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Parkway North assistant principal honored as exceptional education leader
10/28/2020 -- Michael Zitzer, assistant principal at Parkway North High School, was recently selected as one of nine exceptional education leaders for The Opportunity Trust’s fourth Catalyst Fellowship cohort. The Catalyst Fellowship is a selective program that provides community and support to educators as they imagine, build, and test new ideas and approaches to teaching and learning.
Catalyst Fellows are educators and entrepreneurs working to forge the next frontier of learning environments in St. Louis. At this moment, when educators find themselves facing one of the most significant opportunities in a generation to reimagine school, The Opportunity Trust’s Catalyst Fellowship provides community and support to help develop innovative, research-backed plans to transform learning experiences.
This year’s program will be conducted through six virtual sessions to imagine, build, and test new ideas and approaches to teaching and learning. Fellows will engage in virtual inspiration visits to innovative schools across the U.S. to expand their thinking around how learning environments in St. Louis need to evolve. The culmination of the program will be concrete designs that can help transform the student experience and a plan of action to launch and pilot those ideas.
This year’s cohort is made of education leaders holding various roles in traditional public schools, charter schools, and education non-profits. They each bring their unique backgrounds and experiences to the cohort but share a track record of achieving strong results with their students, a deep conviction and optimism about the need to reimagine school, a voracious curiosity and openness to learning, and a commitment to partnering with students and families.
This is Zitzer’s 9th year in education and his first year with the Parkway School District. Previously he served as a middle school math teacher and instructional coach. As a teacher, Zitzer was named the Hazelwood School District’s Most Outstanding First Year Teacher and the district’s Teacher of the Year.