SUPPORTERS
Teacher Excellence Award winners
Walter Kinderman, teacher at Walter Payton College Prep, was the winner of the Teacher Excellence Award for 2018 given by the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society. This is the first year that this award has been offered, and we are honored that excellent candidates were nominated.
Walter was asked about his pedagogical philosophy guiding students towards excellence and scientific interest. Here is his response:
I think learning best occurs when students are supported while taking chances and provided a safe place to make mistakes. Whether its competing in the ACS Scholarship Exam, for a spot on the Chemistry Olympic Team, the IIT Bridge Contest, or Science Fair, it is important we allow students to engage in challenging science outside of the classroom. As teachers, we must embrace diversity of learning styles, engage students within and beyond the classroom with tangible, real-world storylines, and encourage them to use this scientific knowledge to make an impact on society.
For 2020, Rachael Swiercz of Niles West high school was selected as our Teacher Excellence award winner for 2020. Rachael shared these thoughts with us:
On what she has learned from her students: Students have taught me that providing them the ability to make choices and bring ownership to their education can produce incredible connections, experiences, and deeper learning.
On advice that she might pass on to other teachers: A piece of advice I would pass on to a new teacher is that it is okay to not have all the answers. It is powerful to show your students that true learning is not just about gaining knowledge, but also about being curious and willing to change and grow. Exploring ideas as a class, searching for answers, and making connections is an enriching way to learn.
In 2021, Chris Cassidy of John Hersey high school in Arlington Heights is the winner of our Teacher Excellence Award. The award includes $1,000 and a framed certificate from the section. We recognized Chris within our section at the November meeting, which is serving as the education night meeting this year.
Among the 2021 cohort, there were many teachers who exhibit the attributes of an excellent teacher, which made it a difficult decision for the award committee. Consequently, we recognized a number of those highly qualified individuals (in alphabetical order): Jeromy Bentley of Naperville Central, Lashayne Collins of Chicago high school for Agricultural Sciences, Zachary Hund of University of Chicago Laboratory school, Tanya Katovich of Hoffman Estates, John Kretsos of Niles North, Steven Matthies of St. Charles East, and Karen Trine of Whitney Young.
Here are some thoughts from Chris Cassidy, which reflects the challenges of teaching in this past year of COVID: Many of the difficulties endured throughout the year led to revelations. The importance of connecting with students was paramount. Teaching had to become more personal than ever before. You had to establish a relationship that would allow you to guide a child on a path that would challenge them and not limit future opportunities. It was often too easy for kids to choose a path of least resistance. A lot of personal energy was spent establishing these individual connections to help them to make proper choices regarding their efforts and ethics.
The other moment of clarity I had was that chemistry must remain appropriately challenging even when our instructional minutes were cut. The standards for those pursuing scientific research, practicing medicine, or becoming engineers will always remain high. We could modify what we taach due to time or physical space constraints, but we had to keep it authentic. I spent much more time planning and reflecting on each lesson than in recent memory, looking for ways to help students discover that chemistry is amazing. I redesigned experiments and actually increased the number of labs once we were back in person, and I made some connections with recent graduates to share insight on their current work or research. There are personal takeaways from last year that will continue to help me set lofty expectations and establish class culture.
The winner of the 2022 Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society Teacher Excellence Award was Katherine Goebel. Ms. Goebel teaches at Buffalo Grove High School and serves in her community in many other ways. As always, there were other highly qualified candidates, but her teamwork and overall approach to educating her students strongly impressed us. On September 16 at the section’s education night meeting, we were pleased to honor Ms. Goebel.
We asked Katherine Goebel for some thoughts on education. Here is what she shared with us: Model imperfection. Wanting/being perfect doesn't serve anyone in the learning community because humans are infinitely variable. Instead, be authentically vulnerable in your failures to be better than today. Share what you know and learn, welcome differences in opinion on a chance to not only keep yourself accountable, but also as a way to grow your practice. Do it humbly for your students, for your fellow educators, and for your community. Have fun creating and trying new things, together with others. Evaluate without judgment, but instead with the goal to be better, so that students can share that vision, and through that experience, find joy in the process of learning. Appreciate and accept your teammates' super powers and areas of improvement as your own. Develop a community of growth and influence that can affect change by supporting and building others up.
