Gibraltar Psychologist Earns UW-Whitewater Award

Colleen Tillis. Submitted.

Colleen Tillis, Gibraltar Area Schools’ psychologist, received the 2023 Outstanding Capstone Award from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater School of Graduate Studies.

While helping at Milton schools and working on her college project in 2022 – “Improving Students’ Visual Spatial and Math Reasoning Skills in the Early Childhood Classroom with Weekly Teacher Video Training” – she showed how 10 weeks of brief training of early childhood teachers on nine key math topics may improve students’ visual, spatial and math-reasoning skills. A greater percentage of 4-year-olds showed secure understanding on six out of nine math topics following the training, including sorting objects, pattern recognition, one-to-one correspondence, rote counting, interpreting creations and naming numbers.

Tillis completed an internship at Gibraltar during the second semester last year and the district hired her full-time for this year.

“I love it here,” Tillis said of Gibraltar. “The school climate and the staff, students, and families here are what school psychologists dream of.”