Teacher honored for excellence

Mike McCambridge believes students learn best when they get away from their desks and start moving around, whether they're in fourth grade or graduate school.

McCambridge teaches graduate students in the teacher credential program at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. But he also sometimes works with children at the Flory Academy of Science and Technology in Moorpark because the two schools are partners in training teachers.

He uses the same approach — called "active learning" in academic circles — with both groups.

"He understands kids, even though he works with college students," said Genevieve James, a teacher at Flory. "He's still in tune with what needs to be taught in the classroom."

Earlier this year, McCambridge was recognized for his teaching, receiving the President's Award for Teaching Excellence at CLU.

He's also received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education so he can train Moorpark teachers in active learning.

In his classes, McCambridge wants students to draw links between what they're learning and their own lives. To that end, he encourages lots of discussion, then reflection.

"I tell them, Ultimately, I want you to leave with that deep understanding of content and of yourself,' " he said.

McCambridge bases his approach in drama, one of his lifetime loves. But it's an approach that works with all subjects, he said.

A math lesson, for example, might involve second-graders' becoming groups of numbers themselves, then adding or subtracting themselves from that group.

If middle school students are reading the "Diary of Anne Frank," the teacher might ask students: "What if your parents woke you in the middle of the night and said you had to leave? What would you take?"

In his graduate classes, McCambridge models active learning, giving his students a first-hand experience of how it works, said Jessica Butler, one of his graduate students at CLU.

"A lot of college professors stand up there and lecture, but he's active," Butler said. "We do a lot of discussion, a lot of activities."

Both McCambridge's parents were teachers, but as a young man, he did not want to go into the profession.

Out of college, he pursued a career in acting. Yet he slowly got drawn into teaching. After teaching at a private school in Hollywood, then at Calabasas High School, he came to CLU full time in 2002.

While teaching, McCambridge has not given up his love of the theater. He is involved in the education arm of the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival, which brings Shakespeare into local elementary schools. Thanks to the new grant, the festival will bring actors into all six elementary schools in the Moorpark Unified School District this year, he said.

He's also working on a book, tentatively titled "On Becoming the Good Teacher: In Pursuit of Effective Teaching and Learning."

"One does not become that good teacher on that first day," he said.

"I'm constantly surprised with what students come up with. It's wonderful."

--- Published in the Ventura County Star on Oct. 10, 2008