Walden Alumna Named Teacher of the Year

Amanda McCall, an M.S. in Education alumna and first-grade teacher at Starr Elementary School in Starr, S.C., was chosen Anderson School District Teacher of the Year for 2006–07.

Unlike many teachers, McCall says she did not enter college intent on becoming an educator. “I set out to become a pharmacist,” she says.

McCall worked as a pharmacy technician while attending high school and later was a chemistry major at Erskine College. “I believed I had found my calling,” she says.

A New Direction
After McCall’s sophomore year, she had a change of heart. Unsure about which academic path to take, she prayed.

“Seeking direction and fondly recalling my experiences as a teacher cadet, I decided to enroll in the ‘teacher shadow’ course at Erskine,” McCall says. “But I was still unsure whether teaching was for me.” That is, until the South Carolina State Teacher of the Year came to speak to the class.

“The teacher of the year was so energetic and positive about teaching. I came away from the experience inspired,” says McCall. She graduated from Erskine in 2000 with a B.S. in early childhood education and has been teaching at Starr Elementary ever since.

Favorite Walden Course
In 2004, she earned her M.S. in Education with a specialization in Elementary Reading and Literacy from Walden.

“The specialization course that had the most impact on my teaching was Planning and Managing the Classroom Literacy Program,” she says. “In this course, I was able to implement the planning, organizing and managing aspects to provide a balanced literacy program to meet my students’ needs as emerging readers.”

Australian Partnership
McCall tries to make learning to read and write fun. Her class recently partnered with another first-grade classroom in Australia. “Through our Aussie partnership, my students and I—via journal writing, Web posts and the exchange of parcels and emails—have developed friendships as well as cultural awareness,” McCall says. She created a blog for the partnership, and her class prepared a “G’day Australia” Web-based video to introduce their Australian pen pals to their school.

The Greatest Reward
McCall says being named Teacher of the Year counts among her highest professional honors—although her teaching skills have hardly gone unrecognized. The professional development coordinator at her school uses McCall’s long-range plans as a model for first-year teachers. “And Walden requested to keep my Professional Portfolio to show other education students as a model to guide their Professional Portfolio submissions,” she says.

The greatest reward for McCall, however, is not public recognition from her peers or even administrators.

“It is the expressions on the faces of my students when they learn something new,” she says. “They reinforce in me the belief that I am doing something important, far more important than anything I could do in any other profession.”

McCall is a finalist for South Carolina State Teacher of the Year.