When Cheri Stageberg told her she was Austin’s Teacher of the Year, Katie Ulwelling thought it was a practical joke.

Monday, August 14, 2000

When Cheri Stageberg told her she was Austin’s Teacher of the Year, Katie Ulwelling thought it was a practical joke. When she figured out it wasn’t, she told the Austin Education Association president: "No, I can’t accept that honor."

Stageberg told the teacher of deaf and hard-of-hearing students to think about it.

"As a special ed teacher, everything I do is a team effort," Ulwelling explained. "So to be singled out and recognized is uncomfortable." Her’s wasn’t an unusual reaction.

"So much of teaching is a team approach with your co-workers and your students," Austin’s 1999 Teacher of the Year, Cheryl Dunlap, said. "But the way to think of the award is to consider it a team approach, too. When you take it, you’re representing everyone – all the good teachers in Austin."

So far Ulwelling has represented Austin’s teachers right into the state’s top 10 and she’s not done yet.

In October, Ulwelling and the other nine teachers on the state’s Honor Roll will be interviewed by a selection panel of 23 individuals representing education, business, non-profit organizations and government. The Minnesota Teacher of the Year will be announced Oct. 8.

Ulwelling said she would feel more comfortable with the title of "Learner of the Year."

"I’m a good learner," she said. "I like learning. I tell my students that each night when they go to bed, they should think of something they’ve learned that day. It doesn’t have to be academic, just something they didn’t know before. If they really can’t think of anything, then they have to get up and look up a word they don’t know in the dictionary and learn it."

Her goal for all students is 100 percent literacy. Her goal for her own students is to make sure they have the techniques and skills they’ll need to cope with their hearing loss and do well in school and in life.

While Ulwelling believes the old-fashioned three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – are important, her "three Rs" are teaching children to be "realistic, respectful and responsible. Everything I do with my students, academically or socially, leans toward those three values."

Getting her students – who range in age from newborn to 21 – to be realistic can be the biggest problem.

"It is very difficult for the hard of hearing to be realistic about their hearing loss," she said. "Boys never want to admit anything is a problem because of their hearing; girls tend to think everything is a problem. The challenge every day is to find the middle ground." One of the things the teacher does with her students is teach "communication repair strategies."

"Most of my students are hard of hearing, so often it’s a case of not hearing everything a person says," Ulwelling explained. "Denial is the worst thing, trying to pretend you’ve heard when you haven’t," she said, nodding her head up and down to illustrate. "Maybe they heard half the message. I teach them a good way to get the missing part of the message is to repeat what they heard, but get the speaker to fill in the blank: ‘You said you wanted to meet where?’ Then the speaker only has to say ‘Diamond Dave’s.’ It works a lot better than just saying ‘huh’ or ‘what.’"

Visual phonics is another way that Ulwelling gets the message across to her students. It’s a method of teaching phonetics that involves all four ways of learning: visual, auditory, tactic and kinetic. There are symbols ­ hand and written – for each sound. The hand motions that go with the sound represent what the mouth does to make the sound.

Ulwelling not only uses visual phonics with her students, she teaches other teachers how to use them in the classroom as well.

"I’m Austin’s visual phonics guru," the teaching veteran said. Her passion for spreading the word about visual phonics, in addition to her love of teaching, is likely one of the factors that got the deaf and hard-of-hearing teacher this far in the state competition. It is just one way that Ulwelling has gone beyond her classroom and her students to promote better education.

Her fellow teachers say she goes beyond what’s required every day.

"She always puts the kids first," Dunlap said. "She’ll work her tail off to try and find a way to help a student."