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Outstanding Teacher -- Kimberly Gordon

Outstanding Teacher -- Kimberly Gordon

Students looking for the “easy A” should stay away from Kimberly Gordon’s child development classes.

“I want my students to be challenged,” says Gordon, this year’s Outstanding Teacher in the College of Education.

“I don’t want to be seen as an easy teacher. I want the students to develop their higher-order thinking, their critical thinking,” she says. “But whether or not they learn is up to them. I give them the information and the tools, then—and students don’t like to hear it—it is up to them to learn.”

Gordon’s research interests lie in motivation—discovering what makes children motivated to learn and motivating her own students. The goal is to have students take these techniques to their own work with children. “I want my students to be able to apply what they’ve learned when they are out in the real world,” she says.

Most of Gordon’s students go on to become elementary school teachers. Others become marriage and family counselors or go into child services such as working in hospitals with sick children.

“Students tell me ‘I’ve used some of your techniques to keep my students motivated,’” she says. “Good teachers model good teaching. If they learn from me and apply it, that makes me feel good. Maybe it means I’m doing something right. I hope so.”

As an undergraduate, Gordon majored in psychology. “I wanted to go into developmental psychology but didn’t want to be a strict researcher. I wanted it to be more applied. I wanted to use it in the real world.”

She says working at the University is the best of both worlds. “You get to do research and also teach. In teaching I get to give back.”

Gordon studies the influence of parental motivation on four-year-olds and what motivates high achievers in middle school. Generally four- to eight-year-olds are fairly self-motivated, she says. But after a certain age, learning can become a problem in the stereotypical areas: for girls in math and for boys in English. Add to that the fact that they may be trying to learn those skills in schools without the right materials, where parents aren’t involved, and teachers may find themselves in a situation where they need to use motivation.

Gordon holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from University of Redlands, and an education specialist degree in program evaluation and a doctorate in child and adolescent development from Stanford University. She says she gets her love for education from her mother. “She always stressed that education was important. She didn’t get her bachelor’s degree until 1998 and she always said she wished she had been able to get more. I want other people to love learning, too.

“My mom told me to aim high. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and then I went all the way. Yet I wasn’t supposed to make it,” she says. “A lot of students here are the first in their families to go to college. I want to help them.

“When you help students accomplish their goal, you give them a chance they might not have had otherwise.”

In addition to her classroom and research work, Gordon has also done work with First Five Sacramento Child Action, assessing early child education settings for quality of environment and how well they interact with kids. She also helps graduates with their research projects, many in her area of motivation and resilience in children.

“I enjoy coming up with the questions,” Gordon says. “And finding the answers.”