Each year, individual schools across the District honor one of their teachers as the school’s Teacher of the Year. Those teachers are entered into the District’s Teacher of the Year program. The top eight teachers in the District are then interviewed by a District-based committee composed of past Teachers of the Year, District administrators, union representatives, parent leaders and community members – and it’s that committee that selects Broward’s top teacher.
The Broward County Public School District honored the “Best of the Best” at its 2010 Teacher of the Year event on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at the Broward County Convention Center, 1050 Eisenhower Blvd., Fort Lauderdale.
Lara R. Coronel
McNicol Middle School
Lara R. Coronel never planned on being a teacher. She was going to be a Marine Biologist and by 2000, she had achieved that goal, with a Master’s Degree in Ecotoxicology. But after 9/11, she felt the desire for something more. The following August, she began teaching 7th grade science to students at McNicol Middle School.
Her philosophy of teaching is simple, “Teach the children, that is what you are here to do. All the rest is extra.” She makes sure she knows what the children need to know, and then finds a way to teach it. Coronel loves science and wants the students to “get it” and enjoy it. She also believes that her students should be involved in their educations every step of the way. Both she and her students use diagnostic tests and graphs to analyze and determine the students’ weaknesses, so they will understand what her strategies will be for helping them improve.
Coronel knows that trying to teach without the participation and support of parents or guardians is counter-productive. Three years ago she created a Web site to increase parent participation and encourage students to take personal responsibility for their education. She also designed a newsletter that outlines her expectation, grading policies and contact information. She sends the newsletters to all parents who return a signed confirming receipt.
Coronel says that most days she’s not sure who is learning more, her or her students. “I can’t think of anything I would rather be doing than teaching children. Teaching is the toughest job you’ll ever love,” she says.
Christine Donahue
Northeast High School
Christine Donahue knows that sad, scared, neglected students cannot learn, so she creates an atmosphere in her classroom at Northeast High School that makes all students feel valued and valuable. She lives for the teachable moment and connects with students in ways to make students feel proud to be who they are and to find pride in their heritages.
A teacher for 26 years, Donahue’s prime instructional strategy is to bring the child to the lesson, rather than hand a lesson to a child. Her English lessons transcend paper and white boards -- she wants students to walk away feeling that they have learned something that will help them in everyday life. She knows that there are plenty of students who can memorize vocabulary words and meanings without really understanding a word, so she utilizes higher order questioning. Donahue encourages students to explain how they arrived at an answer, and to ask questions even when they got the right answer.
A National Board Certified teacher, Donahue is fascinated by social cubism – the idea that nothing happens in this world in an isolated fashion and there are many sides to any incident. That concept drives literacy in her classroom instruction. When reading a novel, she also teaches her students about what was happening in the world at the time, politically, socially, economically, nationally and locally. She encourages her students to look at today’s events and look for larger, deeper causes – the big picture. This quest for knowledge, to understand one’s world, pushes kids to the Internet, to watch the news, to question easy answers and to think for themselves. “To me, there is no greater literacy than that,” she says.
Gloria D. Edwards
Coral Cove Elementary School
A teacher for over 22 years, Gloria D. Edwards believes that students are entitled to a learning environment that is thought provoking, challenging and designed to prepare them to be good citizens of the world. Entering her kindergarten classroom at Coral Cove Elementary School is like entering an “all-you-can-eat” buffet of learning materials and centers designed to meet the various developmental needs of her students. It is colorful, cheerful, student-friendly and filled with hands-on projects. By arranging the room for productive work, her students are taught a routine that allows them to choose task-oriented projects, manage materials well, cooperate and show respect to each other and follow class expectations and goals.
Edwards believes that effective teachers must develop positive expectations for all students. Her teaching approach involves professional preparation, flexibility, humor and the use of educational data. She believes education is serious business, but it can be fun and enjoyable. She sings with her students, exercises with them, laughs with them and demonstrates habits and behaviors they can emulate. Edwards attains valuable information from professional workshops, graduate level classes, books and peer collaboration and implements it in her classroom. “Teachers who are bored with the curriculum can infect their students with boredom,” she says. To avoid the “blahs,” her lessons are filled with innovative, creative activities, music, movement, poetry, puppets and learning games.
Edwards says her consummate joy as a kindergarten teacher comes from observing a child at the beginning of the school year, who knows few letters or sounds to finally master reading and writing paragraphs and book reports at the end of the year.
Dianne Feraco
South Plantation High School
Dianne Feraco, a reading teacher at South Plantation High School, believes that her students’ growth in reading is the beginning of their independence, because, “literacy is the gateway to their futures.” She describes teaching as her continuous pursuit to help enlighten her students to the world around them.
