McCray named Undergraduate Teacher of the Year

Erica McCray, the College’s 2009 Undergraduate Teacher of the Year, believes she’s doing more than teaching facts, figures and processes. She is instilling attitudes-and that is best done by example.

” I must be willing to go with my students to unfamiliar places and to denounce some of the familiar that I hold dear,” McCray says.  “I teach by example; I teach for social justice.”

McCray entered the teaching arena as a substitute middle school teacher -a temporary position that developed into a career.   McCray’s psychology background helped her monitor and manage student behaviors, but not how to convey knowledge.   She enrolled in master’s level courses to improve her teaching skills, and sought temporary certification as a special education teacher of students with severe behavior and emotional problems.   Gauging where she might make the biggest impact on education, however, McCray charted her course as a teacher educator.

In 2006 she received her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction, with emphasis in special education and the  impact of educational policy on culturally and linguistically diverse students, from  the University of South Florida and joined the College as an assistant professor in special education in 2007. Since then she has developed a student-centered teaching philosophy that’s backed up by her classroom practices, where she focuses on the individuals in her classes rather than the class as a whole.

An   instructor in the Unified Elementary PROTEACH program, McCray’s nomination portfolio is chock full of support letters from Dean Catherine Emihovich, her program chair James McLeskey, her peers, and, most tellingly, her students.  She is the College of Education’s candidate for the naming of UF’s teacher of the year, slated for this spring; but McLeskey says McCray’s qualifications match up with anyone’s.

“Dr. McCray carefully plans her classes, uses a range of instructional methods and addresses complex, controversial issues using a delicate but direct approach,” says McLeskey.   “She also carefully attends to student needs to ensure that they are actively engaging important content and learning the material.”

It’s the attention to her students, playing to their strengths and working through their weaknesses, that makes McCray stand out as an exceptional instructor. Her students’ comments all hinge on McCray practicing what she preaches by treating each and every student as an individual-just the lesson she wants to send into the classroom with newly trained teachers.