Susie Kavanaugh

Sixteen teachers from New York City private, charter and traditional public schools are being honored this year with Blackboards. This year, the 11th for the Blackboards, we received about 1,000 nominations from parents, students, principals and fellow teachers, and the final selections were made by editors and executives from four Manhattan Media publications—Our Town, West Side Spirit, Our Town Downtown and New York Family.

One of our honorees, the beloved Jon Goldman at The Beacon School, unfortunately died this spring, but we wanted to recognize his extraordinary work over the years.

In these pages, you’ll find 16 remarkable stories of teachers, including Susie Kavanaugh at Corlears Elementary School, who empties her classroom every year so her students can decide how to fill it up, and Ross Grosshart, an electrical engineer who changed jobs mid-career so he could teach college-level courses at Brooklyn Tech.

Several other Blackboard winners also chose teaching after starting on a different path, and their students and our city are better off because of it.

—Josh Rogers,
Editor, Backboard Awards

Barbara Ciner: Life Lessons Before Kindergarten

Rose Coffield: Pre-K Teacher Uses Video to Teach Kids About Play

Cara Beseda, She’ll Give a Student the Socks Off Her Feet

Lisa Harrelson, She Cheers Students, and They  Return the Favor

Lindsay Wener, Life Lessons from the South Side to the Upper East Side

Tonia Percy, Second Graders Are Happy  to See a Familiar Face

Laurel Nyeboe, Opening the Doors to the World

Susie Kavanaugh She Empties the Classroom  Before Filling Their Minds

Jonathan Goldman, Beacon Students Remember Jon, Their Inspirational Teacher

Sammie Smith, A Passion for Writing, Theater and Latin

Lois Eder, Special Teacher Making Strides with Students

Andrew Adler, Using Computers to Teach the Three Rs

Marija Kero, Bringing Math Alive by Connecting  it to Students’ Lives

Dr. Warren Wollman, Physics Doctorate Demystifies Mathematics at Rodeph Sholom

Bernadette Robine, From Paris to Brooklyn

Ross Grosshart, Engineer Goes Back to High School Mid-Career

Starting your kids on the right path at an early age is always a top concern for parents. So when parents decide to send their children to the Adults and Children in Trust program at St. John Divine, they can rest assured that Barbara Ciner will empower their children with the skills necessary to survive.

The 44-year-old teacher began her teaching career over a decade ago and has made it a point to teach with a deep understanding of each and every one of her students.

“The quality that sticks out most in my mind is her amazing ability to know the children in her class,” said Karin Kimbrough, whose two children were in Ciner’s class in Morningside Heights. “She would take the time to understand how each one learned, what motivated them to apply themselves and what issues they have.”

Kimbrough was floored by her assessment and how well Ciner understood the children—how she got to know her sons’ habits better than Kimbrough herself did. Ciner even gave Kimbrough some pointers that she still uses with her children today—well past pre-school.

“In a way, the children are who they are going to be,” Ciner said. “They have their own personality, likes and dislikes. All I want to do is give them the confidence and strength to be successful.”

Every morning, Ciner walks her classroom to make sure that each child has their own space and their own outlet for creativity.

“I make sure the blocks are attractive for children who like to build and that every child has a place where they can interact and thrive,” Ciner said.

The teacher said she’s honored to receive a Blackboard Award and is thrilled by the outpouring of support from parents.
“It gave me chills,” Ciner said. “I’m having an out-of-body experience right now. I don’t like the spotlight.”
However, she makes sure each child has their own spotlight in order to thrive and develop in her classroom, a fact many parents appreciate.

“I learned to respect and care about Ms. Barbara because she profoundly cared and respected the little minds she was shaping,” said Janet Hernandez. “Ms. Barbara effectively prepared my [4-year-old] daughter and our preschoolers for the difficult process of entering into some of the most competitive kindergarten programs throughout the city, both private and public.”

Ciner is constantly trying to improve and follows the philosophy of avoiding rigidity in order to maximize the learning of her pupils.

“I am now motivated to keep things fresh and to keep being a student of life,” Ciner said. “When I was 13, my grandmother wrote a note in my yearbook which said, ‘Lend your mind to learning and your heart to understanding.’”
It’s a philosophy that she strongly abides by and hopes to pass on to each and every student she encounters.

In Laurel Nyeboe’s classroom, second- and third-grade children discuss stories in The New York Times, jump in place to solve math problems and earn certificates for good behavior.

