Previous YSU graduates have gone on to be named Teacher of the Year across local, and state nominations and recently Dr. Billy Green was awarded the Ohio Teacher Educator Award.
On campus, the Future Teachers Club has been making major waves on the state and national level. They won the Ohio Educator Association – Aspiring Educators Emerging Chapter Award, and the Chapter Challenge Award. They were also nominated by the National Education Association – Aspiring Educators for the Emerging Chapter Award, the Outstanding Local Leader Award, and the Distinguished Local Advisor Award.
The YSU Beeghly College of Liberal Arts, Social Sciences, and Education places a strong emphasis on experiential learning, and for education students, that starts from their very first semester.
First year students start with observations in classrooms to learn different teaching methods and styles before moving on to tutoring and afterschool program help in their second and third years. In their final year, students will participate in the classroom as a student teacher for the entire school day where they will teach classes, connect with kids, and prepare to become a licensed teacher following their graduation and passing of the OAEs. These are all times when students may find items from the CRC to be helpful in supporting both their own education, as well as the education of the students they are teaching.
Frequently after student teaching, our teacher education students will be made a job offer at the location they had been placed in.
When you think of the library, opossum puppets, botany board games, and flash cards may not be the first things to come to mind, but they are the most circulated items in the Wilcox Curriculum Resource Center (CRC).
The CRC is a branch of the Maag Library located on the ground floor of Beeghly Hall as a convenient place for teacher education, school psychology, and counseling students to access. It houses a variety of items students can check out to take into their classroom placements as well as resources for test preparation for teacher licensing examinations.
The CRC is the most visited branch of the Maag Library with 24,182 items circulated during the 2025-2026 school year.
Some item highlights according to CRC librarian, Alyssa Annico, include:
“We have tons of children’s literature, all different age levels, all different kinds of books, all different content areas, K-12, and we also have a lot of kind of special resources that you don’t always think you’re going to fid at a college library. So we have puppets – that’s everyone’s favorite, you’re never too old for puppets – but we also have tons of games, kits, and manipulatives. And that’s everything from Let’s Learn the Alphabet, all the way up to lots of really fancy board games that are so much fun for adults and college students. And everyone is welcome to come in and borrow these resources.”
Recently, the award-winning Future Teachers Club, celebrated National Library Week by writing thank you notes in a book and gifting it to Annico. The CRC librarian has been able to cultivate a strong connection with the students through this unique space, curated to the students’ interests and degree paths.