Feraco teaches five 10th grade Intensive Reading classes. Twenty-six percent of her students have been in an ESOL program and eight percent qualify for ESE. Her students have varied reading abilities and need help with word identification, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. She routinely reassesses each student’s growth and targets areas where he or she needs further development. She then assigns students to differentiated groups to focus on each of those areas. Through direct instruction, group work, technology, independent reading and the use of literacy-based resources, she helps her students improve their reading skills. She utilizes an array of written materials including magazines, newspapers and novels. Students who have strengths in one area, work in pairs or groups to help those with weaknesses in that area.
Feraco’s students use laptop computers to conduct research. She helps them write questions and they determine which ones to use as they work with a partner or in a small group.
Feraco understands that parent involvement is important to student success. She keeps the lines of communication open with parents through regular phone calls and E-mail messages. By working together – teacher, students and parents -- Feraco’s students become proficient readers who develop a love of reading and leave her class knowing they have succeeded.
Bonnie Yvonne Goldstein
Atlantic West Elementary School
Bonnie Yvonne Goldstein, media specialist at Atlantic West Elementary School, believes that everyone learns in his or her own innate style and rate. Her media classroom is open, friendly, inviting and easily accessible to everyone. Anyone needing assistance may enter at any time, even during instruction. She initiates ongoing reading motivation programs to foster a love of reading and learning and to raise standardized test scores. Due to those programs and other promotions initiated by Goldstein, circulation in the media center has increased by 80%, while parent and community usage increased from 5% to 50%.
As a way to manage her classroom, Goldstein created a program called SHARE (Speak kindly, Hands, feet and objects to myself, Always follow adult directions immediately, Raise hand and wait to be called on, Everybody on task). The media center is the core of the school community, so Goldstein focuses on developing critical content, creating equal access services and supporting inquiry. Students are taught how to self-assess, set goals, prepare information, implement and reflect.
Wanting to include everyone, including her school’s growing ESOL population, Goldstein wrote and scripted a video titled Everybody Reads. The video, which is available in both English and Spanish, instructs parents on how to read and do homework with their children. The video is frequently presented during parent and community meetings. To further increase communication and increase interest in reading, Goldstein created two after school book clubs, one for adults and the other for students. As a National Board Certified teacher, Goldstein is also an instructor for the New Teacher Academy and mentors teachers from the public sector, charter and private schools, all on her own time.
Sarah Rappaport
Seminole Middle School
If you step into Sarah Rappaport’s classroom at Seminole Middle School you will find there is little or no noise, but language and learning are rampant throughout the room. One student may be working on pre-alphanumeric principles, while others are using word cards to structure a basic sentence. All the conversations taking place in the room are through the use of American Sign Language. If you return to the room later in the day, it will be much different, because in addition to teaching deaf and hard of hearing students, Rappaport also oversees the school’s newsletter and yearbook. Students write, edit, create layouts and critique pictures for the publications.
Throughout her five-year career at Seminole Middle, Rappaport has maintained a level of idealism. “I truly believe that all children are able to succeed. Each child’s success will be measured differently, however, they will all succeed,” she says. As a teacher of deaf and hard of hearing students, most of whom have additional disabilities, she is constantly reassessing and redefining her goals. She believes that her students relish in their successes, however big or small, if she recognizes and focus on what they can do, rather than what they cannot accomplish.
Rappaport has found that rote memorization and mindless repetition are not effective learning methods. So, whether she is teaching her advanced and gifted journalism and yearbook students, or her deaf and hard of hearing students, she believes that the most significant and salient learning experiences arise from discovery-based learning, authentic learning and challenging material. Rappaport’s philosophy is that regardless of where you teach or what you teach, it is how you teach that will make an impact on your students, school and community.
Dori N. White
Sawgrass Springs Middle School
Dori N. White, a math teacher at Sawgrass Springs Middle School, loves math and loves teaching. White was fortunate to have amazing math teachers when she was a student and she always had a desire to join their elite club. It is her goal to help her students master the math skills needed to succeed in a competitive, hi-tech world.
She feels that mathematics is literally all around us, and incorporates strategies to help her students interpret the world as she does – through logic, symmetry and numbers. White, through training, research and collaboration with peers has developed projects that bring a literary focus into her math classroom, beyond the standard word problems from a textbook. Students in her classroom maintain chapter math notebooks and file their graded work in a cabinet in the classroom. At the end of the school year, they reflect, in writing on their accumulated work and their experiences. From the very first day of school, White lets students and their families know that her expectations for excellence are high and that she will walk side-by-side with them through the process of learning math. Throughout the school year, students and their families can maintain a constant connection with White through her Web site.
White believes that teaching is a process that requires on-going reflection and refinement. When she mentors other teachers suffering from self-doubt, she tells them, “The best teachers never think they are good enough.” From the very beginning of her career 20 years ago, she has continued to be a learner, earning a Master’s Degree, Gifted Certification, Middle Grades Endorsement, ESOL Endorsement and National Board Certification.
