to develop comprehensive social-emotional learning programs for young people and adults alike.
Barter‘s summer practicum in the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) as a New Urban Mechanics Summer Fellow, granted her that exact opportunity—and it was a welcome change of pace from her previous role as a high school teacher.
“Working at City Hall […] there was this real sense of flexibility and clear boundaries,” she says. “You could finish your work and actually leave [on-time] without the stress of bringing things home.”
Another highlight of working at MONUM, she says, was the proximity to the City Clerk’s Office. City Hall was frequently abuzz with activity and she delighted in the good company of other students from universities across the city. As the only student of public health in the group, Barter both benefited from the diverse range of perspectives her peers brought to the program and embraced the opportunity to teach the others public health fundamentals like the social determinants of health.
Corryn conducts a focus group with elementary school children on the social stories she helped to draft for Boston Public Schools while working as a MONUM summer fellow.
PHOTO: Ting Wei Li
Corryn Barter (6th from the right) and other MONUM fellows with Mayor Wu (left of Barter). PHOTO: John Wilcox
Established in 2010 by Thomas Menino, Boston’s longest serving mayor, MONUM is a civic research and design team focused on delivering solutions to improve city services and programs. Each summer the office takes on a cohort of fellows to manage individual projects within MONUM’s portfolio. The program aims to develop future public service leaders; not only did several members of the current Urban Mechanics team start as fellows, but Mayor Wu herself completed a fellowship with the office, supporting the development of a food truck program in 2010.
For Barter’s project of the course of the 10-week program, she partnered with the Capital Planning Department at Boston Public Schools to produce three trauma-informed narratives or “social stories” to ease the transition of students affected by school closures and mergers. These short, visual guides depict the feelings students might experience and are designed to help them successfully navigate their emotions in challenging situations.
To learn more about Barter’s practicum, visit the BU Initiative on Cities (BU IOC) webpage to read her reflection, “Corryn Barter: My Summer with the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM).”
Applications for the 2026 Summer Fellowship are open now through Tuesday, January 20. Prospective applicants are encouraged to attend a virtual informational session on January 6. Students seeking practicum opportunities may consider applying through BUIOC, which sends one BU graduate student to participate in the larger MONUM fellowship cohort each summer.
