Lauren Palos
Stuchbery Elementary
Pasadena Independent School District
Lauren is a fourth-grade math teacher at Stuchbery Elementary. She graduated from the University of Houston – Clear Lake with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and from the University of Texas at Tyler with a master’s degree in educational leadership. She has been teaching in Pasadena ISD for seven years.
She has demonstrated a commitment to life-long learning to improve teaching and student learning. Lauren continually reflects on her teaching practices and considers how the structures and strategies she uses can be refined to better meet the individual needs of her students.
Lauren incorporates creativity and innovation into her classroom, using a workshop model for mathematics instruction that facilitates instruction through a student-centered approach that promotes students’ engagement with mathematics. She uses both traditional and non-traditional teaching tools such as interactive notebooks for students to capture academic language and key ideas for reference during independent practice and strategies such as “number talks” and “choral counting” to promote her students’ development of mental math skills and number sense. All these tools and strategies are a part of her everyday practice, which creates a learning environment in which students are empowered as mathematicians to learn, grow, make mistakes, and learn from their mistakes.
Lauren has made numerous contributions to education outside of her own classroom. She has developed leadership skills in mathematics education through participation in her district’s leadership cohorts and by presenting professional development sessions at the campus, district, regional, and state level. She authored a “Voices from the Classroom” article for the Texas Mathematics Teacher journal. Her keen awareness of her grade level’s standards has allowed her to contribute to numerous district curriculum efforts such as the facilitation and creation of her district’s digital activity library in Seesaw, videos that model our district’s mathematics routines, and resources to support fact fluency and intervention efforts.
Lauren goes above and beyond to make a difference in students’ lives in many ways. She cofacilitates her campus’s #MathGals Club, a club for fourth-grade girls in which the girls are given opportunities to learn from a #MathGal (a women in a STEM field) of the past, present, and future. She helped create and facilitated her campus’s Math Bee, which is an event that encourages our students in Grades 1-4 to develop proficiency with number-based strategies to support the recall of mathematics facts. This event is now being replicated across Pasadena ISD. She is also the campus sponsor for the A+ Academics, a UIL event that encourages students to develop proficiency with mathematics computation skills beyond the elementary grade level.
A testament to her excellence in teaching, the Texas Education Agency recently named Lauren one of Texas’s three state finalists for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching for K-6 Mathematics.
