Martha Mock joined the Warner School in 2005 to coordinate and teach in the teacher preparation program. She teaches courses in the areas of early childhood, young children with disabilities, and inclusion. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Innovative Transition www.nytransition.org/, which conducts work in the area of adolescents with disabilities and transition. Together with her colleague Susan Hetherington, she is currently working in partnership with the Golisano Foundation to improve the lives of adolescents with disabilities and their families as well as the systems that serve them. The work is based on the recommendations from “In the Balance: Successfully Transitioning to a Meaningful Adult Life”, www.golisanofoundation.org/content/TransitionReport.pdf a report from the Collaborative Community Transition Planning Process led by the Advocacy Center in Rochester, NY.
Mock has worked with children with disabilities and their families since 1989. She taught in the Virginia Public Schools in a variety of early childhood special education classrooms and home-based settings, and worked in the area of early childhood special education teacher preparation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While at the UW-Madison, she was a program evaluator at the Waisman Center, the University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities. She conducted evaluation and community-based activities for two projects: the federally-funded project Wisconsin Healthy and Ready to Work www.hrtw.org focusing on youth with disabilities in transition, and a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction grant focusing on parent education and training for parents of children and youth with disabilities.
While at Warner, Mock was also the Director of Professional Development for the federally funded Early Reading First Project (principal investigator, Lucia French) using the ScienceStart! Curriculum www.sciencestart.com. ScienceStart! is a science-based preschool curriculum designed to foster language development, literacy, learning, and cognition.
Mock’s research and community involvement interests include early intervention, parent-professional relationships, systems of service delivery, systems change, adolescent transition, and disability advocacy.