At Buffalo Elementary School in Buffalo, fourth-grade teacher Rachel J. Hull utilizes cooperative learning, peer tutoring, high-yield vocabulary instruction, nonfiction reading, and effective technology integration to produce high levels of student achievement. In 2003, more than 70 percent of her students were in the top two quartiles, and her class (which included a high number of special needs students) had the greatest overall gain of all fourth graders in the county. Hull provides training for teachers on standards-based instruction, inclusion of gifted students, high-yield instructional strategies, and teaching in a parallel block schedule. She has been a conference presenter at the county, state, national and international levels, and currently serves on curriculum policy committees as well as the curriculum mapping team for Putnam County. Hull was the 2003 Putnam County Teacher of the Year and received the Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award. In 2005, Hull was accepted to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, through which she participated in a Yale University seminar on the American Colonial era.
