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It
Pays to Be a Great
Teacher at Mizzou
The William
T. Kemper Fellowships for Teaching Excellence were created
in 1991 with a $500,000 gift to honor outstanding MU teachers
each year. Commerce Bank manages the trust fund. This year, five
faculty members are each being recognized with a $10,000 cash
bonus.
Kemper, a 1926 MU graduate, was a well-known
civic leader in Kansas City until his death in 1989. His 52-year
career in banking included top positions at banks in Missouri,
Kansas and Oklahoma.
FRAN ARBAUGH
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Education
Fran Arbaugh is dedicated to helping teachers
understand and extend their students' mathematical thinking and
reasoning.
Her research focuses on mathematics teachers'
learning, especially in professional development projects, and
contexts of learning, through vehicles such as teacher study groups,
types of curriculum and college courses. Her work has been published
in various journals, including The Journal of Mathematics
Teacher Education and Teaching Children Mathematics.
Arbaugh teaches a variety of undergraduate
and graduate courses for middle school through college level teachers.
Her focus is on preparing middle and secondary school mathematics
teachers, but she also has pioneered efforts within the learning,
teaching and curriculum department to mentor graduate students
in the area of college teaching. She routinely engages mathematics
education doctoral students in preparation and instruction of
undergraduate classes, helping them organize syllabi, select instructional
resources and tasks, and develop assessments.
Arbaugh is regarded by students as a demanding
but accessible instructor. Students praise her for her ability
to organize instruction, stimulate reflection and inspire a love
of mathematics. She is described as “masterful in crafting
activities that would encourage prospective teachers to think
deeply about the importance of student understanding.” One
former student said, “Fran Arbaugh has a way of bringing
out the best in math teachers. She takes my thinking and teaching
to levels above what I think I can do, and it's always with a
question.”
Another former student said, “Dr. Arbaugh
held such high expectations that none of us wanted to disappoint
her, which often meant working harder in her class than we did
in our other coursework.”
She has earned several “High Flyer”
teaching awards from the College
of Education. For four consecutive years, Honors
College graduates have selected her as their mentor to participate
in the Honors Convocation.
In 2004, Arbaugh was nominated for the Provost's
Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award, and last year, she
received the MU Excellence in Education Award.
Arbaugh earned a doctorate in curriculum and
instruction/mathematics education from Indiana University-Bloomington
in 2000, a master's degree in curriculum and instruction/secondary
mathematics education from Virginia Commonwealth University-Richmond
in 1996, and a bachelor’s degree in family and child development
from Virginia Tech University-Blacksburg in 1983.
R. WILSON FREYERMUTH
John D. Lawson Professor of Law
A national expert in the area of property
law, R. Wilson Freyermuth joined the law
faculty in 1992 and teaches in the areas of property, real
estate, secured transactions and local government.
“Professor Freyermuth is a versatile
teacher who is able to reach different groups of students in these
different courses and who effectively conveys both the subject
matter in question and his passion and respect for the subject
matter,” says R. Lawrence Dessem, dean and professor of
law.
Students and faculty applaud Freyermuth's
commitment to his students and their education. “He creates
a nonthreatening environment but is not at all soft on the students;
rather, he is rigorous and does not let those he has called on
off the hook too easily,” says a colleague.
Says a former student: “Professor Freyermuth
can and will explain a legal principle five different ways to
ensure that every person in the room understands. He gives examples,
asks hypothetical questions, uses diagrams, tells stories and
references book materials. I think his students and colleagues
would be astounded by the amount of time he dedicates to teaching.”
While legal academia has been slow to embrace
technology in the classroom, Freyermuth routinely integrates it
into his teaching through the use of PowerPoint, e-mail, blogging,
smart board, video technology and the Web. He was named by the
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) as its property
fellow in 2000. The computer-based learning exercises that he
created for CALI have been distributed nationally and are used
at law schools across the country. Additionally, the textbook
he co-wrote titled Property and Lawyering also is used
nationally.
The MU School of Law has recognized his achievements
in the classroom and awarded him the Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. He also was named the
Phi Alpha Delta Teacher of the Year.
Outside of the academic setting, Freyermuth
is just as generous with his time. He makes a concerted effort
to get to know his students personally, often inviting small groups
of students to join him for lunch or coffee.
Freyermuth earned a bachelor’s degree
in business administration in 1984 at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill and a JD with highest honors in 1987 from
Duke University.
LOIS HUNEYCUTT
Associate Professor of History
Students in Lois Huneycutt’s medieval
history classes typically write off past individuals, their
ideas and concerns as barbaric or backward and less capable of
abstract thought than modern people.
Getting students to identify with people of
the past whose lives, experiences, assumptions and expectations
were different from their own can be a painful task because they
will not always be comfortable confronting alien ideas and beliefs.
However, Huneycutt believes that challenging students to confront
these differences will lead them to listen to and empathize with
people who are different from themselves — skills that will
serve them all their lives.
In efforts to make her classrooms places where
students feel comfortable interacting with each other and with
her, Huneycutt employs a mixture of teaching techniques such as
assigning group and individual projects that include oral reports,
in-class debate and role-playing exercises in which students take
on personae of people in the past.
For Huneycutt, teaching and learning do not
stop in the classroom. She urges students to take advantage of
outside lectures and events and do guided research. She encourages
her best undergraduate students to present the results of their
research at professional conferences, and she works with graduate
students to reduce their seminar papers or aspects of their theses
into presentable form, encourages them to submit these papers
to scholarly conferences, and takes them with her to such conferences.