It’s a way of following the curriculum and having fun at the same time, and parents at P.S. 40, Augustus Saint-Gaudens School, have taken notice—so much so that they wouldn’t mind reliving their elementary school days themselves.

“I wish I was 7 again and in her class,” said Carla Massey, a parent at the school.

Nyeboe, 58, has been an educator for 23 years and has taught at P.S. 40 for the last five. Her goal in teaching is to make sure the students learn math, reading, writing and all the fundamentals, but she doesn’t stop there; she works through the curriculum and the children’s passions to help them develop critical thinking skills and social consciousness.

“My premise is opening up the world to the children and exposing them to it as much as possible,” Nyeboe said. “I want them to live in a bigger world.”

Nyeboe starts off every year reading books by Roald Dahl and Robert Munsch, whose zany stories help children see “outside a formula.” She encourages the children to discuss stories in the newspaper in a way that’s age-appropriate and uses terms they understand to keep them engaged. One parent remembered her third-grader coming home and saying, “Mom, are you aware of the tax problems in Paris?”
It’s that sort of experience that makes Nyeboe popular with parents.

“Ms. Nyeboe infuses her students with her enthusiasm for learning. Her curiosity is contagious. She has a direct pipeline to the imaginations of her students. She knows what makes children tick. She sees the world in a grain of sand,” Massey wrote, nominating Nyeboe for a Blackboard Award.

“She opens doors to the world and inspires students to cross their threshold. Each of her students feels loved.”

Nyeboe got her start in education at P.S. 183 under then-principal Tanya Kaufman, who transformed the struggling school to a success story. At P.S. 183, Nyeboe worked on a “looping” schedule, where teachers spend time with the same kids year after year. That experience allowed her to develop deep relationships with the families.

“One mother I’m still friends with claims I helped her raise her child,” Nyeboe recalled fondly.

After 15 years at P.S. 183, she moved on to the New Teacher Mentor Program, where she stayed for the next three years. She missed spending time with students in classroom, though, so she took a position at P.S. 40.

Nyeboe recently took the LSAT and plans to go into school law. This fall, she’ll also move on to a new school where she will reconnect with a former colleague as her new principal. “It’s like coming home,” she said.

In the case of Chelsea resident and 10th grade electronics teacher Ross Grosshart, the phrase “better late than never” couldn’t be more true.

After more than 22 years as an engineer, developing software for high-profile companies including Hewlett-Packard, American Express and GTE, Grosshart decided to leave his lucrative career and follow his dream to become a teacher.

That passion led Grosshart in 2007 to Brooklyn Technical High School, where he has been teaching 10th graders the finer points of digital electronics ever since.

“DE is an introductory, college-level course typical for an college freshman majoring in electrical engineering,” said Grosshart, 50. “It starts with electrical circuit fundamentals, both analog and digital, to build student knowledge of different circuit components, and then it moves toward projects and group-based activities where students design complete circuits.”

Although Grosshart realized he wanted to teach during his undergrad days at the University of Connecticut, it wasn’t until he saw an ad for a teacher’s program that he decided to act.

“I tutored math and chemistry from freshman year until I graduated and realized how fulfilling the role of educator can be,” he recalled. “After 20 years in the business, I saw an ad for the NYC Teaching Fellows and looked into becoming a math teacher. I was lucky enough to end up at [Brooklyn Tech] teaching technology classes.

“As far as teaching goes, my biggest influence was my chemistry professor at the University of Connecticut, Dr. Covey,” he said. “She was the one who pulled me aside after class one day and asked me if I’d be interested in tutoring some students. If not for her, I don’t know that I would have ever made the career transition.”

Projects and concepts that Grosshart covers in his class include working with small, micro-controller-powered robots. “Kids love technology and use it daily, so getting them hooked on the content isn’t that difficult,” Grosshart said. “Most find the class interesting, especially if they like working with their hands.”

Grosshart said it wasn’t just his desire to teach that drove him to the classroom.

“We need technology innovators—and it’s more than just an opinion,” said Grosshart, agreeing that the United States now lags behind other countries when it comes to turning out enough engineers and workers with technical skills.

“Algebra and geometry should be taught throughout the middle school years,” he added. “Basic computer programming and introductory engineering should follow.”

Linda Soled, the parent of a student in Grosshart’s class, said the teacher “never hesitates to please parents and students alike.”
“Friendly to all, caring and extremely grateful to finally be at his dream job, Mr. Grosshart hopes to stick around for a long time doing what he loves,” Soled said. “Inspiring kids to look past high school and plan a fulfilling career, that’s what he’s all about.”

