Montbello High School Geography teacher Stuart Ritchie will be presented with the 2009 National Distinguished Teaching Achievement award at the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico in September. The award is the Council’s highest honor for teachers.
Before his teaching career, Mr. Ritchie was an international high altitude mountain climbing guide for ten years. During that time he traveled to many of the high ranges of the world including the Himalaya, Andes, Alps, Alaska Range. It was out of interactions with indigenous peoples of the world that he chose teaching geography as a career path.
Mr. Ritchie is a graduate of the University of Denver, and received his Masters degree in Secondary Instruction and Curriculum Design from the University of Colorado. An Advanced Placement human geography teacher in Denver Public Schools, Stuart serves on both the geography redesign and assessment committees. Stuart has participated in a GIS Symposium and Community Mapping project, and was awarded a $5,000 grant from the technology department of Denver Public Schools. The purpose of the grant was to implement a GIS project in his AP Human Geography class. The class chose to study the school pattern of discipline issues within the building, and once the data was collected, with the help of school security, the data was loaded into a geographic information system which was analyzed to discern patterns of incidents and recommend changes in the use of the school security resources.
Stuart Ritche has also served for a number of years on the Colorado Geographic Alliance (COGA) Steering Committee. Recently, Stuart participated in the COGA-sponsored Teacher Leadership Institute at Denver Public Schools and is often called upon to present workshops on standards-based geography instruction and assessment for other teachers in his district.
Thanks to Marianne Kenney, chair of the Colorado Geographic Education Fund, for nominating Mr. Ritchie.
"Congratulations..." Colorado Geographic Alliance News (Summer 2009): 1. <http://www.uccs.edu/~coga/>