Huneycutt’s commitment to scholarly
outreach is evident in her willingness to share her expertise
in the community whether with home schooled students engaged in
the study of Christian history, senior citizens preparing themselves
to see the Dead Sea Scrolls on exhibition in Kansas City or a
women’s book club reading a novel about Mary Magdalene.
“Continued enthusiastic participation in this broad community
of learning, both inside and outside of the classroom, illustrates
my teaching and learning philosophy and defines who I am as a
scholar and a teacher,” Huneycutt says.
Jonathan Sperber, chair of the history department,
calls Huneycutt “the model of an intellectually and personally
engaged faculty member.”
Huneycutt received a bachelor's degree in
history from the University of California-Riverside in 1984 and
a master’s degree in history from the university in 1986.
She earned a doctorate in medieval European history from the University
of California-Santa Barbara in 1992.
LYNDA KRAXBERGER
Associate Professor, Convergence
Journalism
Lynda Kraxberger's willingness to adopt new
teaching strategies is what distinguishes her from being a good
teacher, who presents information and demonstrates ideas, to being
a great teacher who inspires.
She joined the Missouri School
of Journalism in 1993, where she oversaw the broadcast news
portion of the curriculum at the NBC and CNN affiliate KOMU-TV,
the only university-owned commercial television station in the
United States that uses its newsroom as a working lab for students.
Seven years later, Kraxberger moved from the
television station to the traditional classroom and began teaching
Broadcast I. During the five years she taught the introductory
course for radio-television journalism students, she never used
the same syllabus twice, as her approach and subject matter changed
constantly to adapt to changes in the field and in her students.
In 2005, Kraxberger became a founding member
of the school's newest sequence: convergence journalism, an emerging
discipline of cross-media cooperation involving broadcast, print
and the Web. With this assignment she has co-created and co-taught
four new courses. This spring, the school graduates its first
full class of undergraduate and master’s students with degrees
in convergence journalism.
“The sequence has been a challenge to
Lynda, and she's meeting it with a first-one-in, last-one-out
work ethic,” says a colleague.
“Lynda spends considerable time preparing
each lesson so that she is familiar with the software and hardware
and can be prepared for most any possible question or situation,”
her teaching assistant says. “In this rapidly changing world
of technology, Lynda is working hard to stay at least one step
ahead of the students — and that is no easy task.”
Like many of the school’s faculty with
professional media responsibilities, Kraxberger did not come to
Mizzou with any teaching experience. She has honed her skills
in and out of the classroom by attending 10 conferences devoted
to teaching excellence and providing workshops for other faculty
members. She served for five years on the campus curriculum committee.
In the past two years, her leadership as chair of the school's
technology committee has resulted in an academic transformation
grant from ET@MO to enhance student career opportunities through
the creation of electronic portfolios. The journalism faculty
recognized her teaching excellence two years ago with the school's
highest teaching honor, the O.O. McIntyre Distinguished Teaching
Award.
Kraxberger received a bachelor’s degree
in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia-Charlottesville
in 1984 and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from
Mizzou in 1988.
FRANK J. SCHMIDT
Professor of Biochemistry
Frank Schmidt guides students to become scientists
in the classroom, to learn science by doing science.
To do this, he structures his classes to include
models of the way science is done professionally. Scientists,
he says, ask questions, gather existing knowledge, identify needed
knowledge, find out information they need to know and test their
ideas on something new.
He is known for his ability to cause students
to think creatively, not only through his teaching methodologies
but also through his evaluation process. He uses deductive reasoning,
problem-solving examples from real-life applications and natural
phenomena to reinforce learning and understanding.
“The skills he has developed in his
students will not only assist them in becoming successful researchers
but also will carry them far in working in intellectually stimulating
environments,” a colleague says.
Schmidt led an interdisciplinary team of faculty
members to develop and implement a two-course introductory science
sequence for the MU Honors
College. The courses were founded on principles of interdisciplinary
and inquiry-based instruction and a “less is more”
approach. As a result of his teaching of these classes, he was
selected as the campus Honor College Professor of the Year in
2000.
“Dr. Schmidt's striking effectiveness
as a teacher are his uncanny memory and brilliant ability to weave
into his lectures stories that crystallize the central points
of a lesson,” a colleague says. “His gift for storytelling
makes real the ways scientists discover via deductive reasoning,
testing hypotheses and designing critical experiments to reveal
molecular mechanisms of life.”
A former student notes that interactive learning
and promoting critical thinking are hallmarks of Schmidt’s
teaching style that are noticed by his students. For example,
in one of his lectures she says, Schmidt arrived with a plastic
grocery bag stuffed with 12-inch segments of red ribbon. “Initially
we supposed that he raided his wife's craft bin. However, our
silly mood changed when he pulled two ribbons out, twisted them
around each other and visually displayed how DNA supercoils to
effectively package itself inside the cell.” With that,
each student was prompted to pick out their own ribbons and repeat
what he was doing.
“Dr. Schmidt is exceptional in the degree
to which he continually challenges himself to enhance his teaching,”
says a colleague. “He serves as a role model and leader,
demonstrating that excellence in teaching must be pursued continually
and passionately.”
Schmidt, who has been at MU for 29 years,
received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Marquette University
in 1968 and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 1973.
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Copyright © 2007 — Curators of the University of Missouri
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An equal opportunity/ADA institution.
Published by the Mizzou Alumni Association
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Last Update:
November 15, 2007
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