Before beginning her journey at the GSE, Rachel Lotan, MA ’81, PhD ’85,  was a French and English teacher for 10 years in Israel, where she saw firsthand the way her students’ status characteristics — factors like ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic standing — affected how they were taught. 

“On the one hand, there were kids of higher economic status with highly educated parents, and on the other, kids from a much poorer neighborhood,” said Lotan, a professor emerita of education and former director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). “They were all put into different tracks of the same class and I didn’t like that they were separated that way.

One of Lotan’s first decisions in that position was to meet with school administrators and ensure that all of the students in her homeroom class took English together, so she could set up classroom conditions that would better set students up for equitable learning outcomes.

Now, as director of the Program for Complex Instruction at Stanford, she continues to work toward creating fair learning environments by offering teachers research-backed approaches to leading classrooms that benefit all children.

“Through Complex Instruction, we looked at student interactions during small groupwork, and we found that it was effective in achieving intellectual and social learning goals for students across a wide range of academic skills and language proficiencies,” Lotan said. 

In commemoration of her 15 years directing STEP and nearly five decades of teaching in various roles, Lotan is being honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the GSE’s Alumni Excellence in Education Awards on Oct. 25. The distinction highlights those who have spent remarkable effort and time to changemaking through education.

“I believe that any good leader in education has to have a vision,” she said, “and mine is to help create equitable, excellent, and democratic classrooms.”