Lincoln Northeast High School math department chair Cassie Seiboldt takes advantage of every opportunity of being a lifelong educator.
After she graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Education and Human Sciences with a Bachelor of Science in secondary mathematics education, she applied to the Knowles Teaching Fellows Program as a first-year teacher in 2015. Five years later, Seiboldt has completed the program and has now become a Knowles Senior Fellow.
“Dr. Lorraine Males shared this opportunity with first-year teachers who earned their degrees and secondary math endorsements from UNL and were a part of her methods courses,” Seiboldt said. “I decided to apply because I felt I needed some additional support to develop my teaching practice. It was amazing to be a member of a community like Knowles that saw value in providing support and guidance for teachers new to the profession.”
The fellowship is awarded to pre-service and first year math and science teachers to gain support through their first five years of teaching. The Knowles Senior Fellows Program builds upon the professional norms, practices, and knowledge gained through the Teaching Fellows Program to strengthen the teaching profession and improve math and science education.
Along the way, Seiboldt also earned her Master of Arts from the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education in 2018, and she is currently working on her Master of Education in educational administration at UNL.
Since Seiboldt transitioned to becoming a Senior Fellow in the summer of 2020 amid challenging times teaching during the pandemic, she has not yet applied for any of the project’s grants but she plans to pursue these opportunities in the future.
“I am so excited to start utilizing the Senior Fellow benefits,” Seiboldt said. “While we learned so much about best teaching practices for the math and science classrooms, the Knowles Teaching Fellow staff saw our personal strengths as educators and pushed us to critically think about our students and learning outcomes.”
As a Teaching Fellow, she did present with two members of her cohort in the summer of 2019 at the Knowles Summer Conference, with a presentation titled “Staying Connected—Why Maintaining Teacher Friendships is Important.”
“During my experience as a Knowles Teaching Fellow, I was a member of a collaborative cohort of math and science teachers from all over the country. As a result, I shared my experiences in my classroom and learned from other early career teachers outside my school context,” Seiboldt said.
Read more about Seiboldt at: https://knowlesteachers.org/bios/cassandra-seiboldt.
Other Knowles Fellows who are Nebraska graduates are: Evan Thornton-Kolbe, 2020 Teaching Fellow, Lincoln High School, https://knowlesteachers.org/bios/evan-thornton-kolbe; and Connor Bohlken, 2018 Teaching Fellow, Denver School of Science and Technology, https://knowlesteachers.org/bios/connor-bohlken. Former Nebraska teacher Kristin Frew of Aurora is now a Senior Fellow: https://knowlesteachers.org/bios/kristen-frew.
- Lindsay Augustyn, UNL CSMCE