Middle School Education

Susan joined the Lesley faculty in 2010. Having been described as an "unapologetic evangelical for the cause of technology in schools," her focus remains on working with classroom teachers on appropriate technology integration.

Susan started her professional career as a middle and high school teacher of history and economics. She lived and worked abroad for 10 years in Israel, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. 

Susan weighs in on ways to prevent bullying in schools.

Diane Ronchetti Cooper is an associate director for academic advising and student services in the Graduate School of Education, where she is advisor for the middle school, high school, individually designed, instructional technology, and digital literacy and computer science programs.

She is a long-standing member of the Lesley community. She earned her BA from Emmanuel College; attended the George Washington University Law School; and received graduate degrees from Suffolk and Lesley University in both Business and Educational Administration. She is an active member of the American Association of University Women, the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), and various local school and community organizations.

"The creative impulse, like love, can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian or parent can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations." - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

Dr. Mary Ann Cappiello is a Professor of Language and Literacy in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley. Prior to that, she served as a curriculum facilitator for English Language Arts and Social Studies at the middle level, and she taught English Language Arts and Humanities at the middle and high school level in New York and New Hampshire.

At Lesley, she teaches courses in children's and young adult literature and literacy methods, including a specialized course in nonfiction for children and young adults. She also mentors the content literacy and children’s literature courses and advises doctoral students. Previously, she served as program director of the Collaborative Internship Program, a residency-based teacher preparation program in its fifth decade.

Mary Ann co-chaired the writing team for the National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) 2023 Position Statement on the Role of Nonfiction Literature (K-12). From 2015-2018 she was a member of the National Council of Teachers of English's Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction (K-8) Committee, serving two years as chair. In 2022, Mary Ann led the national “Kids Love Nonfiction” campaign with Dr. Xenia Hadjioannou.

With Erika Dawes, Grace Enriquez, and Katie Cunningham, she is the coauthor of Reading with Purpose: Selecting and Using Children’s Literature for Inquiry and Engagement (Teachers College Press, 2023). With Erika Dawes, she is the co-author of Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy (Stenhouse, 2021), as well as Teaching with Text Sets (Shell, 2012) and Teaching to Complexity: A Framework for Evaluating Literary and Content-Area Texts (Shell, 2014). Mary Ann is also the author of the 2021 historical essay, “Searching for Dinah Tuck.”

Mary Ann has been a guest on public radio and a consultant to public television, and her work has appeared in The Reading Teacher, English Journal, Language Arts, The Dragon Lode, School Library Journal, and School Library Connection. She champions the use of biography in the K-12 classroom at The Biography Clearinghouse.  Previously, Mary Ann reviewed children's and middle-grade books for Language Arts and blogged about children's and young adult literature for over a decade at "The Classroom Bookshelf," a School Library Journal blog. Mary Ann was also a consultant on the PBS kids' show "Molly of Denali." Read more about her participation.

Mary Ann serves on the Advisory Board of the Children’s Literacy Foundation (CLIF), the Program Committee of the American Independence Museum (AIM), and is the 2023 Co-Chair/2024 Lead Chair of the Children’s Literature Assembly of NCTE’s Expert Class Committee.