Faculty Profile: Kelley Vauk
Since she first started working at Burke's five years ago, Kelley Vauk has hopscotched all over the Lower School. She started out in first grade, then worked as an associate teacher in the 2B classroom before co-teaching in 2A with Gale Mosheim in her final year before retirement.
And now, she is finally a permanent member of the faculty, having officially taken over in the 2B classroom after Karen Tang decided not to return full-time after her family leave. Thanks to her previous position, though, Ms. Vauk has spent more than five years as a member of the Burke's community.
"Before I started as an AT at Burke's, I taught and worked as Director of Education at Tree Frog Treks for eight years. Seven of those years, I taught science enrichment classes here at Burke's to students in grades K-2 — not to mention the countless Burke's girls who came through the summer camps in Golden Gate Park," she says. "So really, I have been hanging around Burke's for 12 years!"
Just like her mentor, Ms. Mosheim, Ms. Vauk is passionate about instilling in her students a love of reading and writing. This past school year, she and Linda Chiao — the other second-grade lead teacher — implemented several new events to teach girls to take pride in their writing. The first, a "publishing party," gave students to opportunity to share with their classmates a story they had written and illustrated based on something that happened in their own lives. The second, a "poetry cafe," put girls in the spotlight as they shared their work in front of an audience that included their parents and other invited guests.
Both sessions tie into a method of teaching writing called the Reading & Writing Workshop, which includes as one of its main phases of instruction a time for sharing out their work and evaluating it as a group. These efforts resulted in Ms. Vauk and Ms. Chiao receiving a staff award at the end of the 2016-17 school year that recognizes exemplary instruction in writing among the Burke's faculty.