- Programs
- Golden Apple Fellowship
- Golden Apple Fellows
This program has been suspended, but we would still like to highlight the outstanding educators who have participated in the past.
2003-2004 Golden Apple Fellows
Stacy Schmidt-Wenzel2002-2003 Golden Apple Fellows
Alane Paul-Castro2000-2001 Golden Apple Fellows
Gerald FlemingChristina Noyes
1999-2000 Golden Apple Fellows
Mary Lou CrannaNoreen Tierney
1998-1999 Golden Apple Fellows
Jennifer NaussSharon Treece
1997-1998 Golden Apple Fellows
Amy BenedictyAlison Shepard
The 2003-04 Golden Apple Fellowship was awarded to Stacy Schmidt Wenzel, an 8th grade language arts and English language development teacher at Horace Mann Academic Middle School. During her time at Berkeley, she took classes in the Graduate School of Education in order to further her research in language acquisition and metacognition.
Ms. Wenzel was renewed and inspired by her experience as a Golden Apple Fellow. "My semester at Berkeley was one of the most intellectually stimulating experiences of my life. What I learned will impact my approach in the classroom every day," she said.
Alane Paul Castro has been with the San Francisco Unified School District since 1995 and has been teaching 2nd grade at Jean Parker School since 1997. She received a master’s degree in international education from the University of Massachusetts and spent many years working in non-formal community education. Since coming to SFUSD, Ms. Paul Castro has merged her interest and experience in community education with the needs of the school community by facilitating educational workshops for parents and literacy volunteers. She has received two Ed Fund Leadership and Professional Development grants, both for her work focusing on families learning together. One of the grants, The Write Stuff, was developed into a handbook that was disseminated by the Ed Fund. She is also a past recipient of a Josephine Miles Fellowship.
Ms. Paul Castro attended UC Berkeley during spring semester 2003. She enrolled in courses to broaden her subject knowledge and to help her develop ways to enable more students to access the curriculum. Her educational exploration at Berkeley emphasized ways to embrace and empower all families in the education of their children.
For four years, Ms. Noyes has taught visual and performing arts at Everett Middle School. This year she also began teaching Math and science core classes. Ms. Noyes established Everett’s drama department and is the director and choreographer of the Everett Middle School Drum & Dance Ensemble "Les Shekeres," who were awarded the 1999 SFUSD Youth Arts Festival Performing Arts Award. She is also the coordinator of the Theatre Academy at Everett’s Beacon Center, where she directs students’ original plays and electronic sound scores. She serves on Everett’s Safe Schools Action Committee and is a coordinator for their Healthy Schools Team, organizing student activities such as Red Ribbon Day and the Great American Smoke Out. She has displayed students’ artwork in the de Young Museum and the International Children’s Museum. She also participates in the Zeum Internet Publishing Access Program and, with colleague John Burke, produced an original movie entitled The Math Minute.
Ms. Noyes will pursue a course of study which will allow her to understand how to make multimedia computer technologies more accessible to the inner city youth she teaches, taking them to higher levels of technological expression and communication.
An English teacher at Marina Middle School for the last decade, Mr. Fleming has been teaching for almost 30 years. He teaches classes in the Secondary Education Department at the University of San Francisco and is an SFUSD mentor teacher. He has served as Marina’s representative to the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative and on the boards of the Newspaper in Education Program and the C.A.R.E. program, and he has presented at various professional conferences and workshops. Mr. Fleming has published two books about teaching creative writing, edits an annual literary magazine, and has published poetry and prose in many literary magazines across the United States. Recently, San Francisco State University presented Mr. Fleming with The Golden Torch Award, honoring him as the Year 2000 Middle School Teacher of the Year.
The course of study proposed by Mr. Fleming was focused and innovative. He explored ways of capitalizing on students’ affinity for and willingness to fully engage in poetry writing in order to find a way to let "poetry spring kids loose from their recalcitrance and propel them willingly into prose."
Noreen Tierney teaches 3rd and 4th grade English Language Development at Marshall Elementary School. She has served as the school’s Program Resource Teacher, Science Coordinator and Family Math/Science Teacher, and provided Mathland in-services. She has received two Ed Fund grants for science and social studies, a Math grant from CMC, and a Community Project Grant from Linking San Francisco. Outside of the district, Ms. Tierney serves as a master teacher for teaching credential programs at SFSU and New College.
Ms. Tierney focused her fellowship studies on writing. She would like to write a children’s book for second language learners with a matching integrated science curriculum. (In yearly surveys of her class, the students consistently identify science as their favorite subject.) By carefully embedding language lessons in high interest science lessons, Ms. Tierney aims to help students become better readers and writers. The lessons, she explains, "would involve language activities facilitated with bold visual aides and plenty of opportunity for oral language development, preceding the reading and writing components."
