Featured #MSUrbanSTEM Sustainability Fellow: Molly Lahart

Featured Sustainability Fellow: Molly Lahart

Bio: Molly Lahart has been teaching at Prosser Career Academy for the past 13 years.  She is currently teaching two Algebra classes and works as the On-Track coordinator for freshmen and sophomore students.  She has a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership from American College of Education and a Master’s Degree in Mathematics Education from DePaul University.  She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and Secondary Education from Loras College.

Passing the Torch

This has been a good year.  Being a member of the MSUrbanSTEM community was a huge turning point in my education career.  It allowed me to reflect on my teaching and make changes that I knew would help with student understanding and engagement.  In the two years since my MSU classes, I have seen a drastic change in the way that I approach lesson planning and structure my classes.  

When the cohort was done meeting, I was lost as to what to do with all of my momentum going into the next school year.  Luckily, this year I was fortunate to be a Framework Specialist. We are working on mentoring teachers new to Chicago Public Schools this year.  I have been working with a small group of new high school math and science teachers and was paired with a new math teacher for one-on-one mentoring.  This has proven to be a great way to pass along how the MSUrbanSTEM program has helped me to rethink how I approach teaching. I still remember how stressful and difficult my first year of teaching was.  There were many times when I considered not coming back, but now that I am in my thirteenth year, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Being able to work on this team with Marianna Jennings as our leader has been just what I was looking for to be able to pass on just a fraction of what I got out of the MSUrbanSTEM program!