Encouraged by an early retirement incentive to leave her eighth-grade social studies classroom 10 years ago, Judith Sheldon still wasn't quite ready to walk away from the education field.

"I retired reluctantly," said Sheldon, a member of the Jamesville-DeWitt Faculty Association.

She needn't have worried. Thanks to contacts she made during her teaching years, Sheldon soon landed another education gig — teaching the teachers.

Sheldon is an instructor with Syracuse University's Teaching and Leadership teacher prep program, supervising secondary teachers.

"I teach a class in methods in secondary social studies and I chair the social studies academy," Sheldon noted.

In her latest role she works on students' skill development as well as teaching abilities. "It's sort of a reality check. They get a lot of theory in schools of education, which is fine," she said, "but they also have to know what works in a classroom with real kids."

Educators now, she said, are not just teaching history, but teaching kids "how to be historians and really understand subjects like geography, for example."

She uses her role with the professional development program to introduce the new generation to some available resources.

Serendipity

"A nice thing that has spun off from this — I've been able to require my students to become members of various councils of social studies," Sheldon said.

She devotes at least one academy meeting to the role the union plays in teachers' lives.

It is critical "that the new generation of teachers sees how important the union is," she said. "I was in public education long enough to see what a difference it has made."

It's important "to appreciate the struggle people before them have made, and also to appreciate the liberty they now have to teach how they want to in their classrooms," Sheldon said.

She recently won a Central New York Council for the Social Studies award for higher education training of social studies teachers.

— Clarisse Butler Banks