For 2023, the winner of the Chicago section Teacher Excellence Award is Jeromy Bentley. Jeromy teaches at Naperville Central, and impressed us with his educational strategems, his devotion to his students, and his outstanding community service. We are honoring Jeromy at our sections education night meeting on Sept. 14 at North Park College. We wish to thank all our other nominees, who clearly are all excellent teachers, and deserving of accolades.
Here are some thoughts on education that Jeromy shared with us:
Our duty as educators is to foster our students' inquisitive nature and establish a culture of learning where mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth.
Our students know the world around them is not perfect. They know they might not "fix" the problems of the world, but they are hopeful their contributions can at the very least provide movement in the right direction. I view my teaching the same way. It's not perfect, but I am hopeful I can at the very least provide my students with the skills to be successful in their future academic and employable careers.
There is a partnership between our classrooms and the world outside them. Our classrooms are an extension of our students' lives. Their experiences outside the classroom should always be invited to provide relevance to our exploration of chemistry. On the flip-side, the exploration of chemistry we provide our students should be used to enrich the communities outside of our classrooms.
The partnership between student and teacher is one that carries on for a lifetime. Our influence as educators should be treated with the utmost care. The collection of moments and experiences our students have in our classrooms will stay with them longer than the school bell. One year, ten years, twenty years later, after our time with them, they may not remember every single detail regarding chemical nomenclature, balancing equations, moles, limiting reactants, etc. They will remember the challenge. They will remember how their peers challenged, yet supported each other. They will remember our words of advice and encouragement. They will remember us. That is our legacy as educators.
For 2024, Jaime Stasiorowski of Deerfield High School is the 2024 Teacher Excellence Award winner for the Chicago section of the ACS. As usual, we received wonderful nominees who each had their strengths and are serving their students, schools, and communities well. Ms. Stasiorowski stood out on the strength of her involvement in so many of the aspects of our educational and scientific endeavors. Here are Jaime's thoughts:
I fell in love with Chemistry because my high school Chem teacher made it so fun, engaging and cognitively challenging. I ended up majoring in Chem and Biochem in college with plans to go to grad school to get my Ph.D. I started grad school and quickly realized that lab research was not for me but I really enjoyed being a TA. It wasn't until 5 years later after I left grad school and worked in business jobs for a while (companies hired me because I had a science degree and had analytical skills!) that I made the decision to go back to school to be a chemistry teacher. I realized that I missed the way chemistry teaches one to think and I missed sharing my love of chemistry and my love of learning with others. Fast forward to now and I try to not only help my students appreciate chemistry for its complexity but also to help students use the study and cognitive demand of chemistry to help them become more engaged, more confident, and more reflective learners. We talk all year about how chemistry teaches you to problem solve, to reason, to fail and pick yourself up again, to say "wow" or "so cool" and make you think in ways you didn't think you could. I use labs to drive learning. I check in on their learning every day through formative assessment. We make connections to real life - what caused the explosion at the sugar refinery in Georgia? Why was Flint, MI water so lead-ridden? Why do they call it Elephant Toothpaste? I try to live by what Paul Hewitt of Conceptual Physics fame taught me: Make their first experience delightful and they will come back for the rigor. I strive to show them the wonders of Chem, discover the wonders for themselves, model what it looks like to wonder, and get them excited about learning. These are the tenets that I consistently return to to ground me when teaching feels too hard or when the way I taught something last year doesn't seem to be working this year. These tenets drive me to "see" the students in front of me and continually evolve my practice and pay forward my love of chemistry and learning.
For 2025, Andrew Park of Buffalo Grove High School is our winner of the Chicago Section Teacher Excellence Award. Mr. Park impressed us with advocacy for his students, his service to the community, and his ability to both differentiate instruction and enable student growth.
