Cathleen Galas
Galas Consulting
Provides services in teaching and learning in K-12 math, science, the arts, curriculum, assessment, and instructional technology.
Cathleen Galas is an educator, researcher, and consultant. Her teaching practice encompasses primary through post-graduate, and she has experience consulting and conducting research in education.
Galas's teaching is student-centered, geared to teaching the whole child, with respect for learning styles, and cognitive, motor, and social-emotional development. She embeds learning in inquiry, fostering student problem solving and the abilities to question, communicate, research, think creatively, and solve real-world problems. Galas's studies in teaching, learning, and technologies has focused on learning through design, creativity, and various aspects of cognition, design, and social context. She has extensive experience in integrating technologies to amplify math and science learning, as well as dance education and the arts. Her work includes development, implementation and research in design projects, apprentice teaching and learning, online communities, tween and adolescent learning needs, gender, games programming and virtual worlds. Her research includes work on several multi-year NSF research projects in the learning sciences. She is an active participant and presenter at local, national, and international venues for several professional organizations, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), International Society of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), (CUE), Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA), and Constructionism.
Galas developed Managing Information in the Digital Age, a process and essential skills for embedding information literacy strategies across all areas of the elementary through high school, as part of a team at the UCLA Lab School, Graduate School of Education, UCLA. Galas launched one of the first elementary school websites in the US at the UCLA Lab School in the fall of 1995, and maintained the site until 1999. (First UES Website).
Galas consults with educational organizations and school districts. Past clients include The California Arts Project (TCAP), Viewpoints Research, Disney Imagineering, the Jefferson Institute, Beverly Hills USD, NCREL, Department of Defense Schools (DoDea), CSULA, and the Galef Institute. Galas worked as Project Director for TCAP to develop and pilot an online arts assessment tool for California schools and districts statewide, and with Alan Kay and his OLPC group at Viewpoints Research on curriculum support and user interface for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC). Galas wrote the first online open-source Teacher's Edition for Middle School Life Science to be adopted by the state of California.She has completed work on life science teaching modules for America's Choice and ACT, and design of interactive life science digital inquiry lessons with Pangea Tools.
