Rosie Reid named California Teacher of the Year, 2019

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Congratulations to Rosie Reid, an outstanding educator from Walnut Creek, California, who has just been named a California Teacher of the Year for 2019.

Rosie’s career has spanned 16 years, the last two at Northgate High School in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District. She was the first in her family to go to college. She credits this achievement to her teachers, and says she decided to become a teacher to pay this forward.

Rosie, a Language Arts teacher, is a member of the English Learner Review Team which monitors English-language learners and mentors ESL teachers. Most recently, Rosie founded and leads an equity task force at her high school. “I strive to be a status quo disruptor and an agent of social justice, while engaging in a rigorous, standards-based English curriculum,” declares Rosie. “So often teachers feel that if they are thinking about issues of equity and implicit bias, they must compromise rigor in order for all students to be successful; in fact it is by helping our most socially marginalized students develop literacy (and numeracy) skills that we may achieve social equity,” she asserts.

Rosie employs a number of strategies to achieve success in her classroom. She uses standardized test data to view individual student progress, identify patterns with groups of students, and remediate achievement gaps for marginalized students. In addition, she invites guest speakers to come to her classroom, and she designs real world projects to give her students a broader perspective. In order to encourage participation from all students, Rosie requires daily practice of language skills. To ensure inclusivity, she selects materials from a diverse range of authors and articles about relevant and compelling social issues so that every student sees themselves in the coursework, feels the work is important, and realizes how much their voices matter.

Rosie Reid: a true chalkboard champion.

Willa Brown Chappell: The teacher of Tuskegee Airmen

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Many exceptional teachers use their instructional expertise to work with students outside of the classroom. Willa Brown Chappell, the first African American woman licensed to fly in the United States, is an excellent example of this.

Willa was born January 22, 1906, in Glasgow, Kentucky. She earned her degree in education from Indiana State Teachers College in 1927. She also completed the requirements for an MBA from Northwestern University in 1937. Following her college graduation, Willa was employed as a high school teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, and later as a social worker in Chicago.

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Willa was always seeking challenges and adventures in her life, especially if they could be found outside the limited career fields normally open to African Americans at that time. She decided to learn to fly, studying with Cornelius R. Coffey, a certified flight instructor and expert aviation mechanic at a racially segregated airport in Chicago. Willa earned her private pilot’s license in 1938. Later, Willa and Cornelius married and founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport in Chicago, where together they trained black pilots and aviation mechanics. Willa conducted the classroom instruction and Cornelius conducted the in-flight practice.

In 1939, Willa, Cornelius, and their friend Enoch P. Waters founded the National Airmen’s Association of America. Their goal was to secure admission for black aviation cadets into the US military. As the organization’s national secretary and the president of the Chicago branch, Willa became an activist for racial equality. She persistently lobbied the US Government for integration of black pilots into the segregated Army Air Corps and the federal Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), a system established by the Civil Aeronautics Authority just before the outbreak of World War II. The CPTP’s purpose was to provide a pool of civilian pilots for use during national emergencies. Willa was given the rank of an officer in this first integrated unit. In 1948, when Congress finally voted to allow separate-but-equal participation of blacks in civilian flight training programs, the Coffey School of Aeronautics was one of a select few private aviation schools selected for participation. Later, her flight school was selected by the US Army to provide black trainees for the Air Corps pilot training program at the Tuskegee Institute. Willa was instrumental in training more than 200 students who went on to become Tuskegee pilots. Eventually, Willa Brown became the coordinator of war-training service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board. She was the first black female officer in the Civil Air Patrol and the first black woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.

This remarkable educator and pioneer aviatrix passed away on July 18, 1992. In 2010, Willa was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by the Indiana State University Alumni Association. She was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in her native Kentucky in 2003.

To find out more about this remarkable chalkboard champion, you can read a chapter about her in my book, Chalkboard Heroes, which is available on amazon.com and the website for Barnes and Noble.

