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SPH Associate Professor Michael Siegel
Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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“At seven years old, I got my first teaching experience by helping my mom in the kindergarten classroom,” says Michael Siegel, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at BU’s School of Public Health. Even then, his mother’s thorough methods of preparation and her talent for engaging her students at the United Jewish Center in Danbury, Connecticut, impressed him deeply. When she died in a 1981 car accident, Siegel was seventeen years old and committed to a teaching career.
Last September, Siegel announced the Ruth Willner Siegel Memorial Teaching Fellowship Fund, which he is funding in memory of his mother. The fund will support both a monthly teaching seminar for SPH faculty and a fellowship to be awarded biennially to an incoming SPH student who demonstrates a strong desire to teach. Recipients of the fellowship will work directly with Siegel for two years; they’ll observe one of his classes over a semester and teach a session under his guidance. “In addition,” says Siegel, “they’ll have the opportunity to do community field practice—particularly in areas of need. For example, they might go into the Boston public school system and develop a public health course for high school students.” Other potential field practice sites for fellows are Citizen Schools, City Year, and the Boston Area Health Education Center.
The first fellowship will be awarded to a student entering this year. “The main thing I look for in a fellow,” says Siegel, “is dedication to teaching. We want to train people who will make teaching a major part of their career, even though they’ll also be public health practitioners or academicians.” The fellowship carries a stipend of $4,000; Siegel expects it to be a valuable recruiting tool for SPH. “Many of the school’s qualified applicants end up going to other universities for various reasons,” he says. “We hope that the experience we’re offering, as well as the financial element, will attract students to BU who might otherwise go elsewhere. In that way, we’ll help to increase the quality of the student body.”
As for sustaining the high quality of SPH’s professors, Siegel has received an enthusiastic response from faculty members participating in the yearly seminar series also supported by the fund. Begun last fall, the series is delivered by Siegel in monthly sessions. This year’s seminar, The Craft of Teaching: Nine Steps to Excellence, which quickly reached maximum enrollment, focuses on such topics as course flow, the evaluation of student performance, and “teaching as theater.” “It’s a great group of faculty members,” says Siegel. “They’re dedicated to their teaching and to improving their skills. The seminar’s going strong.” Recipients of the fellowship will be invited to the seminar.
Ruth Willner Siegel, who grew up in the Bronx, attended Barnard College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1959, and the Yeshiva University Graduate School of Education, where she received a master’s in secondary school education in 1960. She taught science at Bronx High School of Science and at Great Neck North Junior High School before moving, with her husband and three children, to Danbury.
“I think that the primary professional gift I got from my mom is my teaching,” says Siegel, “and so I think that the best way I can memorialize her is to help pass that on to yet another generation of effective teachers.”
—Kelly Cunningham |