For Grosshart, some of the best parts of teaching include building a rapport with students that sometimes transforms into a mentoring relationship. He said “dealing with college, applications, personal conflicts, advice, etc.—that’s the best part of the job.”

Learning the nuances of American life has been a welcome adventure for Robine, a Parisian who moved to New York four years ago and now teaches first grade at the International School of Brooklyn (ISB) in Carroll Gardens. Robine, 32, said she developed a strong sense of wanderlust as a graduate student in Italy. When her husband received a job offer in New York, they jumped at the opportunity to move abroad once again—even though her English at the time was limited.

“You don’t learn as much when you stay in your own country,” Robine said. “I think [we] are more open-minded when we have the opportunity to discover another culture.”

Robine is a five-year veteran of Parisian public schools, but her position at ISB marks uncharted territory for her. The school is bilingual, with students receiving half their instruction in English and the other half in either Spanish or French. Robine’s class is conducted entirely in French, but her students hail from all different backgrounds—approximately 50 different nationalities are represented at the school—and some have only limited exposure to French outside the classroom.

“I wasn’t trained to teach my own language,” Robine said. “You really have to…try to make it more understandable for them.”
Occasionally, she added, students will interchange French and English mid-conversation—or even mid-sentence—when they stumble on a word. This is the very type of cross-cultural bridge that Robine encourages.

“I’m not going to say, ‘You have to speak French,’” she said. “It’s like a big salad bowl.”

Sophie Ferguson, whose daughter is in Robine’s class, praised Robine’s ability to accommodate students of varying proficiency levels. “She is an effective teacher who has been able to work well with different levels of both the French language in her class and the great diversity her group encompasses this year,” Ferguson said. “She is there for our daughter…[and] has been instrumental in helping her both with her developing written and reading French skills.”

After three years at ISB, Robine will be leaving after the current school year wraps up to spend more time with her two children: a 4-year-old daughter, who was just an infant when the family moved from France, and a 2-year-old son born in the United States. French is spoken in the family home, but Robine expects to stay here for years to come and hopes to enroll her children in a bilingual school.
“She has better English than me,” Robine said about her daughter. “She corrects me sometimes.”

A lifelong affinity for sports and mathematics has blossomed into a successful career for Marija Kero. The 27-year-old math teacher has found a way to capture the attention of her students and unlock their potential.

The young teacher makes it a point to get to know each of her students.

“Always make it about their life,” Kero said. “You never know, something that is going in their life could be a useful in how I teach my lesson,” Kero said, adding, “If you understand them as people…you can catch and hold their attention and teach them to embrace the subject the way that I have.”

Kero initially went to school to become a social studies teacher.

“Math is fun to me—it’s like solving a puzzle—but I also know that the lessons we can learn from history are just as important and necessary,” she said.

It was only after a long talk with her father about the opportunities the subject could offer that Kero decided to turn her attention to math. She attended Pace University, where she excelled and graduated from the school’s Pforzheimer Honors College.

She began teaching career at Washington Irving High School before getting her certification to teach in Florida; but through the push and pull of life, she just missed the window to apply for a New York City teaching position before the hiring freeze. This forced the young teacher to take an unfulfilling sales job with a basketball team in Harlem.

“It was as if a piece of my heart was missing,” she said. “I should have been out there helping students. I missed two years of helping kids, but now I am focused and determined to make them successful.”

During her time with the team, she began to look for schools where she wanted to teach. She found Co-op City’s Equality Charter School in the Bronx.

Vivian O. Patrick, a parent there, said Kero’s attention and drive sets her apart from other teachers.

“Ms. Kero is a wonderful teacher. She has made math come alive for my son as well as the class. My son needed to be challenged and she did just that, making it possible for him to excel,” Patrick said.

Kero tries to keep her seventh and eighth grade students’ energy levels high by finding ways to relate mathematical theorems into concrete examples.

“You have to relate math to life,” she said. “Someone will always ask, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’ Every day you have to answer that question because it is always there.”

She relates percentages to sports statistics and other concepts to things like shopping, art and music. She has even devised a classroom game called mathketball, a game that came out of her lifelong love of the New York Knicks.

She has two teams of students face off while having them solve equations head to head. The wining player can chose to add another point to the tally by making a shot into a waste paper basket or go for three from further out.

“I love when they [compete] and they check their work and get excited when they are right,” Kero said.
She hopes to give students the skills they’ll need for life.

