New York, NY - September 9, 2015 - The Council for Economic Education (CEE) is excited to announce the winners of the 3rd annual Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Teaching Champion Awards, honoring three outstanding NYC metropolitan area teachers for excellence in economic education. Demonstrating innovative teaching methods, lesson plans and learning strategies, these teachers are raising the bar for economic education, and will receive the Sloan Award at CEE’s annual Visionary Awards gala later this Fall.
Selected by an expert panel of judges, this year’s winners stood out for their creativity and ability to effectively engage students.
“We applaud these outstanding teachers for their innovation and dedication to making economic concepts come alive for their students,” said Nan J. Morrison, CEE President and CEO. “We hope that by bringing awareness to their achievements, these educators will inspire their fellow teachers to bring economics and financial literacy to every classroom.”
The winners will have the opportunity to share best practices with their colleagues by co-facilitating a training workshop for area teachers and sharing their best lessons with teachers nationwide through videos on CEE’s sister site, EconEdLink. The winners will also each receive a $5,000 prize, and their schools will receive a cash award of $2,500 to support economic and financial education.
Below are the names of the winners:
Matthew Gherman
11th and 12th Grade Teacher of AP Economics, Honors Economics
Edward R. Murrow High School, Brooklyn, NY
Teaching at a school with over 4,000 students with hundreds of diverse cultural backgrounds, Matthew Gherman is tasked with the challenge of making all of his students career, college, and life-ready. By teaching Economics grounded in Personal Finance, Gherman has excelled. Linking real-life concepts like credit card debt to the national deficit, he uses Personal Finance as a motivation for complex macroeconomic topics. Or, as Gherman puts it, “I want my students to understand that the world of economics is not just about supply and demand curves, but everyday life decisions as well.”
Noah Lipman
11th and 12th Grade Teacher of AP Macroeconomics
Long Branch High School, Long Branch, NJ
Before he began his second career as a teacher, Noah Lipman spent over 20 years as a practicing attorney in New York City. Trying many cases directly tied to the investment world, Lipman gained invaluable experience that he brings to his economics classroom. He is a previous member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s education advisory committee and is the coach for the high school’s Fed Challenge and Euro Challenge economic teams. He also serves as a consultant for the College Board’s leading Advanced Placement workshops for teachers throughout the United States.
Deborah Surian
11th and 12th Grade Teacher of Economics
Hauppauge High School, Hauppauge, NY
With almost two decades of teaching experience under her belt, Deborah Surian knows how to get her students excited about economics: by focusing on current events and the concepts they’re most interested in, like college loans, and the impact they have on their lives. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, working closely with other departments from Arts—teaching economics through the eyes of museum curators, for example—to Sociology, exploring the concepts of class structure and inequality. Ms. Surian is also a National Ethics Bowl Judge for the Long-Island Metro area and currently serves as an adjunct Faculty Member at Syracuse University.
About the Council for Economic Education
The Council for Economic Education (CEE) is the leading organization in the United States that focuses on the economic and financial education of students from kindergarten through high school, and we have been doing so for over 65 years. We do this by educating the educators: providing the curriculum tools, the pedagogical support, and the community of peers that instruct, inspire, and guide. All resources and programs are developed by educators and delivered by CEE’s national network of affiliates—over 240 across the country. Last year, CEE reached 55,000 teachers in person, and over 1.3 million unique visitors accessed EconEdLink.org— the go-to place for free online teaching resources. For more information visit our website, Facebook or Twitter.
About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grantmaking institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Teaching Champion Awards are funded through the Foundation’s Civic Initiatives program, which aims to benefit the New York City metropolitan area in ways that advance the Foundation’s mission. www.sloan.org.
