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 Jeanne Ward is a Master teacher. With creativity, patience and skill, Jeanne provides even the most frustrated of her students with opportunities for insight, growth, and learning.
Jeanne cares deeply for her students and strives to make learning a positive experience for them. She does not give up easily, striving to find the right program, incentive, or tool that will help students master an academic skill. She celebrates her students’ achievements—even the tiny ones—and she encourages mastery in the classroom at all times. If a student has not found success, Jeanne creates an opportunity for that child to be successful.
A word that might describe Jeanne’s teaching is “transformative.” Jeanne has transformed her classroom into educational landscapes such as the rainforest and the Oregon Trail. She has transformed literacy into theater, helping her students experience the thrill of performing a play they wrote themselves—about aliens who take over the earth by convincing humans to pollute their own planet. In these and many other creative endeavors, Jeanne can be found standing at a student’s side—helping them read, encouraging them to communicate, showing them that they can do it. Most important, her students are transformed by her reflective, responsive, and imaginative teaching style.
Jeanne’s work does not end at the classroom door. She faithfully attends quarterly staffings, and her reports are thorough, detailed, and extremely informative. She takes an interest in all areas of her students’ lives—not just their education. She asks Residential Program staff questions and strives to understand why her students might be struggling. She is supportive of students going to public school whenever appropriate, and advocates for students when they need additional services.
In 2004, Jeanne became Nationally Certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in the area of “Exceptional Needs Specialist, Early Childhood to Young Adult.” This is one of the highest standards of professional development that a teacher can accomplish. Just 17 teachers in Urbana have achieved this level of certification, and of the millions of teachers across the country just 55,000 are Nationally Board Certified.
About this recognition, Jeanne remarked at the time, “The day to day can be so absorbing that we don’t always get to step back and reflect on the whole. This was a chance to try to become a better instructor and be more intentional about what I do.” Always striving to improve in order to better reach her students, Jeanne Ward embodies the value of Mastery.
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