Fifth grade teacher Katrina Madok of Key West, Florida, has garnered a prestigious 2022 PAEMST honor. Photo Credit: keys news.com

I always enjoy sharing stories about exceptional educators who have earned accolades for their work in the classroom. One of these is Katrina Madok, an elementary STEM teacher from Key West, Florida. She has garnered a  2022 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST). This prestigious award honors the dedication, hard work, and important role that America’s teachers play in supporting learners who will become future STEM professionals, including computer technologists, climate scientists, mathematicians, innovators, space explorers, and engineers.

Katrina teaches science to fifth graders at Gerald Adams Elementary School. Her students are part of the Gifted Education program there. She has also taught at Marathon High School and Kesher Academy, an independent Jewish Day School for students with learning disabilities and developmental delays. Before moving to Florida, Katrina taught in Southern California for ten years. In all, her career as an educator has spanned more than 30 years.

In her classroom, Katrina creates curriculum that involves hands-on science investigations, regularly incorporating STEM challenges. She advances environmental education through school-wide recycling, gardening, and endangered species awareness projects. She also integrates coding and robotics activities on her campus, leading to the creation of after-school bots and coding groups. In these groups, students as early as kindergarten actively use a variety of robots to engage critical thinking skills and learn the foundations for coding.

Katrina has contributed to her school in other ways, too. She has written several grants, she has served as an advisory board member at Infiniscope for two years, she has coached Odyssey of the Mind Teams, and she has participated in citizen science projects with her students. She has also presented at local, state, and national conferences on topics related to robotics and STEM.

In addition to her PAEMST honors, Katrina has earned numerous other accolades for her work as an educator. Last year, she was selected by NASA to help lead a program called Inifiniscope. The program provides exploratory science activities and lessons using experts in NASA data and NASA subject matter. In 2014, she garnered the Elementary Florida Ag in the Classroom Award. She has also been recognized numerous times by the Monroe County School District, the Key West Chamber of Commerce, the state of Florida and a host of other national science programs.

Katrina earned a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and her Master’s degree in Special Education, both from the University of California at San Diego.

To read more about Katrina Madok, click this link to an article about her published on keysnews.com.