“I want them to work hard and be thinking people,” she said. “I want them to be more involved in their community and succeed. When I see that, I know that I have succeeded.”

“I try to give students an idea of where math comes from, not just presenting it to them,” said Wollman, who teaches seventh and eighth grade honors classes. “I try to demystify the mathematics.”

Although Wollman, 73, has taught at schools across the city for the last 23 years, teaching wasn’t his first love. He obtained his undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering at New York University and completed his doctorate in physics at the University of California. While there, Wollman was introduced to the famous psychologist Jean Piaget and went on to study with him in Geneva for three years, an experience that influenced his teaching style.

Wollman returned to Berkley with a strong interest in child development and educational psychology. He taught at universities for 17 years before making the switch to schools.

“I just preferred that life,” he said. And the Rodeph Sholom community agrees it’s a fitting environment for him.

“He really connects with middle school students well,” said Lisa Rubin, 54, whose son had Wollman for both seventh and eighth grade. “He believes in their intellect and he’s able to get them farther then they ever thought they could get.”

While he sets expectations high, Wollman’s sense of humor in the classroom has been known to lighten the mood. Most importantly, parents insist he is always available beyond class hours to help students one-on-one.

“He really lives by that model of if you give a man a fish, you feed him for life,” said Steve Lipman, 51, chairman of the school’s board. “He doesn’t want you to memorize formulas as much as he wants you to think and understand. He wants students to be self-sufficient.”
According to Lipman, whose ninth grade son had Wollman, he has a way of guiding children in the right direction—something Lipman says is characteristic of the best teachers. According to Wollman, it’s all a conscious effort.

“If I want to teach something new, I place a big emphasis on how it can come out of something old—something they already know,” he said.

Outside the classroom, Wollman enjoys playing on the faculty volleyball team at Rodeph Sholom, reading whenever he can and spending time with his two grandchildren. Born, raised and still living in the Bronx (he used to walk to Yankee Stadium as a child), Wollman insists he won’t be following the baseball season. “I got to the age when I realized I won’t be able to read everything I want to read,” he said. “I read more than I watch.”

Eder, 54, believes it’s beneficial for students with different types of educational needs to interact with and learn from one another. To advance that goal, she and a co-worker developed the curriculum for a peer leadership program designed to teach students conflict resolution and leadership skills.

General education students and special education students take the New Strides in Leadership program side by side. It has helped build the students’ self-confidence, encouraged them to step up as mentors to others and helped combat bullying behavior, Eder said.

“Some of the students had never come in contact with each other on a social level, so we did activities that built trust,” Eder said.
The program is designed to help the students overcome stereotypes and biases and learn respect instead, she said.

Even people outside of the system have taken notice of the course and what it’s designed to achieve. Organizers of the 15th annual Season for Nonviolence conference at the United Nations invited the students to come and speak at the event this spring. The experience was transformative for them, Eder said.

“They went from not being able to speak to a counterpart to speaking at the United Nations,” Eder said.
Colleagues and students’ families say the course is effective.

Yulya Ostrovskaya’s sister Elizabeth lost her vision two years ago and experienced some related medical problems. “This class is what encouraged my sister to start to slowly participate in school,” Ostrovskaya wrote when nominating Eder for a Blackboard Award.

“This class teaches students how to feel good about themselves, how to resolve conflicts, how to deal with bullying and so much more. My sister really enjoys this class, and I haven’t seen her have a desire for anything the past two years,” she wrote.

Eder said there’s a reason why the course is popular with families: “They’ve never had this experience where their children could be bridged with regular ed students on a level playing field.”

Drawing on her 32 years of experience as an educator, Eder developed the program together with George Anthony, a conflict resolution specialist. Eder earned a B.A. in elementary education from Queens College and a master’s degree from the College of New Rochelle and professional certification in school building leadership.

“Basically, I have always felt that all students should have the right to learn,” Eder said, explaining why she chose special education as a career. “And I thought I’d like to be an advocate for them and teach them as much as I can, so that they can flourish as young adults.”
Eder hopes to see the New Strides in Leadership program spread to other schools. She said the benefits of the program can be seen in mainstream and special needs students alike.

“We became one family and one community, where we embraced love and respect and tolerance,” Eder said.

Buzzwords and catchphrases such as “digital literacy” don’t mean much without dedicated, hard-working teachers like Andrew Adler to put them into practice.

