About Us
GAY CUMING WARD, PhD, is a Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where she works as a Montessori consultant and academic faculty in Teacher Education and Montessori Studies. Gay is the 2024 Living Legacy for The American Montessori Society and was the 2015 recipient of the Dennis Shapiro Award for Innovation in Montessori Teacher Education. In 2015, she was also awarded the Celebrate Literacy Award by the Wisconsin State Literacy Association and the Lifetime Research and Creativity Award by College of Education and Professional Studies at the UWRF. She has presented and published articles on equity-based assessment, the developmental continuum of reading, narrative development, action research, choice in learning, and joyfulness. She has been consulting with teachers on literacy development for 30 years. She was an elementary teacher for many years licensed 4K-Grade 7 and Montessori E1 Credentialed. At the university level she has taught reading research, Montessori language, EC Language Arts and Children's Literature as well as courses on child development and inquiry learning. With co-author, Margaret Yatsevitch Phinney, Ed.D., she has written Reading Development: A Handbook of Assessment and Instruction, Vol. 1 and 2 and three teaching strategies books: Traditional Tales: 30 Activities for Differentiated Instruction; Interconnectedness: Connecting to Self, Others, Nature and Society; and 36 Sets of Classroom Activities Using Social Justice Literature for Differentiated Instruction. Dr. Ward also co-authored a chapter in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Montessori Education.
MARGARET YATSEVITCH PHINNEY, EdD, taught elementary school for 12+ years as a classroom teacher and a reading teacher before going into higher education. She is a former Director of the Reading Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and currently a UWRF Professor Emerita, co-teaching some courses and workshops in literacy and reading development in the Department of Education. Before joining the faculty at UWRF, she was on the faculty in the College of Education at the University of Minnesota for eight years. She taught all courses related to literacy education at these two universities at one time or another. She received Teacher of the Year Awards at both institutions. She and Dr. Ward give presentations at local, national and international conferences. She has published a book to help teachers working with struggling readers, Reading With the Troubled Reader; articles and book chapters on supporting teachers in teaching reading and writing, and on censorship in children’s literature; multiple contributions to The Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature; and refereed contributions on social influences related to learning to read and write. She has written seven children’s books and co-authored five resource books with Dr. Ward.