Congratulations to Gilman’s 2025 Penn Fellows Kenan Ulku-Steiner and William Tai Lam, who will both soon complete their master’s from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kenan Ulku-Steiner, who has been teaching Spanish in the Upper School and coaching soccer and tennis at Gilman for the last two years, was always familiar with independent schools. In fact, he grew up on their campuses in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and at an American school in Switzerland, where his dad was a teacher, and later an administrator, and his mom was a school psychologist. He says that it was never his plan to follow in their footsteps as “that was their world.” But when he was a junior and senior at Middlebury where he studied international politics, economics, and Spanish, he reconsidered. “I was loving the peer tutoring and community organizing I was involved in,” he says, and then he found the Penn Fellowship program.

He explored several schools but ultimately landed at Gilman because he “felt like it matched a lot of my identity.” He liked the emphasis on community, joy, athletics, and the “playful vulnerability of boys.” He didn’t expect to teach at an all-boys school but has come to appreciate aspects offered by the single-sex environment, like students’ willingness to take more risks. “In a language class especially, that risk-taking is really fruitful.”

Penn Fellows Program Co-Director and Upper School Modern Languages Teacher Matt Zealand served as Ulku-Steiner’s mentor at Gilman. The connection has been really easy because of their shared passion for language and soccer. “We see the world in similar ways,” Ulku-Steiner says. In his first year, he spent a lot of time watching Zealand and trying to replicate his teaching approach. Likewise, Zealand observed many of his classes and offered actionable feedback on timing, transitions, modeling, and classroom set-up. “As a teacher, Kenan intuitively understands that his main role is that of a relationship builder,” Zealand says.

For Ulku-Steiner’s inquiry project, he asked how to build a community of resilient language learners. In year one, he noticed that his students were skilled at recalling information they’d just learned but they “struggled to make jumps with incomplete information to understand or be understood.” In other words, if they were missing the vocabulary to finish a sentence, they would often give up. Through his research, he learned what types of small changes he could incorporate in his classroom to make an impact.

He tried beginning class with a daily check-in to help students “transition into the Spanish world.” He also started to use authentic assessments, like having students work together to role-play ordering food at a restaurant, leading to conversations between “customers” and “servers” about specific menu items, recommendations, and food allergies. Putting on the skits helped students reach the conclusion, “Wait, this is not just a skill I’m reproducing to do well on a quiz; it’s a skill I can see myself utilizing later,” Ulku-Steiner says.

His biggest finding was that “community is the centerfold of all of this” and that the more timely and specific feedback he could offer students, the more risks they were willing to take. Zealand can see the impact the Penn Fellow has made on the students. “In the classroom, he is enthusiastic, empathetic, witty, and kind; rote activities like verb conjugation practice become raucous boat races, and a grammar correction feels like a firm, encouraging pat on the back as he urges his students to give it another go.”

Following his graduation, Ulku-Steiner is heading to Oakland, California, where he will, unsurprisingly, teach Spanish and coach soccer at an independent school.

Upper School History Teacher William Tai Lam was also no stranger to independent schools, having attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. He majored in history and minored in writing and rhetoric at Colgate University, where he developed a passion for teaching through his internship and extracurricular experiences, such as participating in the Utica Refugee Tutors program, serving as a first-gen and Questbridge orientation leader, and collaborating as a pedagogical partner with a Computer Science professor. During the summers of 2020 and 2021, he taught at his middle school alma mater, a tuition-free, all-boys, Catholic school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and worked with alumni seeking college admission or employment opportunities. When he interned at Exeter Summer in New Hampshire, he learned about the Penn Fellowship program. 

He remembers visiting Gilman for his interview, specifically “the energy in the hallways” and the “curious and inquisitive” students in Brooks Matthews’ class. “That was definitely a draw for me as a teacher,” he said. “I’ve really enjoyed seeing students be passionate and engaged about the subject matter and connect it to their everyday lives and for them to establish their own personal connection to the discipline and with each other.”

Seasoned History Teacher Matt Baum served as Lam’s mentor. “Will’s passion for teaching and care for his students was evident in all that he did,” said Baum. “He was especially innovative in pushing students to connect their lives and the world around them to what might otherwise be distant topics from a history curriculum.”

Lam says that Baum has been very helpful, noting that he especially appreciated the support provided in his first year in the program. “Anytime I catastrophized or felt a bit overwhelmed, he would always encourage me. He sees the positive in everything and has a reassuring presence for his students and as a colleague,” he says. “Consequently, it’s been very easy to pick his brain, experiment, and think about new ideas for improving the curriculum. As an aspiring young educator, Matt was the perfect mentor to learn from.” 

Lam’s inquiry question asks: What happens when I integrate authentic learning experiences and critical service learning in a U.S. history classroom? To formulate an answer, he considered the critical service of historians and developed new assignments for students, such as a research project with an advocacy component centered around how American history has broadly shaped the environment students live in today. Topics included voting rights in Maryland, housing segregation in Baltimore, and the impact of COVID-19 on historic educational inequality, among others. 

One of his key findings: Students made stronger and more consistent connections with the content, and they were able to establish contemporary relevance by bringing in their own experiences. He also notes that students demonstrated an ability to identify bias or limitations in his curriculum due to the practice he established in class in which students regularly identified bias in sources. “The project helped me be in continuous dialogue with students on how to perfect my craft and curriculum as a teacher.”

After graduation, Lam will teach Upper School History at an independent school in Houston, Texas. He is excited to be closer to family, eat ample Vietnamese and Tex-Mex food, and continue exploring the notion of service and community engagement professionally.

Learn more about the Penn Fellows Program at Gilman