Adler, 40, teaches eighth-grade humanities at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, known for its pioneering role in ICT (Integrated Co-Teaching), wherein classes are co-taught by a general education specialist and a special education specialist (Adler’s role). About 40 percent of the students in Adler’s classes have learning disabilities.

Lab is outstanding, if not unique, in its insistence on both rigor and inclusion and in its ability to maintain high academic standards while integrating special needs students into nearly every class.

Adler’s approach is often cited for going beyond the call of duty; for example, he spends many after-school hours mentoring his students. But perhaps what makes him most representative of the school’s core values is his commitment to innovation.

Lab’s principal, Megan Adams, who hired him just over four years ago, said “Andy is constantly working to stay current on the research and strategies…which has a tremendous impact on both the classroom and the school.”

After an inauspicious start to his teaching career—he was assigned to a special ed classroom at a high school in California and simply instructed to keep the kids quiet and in their seats—Adler earned his master’s degree from George Washington University in 2002.
Idealistic and determined, he soon became convinced that all students have the capacity to learn, regardless of how severe their disabilities are. He developed a passion for so-called adaptive technologies—the use of up-to-date hardware and software to implement individualized education plans and increase one-on-one instruction time. His main thrust is to engage students who would otherwise be disengaged, to bring them back to school when they might be inclined to walk away in frustration.

“For students who struggle with reading,” he explained, “we need to help them build up their schema, which is a fancy word for background knowledge, so they can better understand the material being covered. We may show them a movie or use photos to help them access content.”

Many of Adler’s recent efforts have involved using the iBook Author program and iPads, adapting various historical source materials to different reading levels and learning styles. He also recently used Google Docs, which allows two users at their respective computer screens to work on the same file simultaneously, as a tutoring device, prompting a student through the difficult task of writing a paper, and in the process teaching him valuable research and presentation skills.

Adler was awarded a scholarship by the Bank Street College of Education to pursue a degree in school-building leadership, which he hopes will give him more ammunition in his ongoing quest to harness technology as a compelling educational tool. Call it digital literacy if you like, but from his perspective, it’s nothing more than using modern-day machines to teach the good old three Rs.

Adler counts as his biggest professional satisfaction “that moment when a student develops, presents, writes or comprehends something they never believed was possible. As a teacher, you don’t hit too many out of the park; you have to move your students around the bases. Every now and then, though, you get that perfect pitch, and you’re surprised.”

Every day, Rose Coffield’s pre-kindergarten students are the stars of their own show.

“I see myself in more of a supporting role,” said Coffield, 34, who teaches pre-kindergarten at The Weekday School at Riverside Church.

Of course, Coffield’s self-described supportive role doesn’t mean she isn’t in charge of leading and educating her 4- and 5-year-old students. She’s just developed her own approach.

“Our curriculum comes from what the children are interested in,” said Coffield. “Whatever they want to do, I help come up with a plan, an idea of how to execute it and help collect the materials they need to use.”

Coffield said the progressive, play-based approach she uses with her students allows for a great amount of choice during the day. Although her students follow a regular daily schedule, much of the day is spent in “choice time,” where students choose activities they want to participate in independently or with other classmates.

“The children become the masters of their education,” said Coffield. “Because of this, they feel very connected to what they are doing.”

Coffield, too, feels a great connection to her work as a teacher. Seven years ago, this wasn’t the case, so at 27, she made two major moves; she leapt from the West Coast to the East Coast and enrolled as a graduate student at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. As a student teacher and substitute teacher, Coffield got her first taste of progressive education at The Little Red School House.

In the five years since she started at The Weekday School, she’s honed her own approach to teaching by reflecting on the happenings in her classroom and experimenting with ways to solve problems.

“Videotaping was an interesting evolution,” said Coffield.

Last year, Coffield had a “very physically active” class of nine boys and five girls. On the playground, the group engaged in rough-and-tumble play that Coffield said she struggled with “policing.” What was natural and fun for the children Coffield found overwhelming.

Coffield consulted with the school’s on-staff psychotherapist, who helped her understand the way children play. Armed with information, Coffield decided to begin a conversation with her students that they could more easily understand.
“I started to videotape them so we could have more concrete discussions with visual examples of the [physical] play and what I thought needed more structure and rules,” said Coffield.

“The children really took to the video and were having some great conversations about their feelings,” said Coffield.
This year, Coffield has expanded the use of video to other parts of the curriculum. And with the school psychotherapist, she’s even touted her work with video to other teachers at workshops and conferences.

Without knowing it, Coffield may be moving from a supporting role in her classroom to a starring role in education.