Check out this teacher-made YouTube channel for ESL videos

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Here is a wonderful resource you might want to check out. Rachel’s English is a YouTube channel dedicated to helping non-native speakers improve their spoken English and listening comprehension.

Philadelphia teacher Rachel creates You Tube channel to share her ESL videos.

The channel is created by ESL teacher Rachel. Having taught off and on since 1999, Rachel became interested in developing a pronunciation-focused resource while she was living in Germany under the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship program in 2008. Rachel, who is also a classical singer, studied with highly acclaimed vocal teachers and coaches and brings a body of detailed knowledge connected to the voice, placement, and the musical nature of speech to her work as a pronunciation coach.

Rachel lives in Philadelphia.  She was born and raised in Florida. She went to college in Indiana where she studied applied math, computer science, and music. She also attended graduate school for Opera Performance in Boston. Then she spent eight years in New York City, where many of her videos were filmed, before moving to Philadelphia.

Rachel currently offers 625 videos through her channel, and she has 1,734,725 subscribers. Way to go, Rachel!

15 Reasons why Teachers are Great

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by Jill Hare, Editor | Teaching  Originally published on Teaching Community http://teaching.monster.com/careers/articles/7666-15-reasons-teachers-are-great

There are countless traits that make teachers great. I’ve narrowed in on fifteen unique behaviors I’ve observed in great educators over the years. Do you have one to add to the list? Write in your own!

1. Teachers can say everything without saying anything at all. Experienced teachers have perfected the use of the facial expression, and can say anything to a student with just a glance. With a unique eyebrow lift, a student (or an entire class) can understand “be quiet,” “be sensitive,” or “nice work.”

2. Teachers don’t accept failure. They try every angle and every strategy to help students learn and succeed.

3. Teachers care. Teachers love every student in their class, even the ones that are hard to love, and sometimes especially the ones that are hard to love.

4. Teachers are fabulous communicators. They love to talk and listen to students, to other teachers, and parents. They chose their words wisely and can say anything with a smile and a positive spin.

5. Teachers are adaptable. They can change a lesson or an entire class in a moment’s notice, which comes in handy when the fire drill or unplanned assembly interrupts.

6. Teachers are positive. They know the work is challenging, but they’ve accepted the task and know they can be an amazing teacher because their attitude is great and no one can tell them they can’t do something.

7. Teachers work hard. They don’t show up and sit behind a desk. They stand all day, talk all day, think all day, interact all day, and learn all day. The corporate world may not get it, but teachers are busy people. Returning emails and phone calls are luxuries our days may not afford. But the important stuff- the teaching- that’s getting done.

8. Teachers know how to take charge. Teachers have no trouble being the center of attention while making students laugh and learn. They know how to be the boss even using just a small movement or sound.

9. Teachers are creative. They can help students learn something a million different ways, with any object, at any time in any place. The hallway, the playground, and the even the lunchroom are places where important lessons and connections take place.

10. Teachers are humble. They don’t teach to be praised, but to make a difference.

11. Teachers are always thinking about teaching. They plan, they research, and they think about lessons all of the time. They write down lesson ideas on cocktail napkins or receipts when they think of something great to include in an upcoming unit.

12. Teachers are resourceful. They know how to make the most of a lesson with no money, no supplies and little time.

13. Teachers are organized. They plan lessons sometimes a year in advance. The room is organized, the desk is in order, and the plan is clear for the day because they’ve made sure of it.

14. Teachers stick together. No one understands or can relate to the inside of a classroom like another teacher. When teachers feel frustrated or challenged, they know talking to another teacher is comforting and helpful.

15. Teachers don’t take teaching lightly.They’ve been trained in a field with no pay and no tangible rewards. The emotional rewards of teaching? The satisfaction of teaching? Those are so great it makes up for everything else and then some. The joys of teaching can be so overwhelming that they know it’s one of the greatest professions on Earth.