Two Faculty Honored With College’s Top Teaching Award

The highest teaching honor bestowed by UT Austin’s College of Education has been awarded to Jo Worthy, a professor of language and literacy, and Tasha Beretvas, associate dean for research and graduate studies.

The Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award is given annually, and winners are selected based on feedback from College of Education students and faculty.

Worthy, who has been with the college since 1994, studies children and youth’s reading interests and preferences, alternatives to ability grouping in classrooms, and bilingual education. In addition to her research and teaching responsibilities, Worthy also has been a cohort coordinator for the undergraduate teacher education program and currently is a graduate advisor for the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her past honors for teaching excellence include a Texas Excellence Teaching Award, Elizabeth Shatto Massey Award for Excellence in Teacher Education, and a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.

Beretvas is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology as well as associate dean, and she has been chair of the department’s Quantitative Methods Program for the past five years. Beretvas also is a faculty associate with UT Austin’s Population Research Center and the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation, and is on the board for the college’s Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk.

As a methodologist, her main areas of interest in research and teaching are evaluation and innovative application of statistical models. Nationally and at the university level, Beretvas has participated in programs, such as the AERA’s Faculty Institute for the Teaching of Statistics, that give her an opportunity to teach fellow scholars about statistics. In her role as associate dean, she has initiated several projects that support faculty research as well as graduate student research and experiences.

Beretvas was among the first group of UT System faculty to be honored with a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.

"You can't overestimate the benefit to our college of having Dr. Beretvas and Dr. Worthy here, serving as mentors and examples of excellence in teaching, research, and leadership,” said Manuel J. Justiz, dean of the College of Education. “They are the teachers that we all aspire to be."