Photo by Jewish Women's Archive

President Obama honored seventh grade English Teacher Rebecca Mieliwocki (pronounced “Milwaukee”) with the 2012 National Teacher of the Year Award at a White House ceremony on April 24. The National Teacher of the Year Award is the highest professional honor for educators in the United States. Recipients take a year off from classroom duties to travel the world representing and advocating educators, averaging 150 appearances in front of audiences ranging from hundreds to more than 10,000. The teacher’s home district pays salary and benefits during this period.

Mieliwocki’s application for the award described her as “a 12-year-old goofball” at heart, an aspect of her personality which President Obama corroborated. “I have to say she was a little bit goofy”, he said, speaking of a meeting they had prior to the award ceremony. “She was teasing me and asking Arne about our basketball games.” On a more serious note, Obama said, “Rebecca is the definition of above and beyond.” He praised Mieliwocki for setting high expectations, developing unconventional lesson plans, hosting regular family nights, sending parents weekly memos and operating a Facebook page for her class.

While she was a seventh grader herself, Mieliwocki frequently acted the clown and ended up in the principal’s office. “I just thought I was hilarious,” she said. Now she has a different perspective on disruptive students, one that allows her to relate to them while redirecting their energy toward learning. “I allow them to think that they’ve gotten me off topic,” she says, “and what they don’t understand is that I was them one time and I’ve tried those exact same tricks. I will let them lead me off only to hit them with some idea or a lesson.” This quick-witted, dynamic approach has won her legions of loyal students — students who might not have had the same success with another teacher.

But Mieliwocki demonstrated modesty in accepting the award. “I am not the best teacher in America — there isn’t one,” she said. “All across this nation there are millions of teachers who do the work that I do and many do it better.”

She also touched on the topic of teacher evaluations, which has become controversial because of the seemingly arbitrary measures of performance sometimes have large consequences for a teacher’s career. “Accountability matters to me,” she said. “I have to know I am doing a good job and know what areas I need to improve in. But I need to be looked at through [performance data, student connection, colleague relationships], not just one.”

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When your phone rings or an email pops up on your laptop, do you ever stop to wonder about the amazing technologies that have made these gadgets possible? Stanford Professor Paulo Blikstein would venture to guess that you haven’t, that you have gone through your life accepting the fact that technology surrounds you without ever seriously wondering or learning about how any of it works. This state of mind, Professor Blikstein posits, is a systemic problem, rooted in the failures of an American education system that has cleaved to traditional modes of teaching and has yet to adapt to a 21st century reality. In other words: Students spend too much time learning fractions and simple arithmetic when they should be learning about the technology of the iPhone that can answer any math question for them almost instantaneously.

To remedy this problem, Stanford University’s Transformative Learning and Technologies Labratory (TLTL) works to devise new and innovative ways to increase the presence of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education in American schools. TLTL, headed by Professor Blikstein, brings together thinkers, teachers and learners of all ages to design new ways of using and teaching technology in educational settings. In their own words: “We view technology not only as a way to optimize existing aspects of the educational system, but as a transformational force that can generate radically new forms of learning and understanding.”

And while there will always be some value in traditional science projects and fun scientific classroom games, TLTL envisions a path towards training the next generation of technological innovators and critical thinkers through hands-on, technology-based learning.

The FabLab@School initiative embodies this vision and hopes to bring technological learning and thinking to the fore. TLTL thinks about it like this: If you want to teach a student how to play basketball, you bring them to a gym. If you want to teach a kid science — and specifically technological science — you bring them to a fabrication lab. Not surprisingly, most American schools are equipped with gymnasiums but lack the learning space necessary to teach STEM topics in a way that would prepare them to understand and invent new technologies. By bringing fabrication labs into the schools, TLTL hopes students will be able to learn about the technologies that surround them and will begin to think critically about how to create new technologies of their own.

Alongside the FabLab@School program, TLTL promotes the inclusion of STEM topics in the classroom by developing educational activities that can be used in any classroom, training teachers in delivering lessons on new technology and creating low-cost fabrication technologies for school that cannot afford fabrication labs.

While TLTL stresses the value of the “learning space,” they also conduct important research about the ways in which the human mind interprets and learns about technology. Through understanding the ways in which we think, TLTL works to create new ways for our students to learn.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved with TLTL or if you want to bring a fabrication lab to your school, check them out here.

Photo by Judy Baxter

Welcome to our Masters in Education series! Check back each week for another profile of an expert educator. 

For the last 13 years, Stacy Hoeflich has taught fourth grade history at Alexandria’s John Adams Elementary School in Virginia. Hoeflich said she was practically born into the classroom; both her mother and sister teach, and long before she earned her Masters in Education, her high school history teacher inspired her to become an educator. In 2011, she won the National History Teacher of the Year Award, but what makes her the best history teacher in America?

Passion on an Operatic Scale
Hoeflich’s students don’t just learn the stories of America’s past, they also learn how to tell them — or, to be more precise, how to sing them. With the help of John Adams music teacher Wes McCune, Hoeflich and her students wrote, produced and performed three original historically accurate operas. Telling the stories of George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and Virginia’s native Americans on the stage engaged students in a learning process much richer and more complex than simply studying the material from a textbook.

In addition to dramatizing the past, Hoeflich’s students also learn the difference between history and a good story. Another of her lessons requires students to perform a critical analysis of historical inaccuracies in the Disney film Pocahontas.

It is combining these kinds of unusual classroom activities with a high level of historical engagement that has earned Hoeflich national recognition. “[The History Teacher of the Year Award] is indeed an honor for Stacy Hoeflich and for Virginia,” said Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia Wright. “Her students dive into Virginia history and geography through experiential learning and hands-on classroom activities. Her creative approach to history instruction engages students throughout the year and instills in them an appreciation of how the present is connected to the past.”

Diversity in the Classroom
One of the particular challenges Hoeflich faces is teaching American history in a school with students from more than 50 countries, in which some classes are composed of more than 50 percent students from immigrant families. For Hoeflich, this means looking past educational politics and traditional narratives to find stories that everyone can relate to. “The teaching I do is way more important than the politics of my job”, Hoeflich said. “I really like all of history. You have to make history a story to make it interesting. It’s far more than dates and facts.”

Hoeflich also makes a point of teaching from sources other than textbooks, in part because many of her students have limited English literacy skills. Creating operas and leading a critical discussion of Pocahontas allows students to engage with history in a highly intellectual manner. She also uses both recent and historical political cartoons in the classroom, as a way of examining political symbolism, subtext and controversy. These unorthodox educational strategies allow her to passionately engage with her students, regardless of what language they speak at home or how comfortably they can read in English.

Primary Sources
While some might worry that teaching from non-text sources might “dumb down” the curriculum, Hoeflich has actually been praised for introducing more primary sources to her classroom than the average history teacher. “Hoeflich is devoted to the teaching and learning of history,” said Dr. Kelly Schrum, who nominated Hoeflich for the History Teach of the Year Award. “After seeing the students in her classroom excitedly puzzle over a difficult map created 400 years ago or political cartoons from the last century, I am confident that students leave her classroom with a lifelong interest in understanding the complexities of the past.”

Curriculum Development
When Hoeflich is not teaching her own students, she develops lesson plans and curricula for a number of national organizations. She serves as an educational constultant to the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and creates and models content for the National History Education Clearinghouse. She has also played an active role in conferences of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the National Council for Social Studies.

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