During her five years teaching kindergarten at Alamo Elementary School, Mary Lu Cranna has served on the Language Arts Adoption Committee, on the Language Arts Implementation Team, as a Mathland presenter, as a BTSA support provider, and as a Year One Teacher Support provider. Since receiving her Clear Credential in 1994, she has participated in summer training programs for teachers including UC Berkeley Extension’s City Science Program and Language and Literacy Development program, and San Francisco State University’s Math Leadership program.
Ms. Cranna focused her fellowship studies on early literacy development across the whole K-2 range. She would like to move into a 1st grade position and coordinate a cross-grade literacy program, a plan supported by her principal. Ms. Cranna intends to pursue the following essential questions: "How can I effectively assess my students in a balanced early literacy program to move them along the literacy continuum to improve their learning and my teaching? How can I match what I am assessing to the Language Arts Standards?"
Ms. Treece teaches graphic arts to students in grades 9-12 at John O’Connell Technical High School. Before arriving at O’Connell in 1991, she was an instructor at a vocational training center for adults and teenagers in East Palo Alto. While at O’Connell, Ms. Treece built an educational-industry partnership culminating in national standards certification for her graphic arts program, which led to program sponsorship by two national industry associations and two local professional organizations. Under Ms. Treece’s leadership, the graphic arts department has received grants and in-kind donations (of materials, equipment, and supplies) totaling $400,000.
During the fall of 1998, Ms Treece pursued a course of study in multimedia in which she learned "how to create animation and 3D images with video and sound editing and to author works/projects for electronic multimedia presentations." She plans to use what she learned at Berkeley to create a curriculum that integrates academic learning with the acquisition of career skills. Ms. Treece wrote of her Golden Apple Fellowship, "…this semester went better than I ever thought it would. I was able to reinvigorate, to relearn what it’s like to be a student, and to dream. My motto this semester was, ‘I wonder… What if? How can we?’"
Ms. Nauss created Thurgood Marshall High School’s ESL program, and currently teaches all levels of ESL to students in grades 9-12. She also serves as Marshall’s Bilingual Program Coordinator and wrote the school’s world literature curriculum, which is a model for 10th grade teachers. She has received fellowships to study with the Bay Area Writing Project Summer Institute and to examine the incorporation of themes of racism, prejudice, and moral decision-making into curriculum. Ms. Nauss helped create Youth Partnership for Change, a youth work brigade program in which students travel to do community service projects, and in the summer of 1997 traveled with Marshall students to Esteli, Nicaragua.
Ms. Nauss focused her fellowship on researching strategies for untracking the "detracked" classroom. At the end of her fellowship semester, Ms. Nauss received a teacher research grant from the University of California’s Office of the President, which enabled her to lead a group of teachers, in collaboration with faculty and a graduate student from Berkeley, in a year-long exploration of their ideologies of ability, intelligence, and tracking. The group plans to develop strategies to create a pedagogy in which all students have access to challenging material in detracked classrooms. They also plan to pilot a professional development model which enables teachers to read, discuss, and apply current educational research to their thinking and practice. She has used her instructional materials development grant to write "Untracking the Detracked Classroom: Rethinking notions of intelligence and ability," a paper the group will use to guide their study.
In 10 years with SFUSD, Alison Shepard has taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade language arts, social studies, and Math at Everett and A.P. Giannini Middle Schools. At Giannini, she served as co-chair of the history-social science department, as co-coordinator of the school’s California Middle School Demonstration Project in history/social science, and as a member of the Program Quality Review Leadership Team. She has studied Native American culture and history with the Bay Area Writing Project and through a fellowship at UC Davis.
Ms. Shepard focused her Golden Apple Fellowship studies on Native American culture, history, and literature. She used her instructional materials development grant to create an 8th grade social studies curriculum which helps students understand the influence of the Iroquois's Great Law of Peace on the US Constitution. As a TSA at CIPD, Ms. Shepard included a social studies standard for 8th and 11th graders based on this new curriculum. She is currently responsible for planning and coordinating professional development opportunities for history-social studies teachers and for coordinating teacher review of content standards and writing exemplars.
After leaving private industry to join the school district in 1990, Amy Benedicty taught 7th grade Math, language arts, and social studies at Horace Mann and Rooftop Alternative. She served on the advisory board for Harvard University’s PACE Project and was involved in SFUSD’s Literacy Collaborative as well as the founding of a peer tutoring program and parent/student service learning program. Ms. Benedicty has presented at numerous conferences, including NCTE, AERA, California Assessment Collaborative in Education, and the Harvard PACE project.
Ms. Benedicty focused her fellowship studies on poetry, linguistics, and Islamic history. She used her instructional materials and development grant to create language arts core curriculum "beyond" activities, which she adapted for middle school from techniques used in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at Berkeley. Ms. Benedicty also created a 7th grade social studies curriculum, "Connecting to Islam," which helps students understand current events and become active contributors in democratic society. Ms. Benedicty has presented these instructional materials at summer workshops. In her current position as a TSA at CIPD, she teaches model lessons, disseminates lesson plans, coordinates middle school writing assessment, and leads the Middle School Literature Review and Recommendation Committee.