Patti Rowland
Kentucky Teacher of the Year
Hogsett Elementary, Danville, KY
Grades PreK-5, Curriculum/Technology Resource Teacher

My teaching philosophy
Education is the key to success in life and as educators we should enable students to set and reach goals and to realize life's dreams. Once attained, education can never be lost, destroyed, stolen or taken away.

Teachers must use whatever means are available to educate all students. They must focus on the whole child. Skills and concepts must be taught, but so must manners, cooperation, compromise, and respect for others. Teachers must spend time addressing the humanness of students to establish the relationships that will allow them to meet the student's individual needs with discipline, care, respect and love.

My philosophy in action
In my current position, I am responsible for teaching colleagues as well as pre-K–5 students. Whether teaching adults or children, my approach remains non-intimidating and positive, enabling me to develop trusting relationships.

All students must be taught through whatever modalities they learn the best. Young students often learn best by doing and by repetition. Technology provides the perfect tool. I enable teachers to implement technology into their curriculum as we work together to create templates and design projects and lessons for students to complete. Technology enables each student to be successful.

When providing technology-related professional development, I accommodate teachers’ varying levels of experience and knowledge by using a SMART Board interactive whiteboard or a large screen to demonstrate the process in question for those who need visual and verbal explanation. Step-by-step handouts are distributed for those who are ready to go ahead on their own. Time to practice is provided so those teachers who need a little hand holding can have one-on-one instruction. The goal is always for each learner to experience success.

My greatest teaching accomplishment
My greatest accomplishment in teaching is seeing my students (whether children or teachers) experience success. When a kindergarten students proudly shares a multimedia project with his classmates or a teacher creates an electronic progress chart, my reward is the satisfaction these learners experience as they attain new knowledge or new skills.

The most critical issue facing educators today
One of the most critical issues facing educators today is the increasing number of school-age children who are living in poverty. Studies have shown that children in poverty are more likely than middle class students to suffer developmental delay, to not succeed and to drop out of school. In addition to insufficient financial resources, these students lack the emotional, mental, physical and spiritual resources and the support systems they need to be successful at school. Their lack of resources often causes them to be considered as behavioral or disciplinary liabilities regardless of their intellectual abilities.

Ways to resolve this issue
Although educators can do little to change the financial resources of our students, we must do all we can to help them acquire the other resources they need to be successful in school. We must provide for their material needs through family resource centers, the Even Start association, and federal breakfast and lunch programs. Through school guidance programs, mentoring programs and programs that recognize character development and good citizenship, we must help students acquire emotion-coping resources as they learn to control their responses and to develop the persistence to remain with a situation until it can be resolved. By using research-based programs to close the achievement gap, we must teach all students to read, write, do basic math and process information, thus establishing the necessary mental resources to achieve. By teaching the basics of health and nutrition and the importance of physical fitness, we can help students acquire the physical resources needed to live healthy lives. And while we cannot directly, legally teach our students about a higher being or about gifts of worth and love from God, we can serve as appropriate role models of spiritual resources that will make a difference in their lives.

To meet the needs of the growing number of impoverished students, teachers must learn more about the characteristics, values and culture of poverty. Through professional development, research and book-study groups, teachers must discover non-traditional ways to deliver instruction, develop personal relationships and teach all students the behaviors that will enable them to be successful at school, at work and in society.

One thought to inspire other teachers to succeed
While students may forget what a teacher says, they will never forget how a teacher made them feel. A teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, touches a heart and changes a life forever.

One lesson every student should learn
Each one of us is ultimately responsible for our own behaviors, successes and failures.

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