 |
||
|
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Three Students Win Outstanding GSI Awards
Julie McNamara Julie McNamara knows how her credential students feel when they try out her methods for teaching mathematics in the classroom. “I was an elementary school teacher myself in Vallejo,” she said. “I also got my credential here at Cal.”
Now she’s a doctoral student and the instructor for Elementary Teaching in Mathematics, a class taken by students planning to work in grades K–5. McNamara won UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for that class. She aims to teach in a way that makes math lively. “Children need to reflect on their thinking,” she said, “not just to be fed facts.”
McNamara tries to incorporate that same methodology in her course, urging the student teachers to examine the content and her methods, which requires her to challenge her own ideas: “I have to revise my own thinking every year,” she remarked.
McNamara is Ph.D. student in the Development in Mathematics and Science program, and the focus of her research is the teaching and learning of math.
McNamara’s course continues to be a passion for her. “This class is the highlight of my week,” she said. “Every week.”
Eun-Sook Yu Eun-Sook Yu, another winner of this year’s Outstanding GSI Award, also practices what she preaches in her teaching. She is the instructor for an undergraduate course where students work in groups to create learning projects in the community.
Yu originally took the course she teaches, Current Issues in Education, when she herself was a sophomore at Cal. Now that she’s on the other end of the grading process, she takes a principled stand and gives the students the power to shape their own grades. “In the class, students create their own system of accountability,” she explained. “They are responsible for developing criteria and procedures for determining their own grades.”
Yu puts into practice Paolo Freire’s theories on education. “I am a firm believer that critical pedagogy is developed through action,” she said. Her students do more than just study problems. “The students design a project with neighboring communities to address a specific issue in education. They begin by identifying an issue in education, they conduct background research, and they craft and implement a response to that issue.”
Joseph Flessa Another Outstanding GSI Award Winner, Joseph Flessa, recently completed a Ph.D. in Policy, Organization, Measurement, and Evaluation. Flessa worked in collaboration with faculty in the Principal Leadership Institute to design one of the courses for that new program. “I love teaching in the PLI,” he said. “The students work incredibly hard and are devoted both to the challenging requirements of their master’s program, and to the day-to-day improvement of the schools and districts they work in.”
Flessa is not afraid to question assumptions in his classes. “The challenge that I feel—and I don’t think I always live up to it—is to make sure that the courses are of use and that they answer two basic questions: How do we know what we know about this topic? and, So what?”
He found his greatest teaching challenge in summer 2002, when he co-taught a course in the PLI that met all day, twelve days in a row. “One thing I learned from the faculty instructors, Janette Hernandez and Sandra Stein,” Flessa said, “was to respond to questions socratically. The purpose of this Leadership and Management course was to practice some of the skills that students would need on the job as administrators, so I knew that I wouldn’t be helping them if I filled in all the blanks.”
Flessa and the other instructors for the course wrote individual letters to each of the forty-eight students after their first assignment, carefully analyzing and critiquing their work. “That takes a while,” Flessa said with understatement, “but it is worth it because students deserve this sort of individual focus and because it causes us as instructors to pay close attention to whether or not our assignments are actually building and assessing the skills that we hoped to see.”
return to BEL Fall 2003 contents return to GSE publications
|