Sara Silver

As a former high school teacher who took a long hiatus to raise children and do volunteer work, Sara Silver was looking to get back into the field of education. “I wanted to brush up on my skills, find out what was new in the field and make myself an attractive teaching candidate for potential employers,” she says. To achieve these goals, Silver entered the Master of Science in Education’s Advanced Teaching program, and now she is teaching social studies at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park.

Sara’s expectations for the program were strongly met. “I was inspired by my fellow students and my professors,” she says. “Lots of authentic projects allowed me to truly experience new pedagogy.” Throughout her classes, Silver was able to pursue inquiry and research into many professional issues that concerned her.  She began to focus intensively on the one issue that concerned her the most. “I was also allowed,” she says, “through a group project in Design of Learning Environments and a follow-up Independent Study course, to complete an intense study in an area of real interest to me: service learning.” She delved deeply into this area of interest in order to develop her teaching practice. 

The best aspect of the program for Sara was having the guidance and time to pursue projects that would truly help her to reflect upon and improve her teaching. “Although authentic projects can be very time-consuming and labor-intensive, I believe they are the most important  — and effective — part of a teacher education program,” she says. “Master of Science in Education courses at Northwestern University use this methodology a great deal.”