English teacher and department chair Margaret Lockhart's instructional techniques at Lingle Middle School in Rogers have been so outstanding that she now serves as the school's literacy coach. Lockhart has coached teachers with particularly good instructional skills to become lab classroom practitioners, providing models of best practices for other teachers to observe. She developed a program called "Bubble Kids" to work with students who score at the basic level on sixth- and seventh-grade literacy benchmark tests, with the goal of raising their achievement to the proficient level. Though most of these students were identified as either special education or English as a Second Language (ESL) students, they made gains of up to 42 percent on the subsequent benchmark test. Her students have competed in state writing and oratory contests for the past three years, with multiple winners selected each year. A National Board Certified teacher, Lockhart was one of only 28 educators in the district chosen for the first class of the district's Leadership Academy, through which she and her team researched and made recommendations for creating a climate for change at the building level.
1989 University of Arkansas - Fayetteville, B.A.
