Dr. Gay Cuming Ward

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".