With new students each year, changing curriculum and standards, and jobs that require 21st-century skills, Becky Streff (NE ’18) sees professional development and sharing best practices as an essential part of being an educator: “I need to change my practices to help prepare students for their futures.”
When new students join her fifth-grade class, Angie Beavin (KY ’18) tells them about her own fifth-grade teacher, who went the extra mile to help her adjust to a new school in the middle of the year: “I want them to know I will help them through this change. I want them to feel at home.”
Sara King (HI ’18) shares with students her holistic, whole-child view of success: “It’s about who you are as a human being and what kind of impact you make on our world and others.”
As a specialist, computer lab teacher Nichole Anderson (CA ’18) misses having one group of children to focus on all day. But sometimes, more is better: “I get to see so many kids and make them happy.”
In writing “boot camps,” Krystal Contreras (TX '18)’s fourth-graders fix injured “soldiers” (sentences) with punctuation and recite march-style chants about the writing process. “Learning to write is like going to the Army,” Krystal tells her students. “We are going to exercise our brains to get them into shape.”
Brian Quinn (MD ’18) takes every opportunity to join his students on the basketball court, football field or baseball diamond. “You can teach children a lot while playing,” he says. “They don’t even realize they are learning at the same time.”
Chad Downs (MI ’18) is passing the torch to the next generation: His new Future of Education Scholarship, funded by his Milken Educator Award prize, goes to a high school senior in his hometown who plans to teach.
Special education teacher Therese Shain (MO ’18) loves working with elementary students because their skills grow in leaps and bounds: “With the right encouragement and support, they get so excited about their learning.”
Sarah Compton (WI ’18) values the weekly professional development time she and her colleagues have built into their schedules: “I walk away feeling that I can immediately improve my classroom instruction as a result.”
Years in the classroom and as an instructional coach reinforced for Principal Rachel Tommelleo (DC ’18) the tenets she now lives by: the importance of working with urgency, listening to her gut, and putting students’ needs first.
