Northwest University’s College of Education

I'm Mary Ewart and I teach for the College of Education at Northwest University. So my path to becoming a professor started in high school, really when I decided I wanted to work with kids. And so I knew I wanted to be a teacher in some way. So I spent about 13 years teaching middle school and high school, particularly in areas in math and science and the classes where kids struggled. And I loved doing that. And through that, I started learning about how do we best help those kids learn and how do we help them grow and access content that's hard for them. In that process, it just kind of evolved into helping others do that, helping other teachers in the department do that, helping other teachers in the district, and that pushed me into teaching teachers. And so through that, I ended up hearing about NU and our Education Department here started adjuncting and working with people who want to be teachers. And so getting the chance to teach them those kind of skills and strategies from the beginning, which just is amazing. And then here I am now. What I love about teaching at NU is that we care about every single student that sits in our classroom. One of the things that drew me to teaching as a profession was my care about students. And I always had this idea in my head, or people are told in school that the farther you move along in school, the less the teachers care about the students and the more they care about the content.

And that is just universally untrue at this university. I love that we care about every kid who sits in our seats. The obvious choice when someone majors in education and goes through are our college of education, is that they're going to be a teacher and they can be a teacher anywhere in the K-12 setting. So we offer opportunities for elementary, middle, high school, many, many subjects. But we also offer options for a non teaching certificate degree in education. And what that provides are people the chance to work in things like international education, say they want to go to another country. They want to teach English to students there. So we offer a track for that. We offer options for people who want to do things like instructional design. So if they want to go work for one of the many tech companies we have in the area and provide training and support there, we offer that option. You could also end up doing things where you work in H.R. departments and offer training and support there. You can end up doing what I do and teaching people how to be teachers. You can end up teaching at a district level instead of in a building or a classroom. You can teach and provide professional development for teachers. There's really a lot of options if you're interested in education. I actually have two favorite classes that I teach. I love teaching instructional design because that is a class that all of our students take, regardless of the pathway that they're going to choose, whether they are interested in a certificate or not, and whether they're interested in elementary school or secondary.

And it's a class where we really get to dig into what does it mean to design instruction that's effective to all of the students in the classroom? And then I also really enjoy teaching our elementary math content and methods class. And that's a yearlong class. And what I love about that is I get to help people not be afraid of math. So we know that a lot of people who teach elementary school are afraid of math and that that translates to their students. And so by getting a year to really dig in and figure out why is this not scary and how do we do this and make it fun, it means that all of those people are going to go out and teach kids and not be afraid of what they're teaching them. So one of the favorite assignments that I give is in instructional design when we are starting to think about how do we identify what we're teaching students. There's a lot of debate and has historically been a lot of debate about standardized education. And we know that in public school, in K-12 school, that there are standards that are national and our students here have to learn about them so that when they're in the field and teaching, they can address them. And so one of the things we do is we tear apart those standards really and truly word by word and think about what it means.

And then we think about what does that mean for students and what do they need to know in order to do that? It's called building a success criteria for kids. We say, OK, this is what they have to know. This is what the standard says, but what does that really look like? And then our students tear it apart and think of examples and and come up with really a pathway of learning. And I love to watch them do that because it takes away this kind of fear or stigma that's involved in standardized education and really just treats it like here is a structure, a framework of what you need to teach kids, but how are you going to do it? So that's one of my favorites there. And then I really like any peer teaching assignment that I gave where I, I put our students up in front of the class and they get to teach us. It's really hard to pretend like junior and seniors in college or third or fourth graders. So it can be nerve wracking and hard and a little awkward when we're all on the floor like we're kindergartners. But it lets people start to practice and it takes away some of the fear in the nerves and it lets them get to start exploring and trying out ideas they have in a safe space. That's really a lot of fun.