2010
Award Winners
Kristin Ziemke-Fastabend
Burley Elementary, Chicago
First Grade
"I don't want to be a teacher!" That's what Kristin Ziemke Fastabend thought, sitting at the dinner table, listening to her parents—both teachers—talk about their work. But fast-forward a couple of decades and you'll find one of Chicago's finest early childhood educators, the kind of teacher who would travel to alligator-infested swamps to bring a one-of-a-kind lesson back to her first-graders at CPS' Burley Elementary.
For ten days this past October, Kristin kayaked the bayous of Louisiana with a team of scientists from Earthwatch Institute and Tulane University. She participated in gathering data—numbers and types of caterpillars and trees, leaf conditions—for the purpose of monitoring climate change in what is some of the richest of America's endangered wetlands. She documented the adventure for her young learners through her daily blog, and brought them into the experience with three live Skype communications from the swamps. "It was wonderful to be able to use technology to increase learning," she says.
That adventure is just one example of how Kristin uses technology in the classroom. "Different children learn in different ways, and at different paces," she points out, so she differentiates learning for her students with tools like the iPod. "Using iTunes and Keynote, I collaborated with my tech coordinator to create custom, differentiated literacy programs that present individual word lists visually and auditorily to my students. They learn to read and spell new words as they hear, say, see, and write them."
Kristin began teaching in 2000, in Chicago's suburbs. She moved to CPS' Burley in 2002, where her principal, Barbara Kent, refers to her as "the Burley ambassador." "She embodies the true Burley spirit," Barbara explains. "She encourages families to participate in the education of their own child, and invites them in to the classroom to enrich the curriculum for all the children; she opens her classroom to colleagues to engage them in discourse about literacy, intentional teaching, and learning communities; she leads her fellow teachers in professional development, both locally and nationally, and she attends outside school events such as fund-raisers, parent socials, PTA meetings, and sports competitions."