Gayle Buckheister Sawyer receives Adjunct Faculty Award
Coker alumna Gayle Buckheister Sawyer received an award from the Richard W. Riley College of Education at Winthrop University on April 24, 2018. Dr. Gayle Sawyer received the Adjunct Faculty Award. This award highlights a faculty member who has demonstrated excellent teaching skills, works well with colleagues in the COE, and challenges students to do their best work. The recipient is someone who provides plenty of academic learning time in the classroom, effective assignments, and works well with students outside the classroom as well.
For the past ten years, Gayle has worked with our M.Ed. Educational Leadership program. She worked for us full-time for five years as a faculty member in support of a $3.75 million U.S. Department of Education School Leadership grant (called NetLEAD) as we prepared school leaders for work in high need schools. Gayle has continued her work with us as an adjunct teaching Educational Leadership courses and supervising those students in their internships. She has also developed and facilitated an undergraduate education core course for us that is taken by all of our teacher education candidates during their capstone Internship II experience. That is a course that focus on school law, ethics, funding, governance and other important topics that are important to beginning teachers; and currently we use a group of school principals as the online learning facilitators of the course.
We have had a long association with Gayle beginning with her role as Executive Director of CERRA. We are so fortunate that Gayle resides in Rock Hill and can work so closely with us.