Patricia Schwab Mooney
I nominate Patricia Mooney For the Branford Education Hall of Fame because I feel she demonstrates every quality of an exemplary teacher. As a teacher in Branford for over 40 years before retiring in 2015, she always went beyond the call of duty to help students she worked with. She was always seeking new information and technology to implement in her class and teach to her students. She always created special lessons that would require students to use the computer lab to become more proficient with technology. She kept up with the latest information and strategies that could help her reach all her students, and always tried new methods to help motivate and challenge them.
Pat Mooney had a very positive impact on her students. During her tenure in Branford, she taught at the Junior High School before going to the Intermediate School upon its opening. She also had different teaching assignments over the years. She collaborated with other teachers to work with a special project called "Kids on the Block", working with Special Education Students and reached out to me to include Spanish in the presentations.This was long before we spoke of "Interdisciplinary and Multicultural" in the classroom. She created very creative and challenging activities for "Brain Blast" lessons and aligned thematic "Character Education" questions to these monthly Team Challenge Competitions. As she taught Language Arts, she seemed to bring more than English in her students' lives. They grew fond of her almost immediately and so too of her class. She had a unique ""out of the box"" teaching style that middle school students liked. They looked forward to going to her class. She made the time to help advise them with projects through high school or beyond.
As a Team Teacher, working with Pat was a very rewarding experience. She collaborated with her teammates and came to each of us if the need presented itself, to seek what was in the best interest of our students. She treated her fellow teammates with professionalism and is very collegiate. She always listened to suggestions and ideas, and was willing to support us and problem solve with us. She was often at school hours beyond the end of the work day and even during vacation, completing a class activity, a team schedule, or the building schedule. She offered her help to each of us and volunteered herself to help out in every situation. She was a team player in every aspect.
Pat was always researching and seeking new ways to better her class presentations. She collaborated with the media teachers and Team teachers to work on Interdisciplinary assignments using the computer lab. She worked on a teleconferencing exchange project with a teacher and class in another district for a number of years, culminating with a field trip/tour to each other's school and town. She was also part of a special teleconferencing session that connected several school districts with then Lieutenant Governor Rell. She would spend endless hours preparing for such activities to the end of providing her students a great learning experience.
I am very fortunate to know Pat since 1977 and to have worked with her until retirement. I nominate her for the 2020 Branford Education Hall of Fame.
Pat Mooney had a very positive impact on her students. During her tenure in Branford, she taught at the Junior High School before going to the Intermediate School upon its opening. She also had different teaching assignments over the years. She collaborated with other teachers to work with a special project called "Kids on the Block", working with Special Education Students and reached out to me to include Spanish in the presentations.This was long before we spoke of "Interdisciplinary and Multicultural" in the classroom. She created very creative and challenging activities for "Brain Blast" lessons and aligned thematic "Character Education" questions to these monthly Team Challenge Competitions. As she taught Language Arts, she seemed to bring more than English in her students' lives. They grew fond of her almost immediately and so too of her class. She had a unique ""out of the box"" teaching style that middle school students liked. They looked forward to going to her class. She made the time to help advise them with projects through high school or beyond.
As a Team Teacher, working with Pat was a very rewarding experience. She collaborated with her teammates and came to each of us if the need presented itself, to seek what was in the best interest of our students. She treated her fellow teammates with professionalism and is very collegiate. She always listened to suggestions and ideas, and was willing to support us and problem solve with us. She was often at school hours beyond the end of the work day and even during vacation, completing a class activity, a team schedule, or the building schedule. She offered her help to each of us and volunteered herself to help out in every situation. She was a team player in every aspect.
Pat was always researching and seeking new ways to better her class presentations. She collaborated with the media teachers and Team teachers to work on Interdisciplinary assignments using the computer lab. She worked on a teleconferencing exchange project with a teacher and class in another district for a number of years, culminating with a field trip/tour to each other's school and town. She was also part of a special teleconferencing session that connected several school districts with then Lieutenant Governor Rell. She would spend endless hours preparing for such activities to the end of providing her students a great learning experience.
I am very fortunate to know Pat since 1977 and to have worked with her until retirement. I nominate her for the 2020 Branford Education Hall of Fame.
Pat Mooney made a lasting impression on the teaching of middle school students in Branford. Pat taught at the Intermediate School from its inception in 1972 when it first opened as a model of cooperative teaching and learning epitomized by its open floor plan and it no walls architecture. Pat incorporated the fundamental ideas of openness and cooperation into an inclusive Language Arts program. She loved cross-disciplinary learning and was eager to promote projects with other academic areas. For instance, when her students were studying optics and human eye in science class, she chose to read "The Diary of Anne Frank" in her Language Arts class. She stressed that understanding the social and emotional aspects of blindness were equal to understanding the scientific facts about vision. She was a model for the Walsh faculty to take a more global look at curriculum for middle schoolers; she integrated reading and writing with other subjects like math, geography, and science long before the standards based curriculum came to be. Over the years, she encouraged each of her students to enjoy reading. She set aside one day a week for a silent class with absolutely no talking. Her students read quietly from “real” books of their own choosing; each chose a spot of their own in the classroom: some lounged on pillows, others slouched on the sofa and a few sat at desks. Her goal always was to give students an opportunity to love reading. She believed students would become life-long readers if they could make their own decisions about what and where to read. This philosophy was a cutting edge idea that was often at odds with existing curriculum. She promoted the value of student centered learning to the administration long before it became the norm. She stood behind her beliefs and became known as the true advocate for individualized learning in the middle school! Also long before the digital world opened to middle school partnerships, Pat instituted a shared classroom with a school in another locale using her simple classroom computer. She teamed with another teacher in a faraway school; both teachers agreed to discuss a common topic and then have their students each write and share their writings on the computer. This exciting introduction to communicating with others at a distance twenty-five years ago spread at Walsh and soon other classes at Walsh followed Pat’s example of writing about real issues with their own digital “pen pals”. Pat Mooney is a one-of-a-kind teacher meant for the Hall of Fame. For over 40 years she planted opportunities for young teen students to take charge of the growth of their own reading and writing. Thousands of Branford students can thank Ms. Mooney for their long lasting appreciation of the written word.