The Washington Post has honored teaching excellence in the Washington region for three decades, with more than 500 men and women winning the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award for their work in the classroom, creativity and contribution to the improvement of education.
The awards are named for Agnes Meyer, wife of Eugene Meyer, who purchased The Post in 1933. She was a staunch supporter and defender of public education and believed in the motto that still guides the awards: “Quality education is essential to the well-being of our society, and good teachers are the foundation of our educational system.”
The Post also honors the region’s principals with the Distinguished Educational Leadership Awards, recognizing those who go beyond the day-to-day demands of their position to create an exceptional educational environment. Winners are invited to attend an expenses-paid four-day leadership seminar.
The teachers, who each receive a $3,000 cash award , are examples of what works in the classrooms, such as tutoring high school freshman at risk of failing, recruiting students for AP classes who didn’t consider themselves advanced-course material, and writing songs to help kindergartners master vowels. Here, The Post’s education team profiles a selection of the 2015 winners, taking us into their classrooms and showing why they are some of Washington’s best educators.
Monica Abuliak
James Hubert Blake High School
Montgomery County
One of her ninth-graders is struggling with algebra, so Monica Abuliak sits beside her, reteaching a lesson on box plots at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring. But Abuliak is not a math teacher.
Her class is college prep literacy, for students at risk of failure in their critical ninth-grade year. Abuliak troubleshoots with them about missing assignments, low marks, undone homework. She teaches, encourages, prods, advises.
This is her passion: closing gaps, especially for minorities. Most students in her classes are African American and Hispanic.
“I believe as though it’s my job to be that agent of change and to show them you have someone here who is willing to work with you, advocate on your behalf and help you navigate high school,” she said.
Born in Puerto Rico, Abuliak, 42, grew up in the Washington region and says she often was the only minority in advanced classes. As she progressed in her 20-year teaching career, she noticed the same pattern and embraced the chance to help minority students succeed.
She started at Blake as a Spanish teacher in 1999 and later became the world languages department head and academic intervention coordinator. Three years ago, she gave up much of her Spanish teaching to focus on her classes with at-risk ninth-graders.
Her principal, Christopher Berry, says many educators express beliefs that all children can learn and succeed, but “Monica lives it every day. I think she has a skill set that is rare, and she’s just relentless. She comes to work every day with her sleeves rolled up.”
She steps into the breach with math problems, social studies lessons, English papers, study skills, self-advocacy, organization. She sees herself as an academic coach, a cheerleader, a stand-in mom. “I’m whatever they need me to be,” she said.
By all accounts, a big part of her success is that she truly likes her students and finds it easy to build relationships with them. She recruits and trains older Blake students to work in her classes as peer tutors, extending her reach.
Lately she sits in on an Algebra 1 class every day during her planning period to relearn the subject and be more effective with her students, most of whom have failed the course.
“Whether kids realize it or not, she definitely has an impact on their lives,” said senior Kate Campbell, 17, a peer tutor for Abuliak’s class. “She’s proactive; she literally reaches out to students and tries to change things.”
Abuliak’s interest in education started in third grade, with a teacher she admired while attending a private school in Virginia. She went to the University of Maryland, launching her career in 1995 and joining Montgomery County schools in 1999. She is married and lives in Silver Spring.
Her language abilities have helped forge connections with Blake’s increasing number of Spanish-speaking parents. “She is not only able to articulate the words, she is able to articulate the care and the compassion,” said Blake counselor Jean Smith.
Abuliak’s efforts also have focused on student clubs. She helped start a club for African American females, and another for minority males. She sponsors a Hispanic leadership club. Her most recent creation is a homework club.
“She’s indefatigable,” said Blake assistant principal Rudy Tyrell . “She gets here early, stays late. There’s no give in, there’s no give up, no ‘It’s too much,’ no ‘I’m overwhelmed.’ ”
Five years ago, 20 percent of Blake’s ninth-graders had less than a C average after the first marking period, Abuliak said. By last fall, the number was down to 10.8 percent, with a steep decline from 2013 to 2014.
“She’s not the only reason for it, but I think she’s a prime reason for it,” Berry said.
— Donna St. George
Dawn Blevins
Guilford Elementary School
Loudoun County
There were lots of little things that marred the busy day Dawn Blevins had planned for this class of third-graders at Guilford Elementary in Sterling. There was a fight on the playground in the afternoon, which set the stage for a talk on bullying. There was a derailed pencil sharpener, an iPad that went missing and a student who was so antsy he looked like he might burst.
But Blevins knows these issues are dwarfed by the problems that some of the children will face once they leave school for the day. Many go to homes where there’s little adult supervision and no English, and many sleep in crowded apartments without their own beds. In her afternoon class of 22 children, only seven speak English well enough to take regular standardized tests and only a handful are reading at grade level.
But for Blevins, Guilford is a dream school, where Blevins sees puzzles she needs to solve.
And that’s reflected in her holistic approach, where she serves as not just a teacher but as an extra parent to some children, furnishing them with hand-me-down jackets and making home visits with school supplies.
“It just gives me the drive to make a difference,” she said. “It never makes me sad. It energizes me.”
Her approach has yielded results. In his nominating letter, Principal David Stewart said a majority of students make more than a year’s worth of academic gains under her guidance, even though some start far behind state benchmarks.
“Dawn gives everything she can to those kids,” Stewart said. “I don’t think she realizes how big of an impact she has on kids.”
Blevins has worked with students with challenges for most of her career, starting in Fairfax County in 1990, where she worked with emotionally disabled children. She then moved to Loudoun County to teach at Sully Elementary School in Sterling. She taught at Catoctin Elementary in Leesburg for a handful of years before taking time off to raise her children.
She later took a job as a homebound instructor, teaching children in their own homes because disabilities, mental-health problems or medical conditions left them unable to attend school. She said she tutored a pregnant middle schooler and a handful of high school students who were too depressed or too anxious to handle traditional education.
Blevins returned to teaching classes at Guilford in 2009, which reaffirmed her love of educating those who need extra help, where her presence can make a major difference in a child’s life.
Blevins’s students, who she refers to in class as “my friends,” often don her children’s hand-me-downs, including her son’s old baseball jerseys with “Blevins” emblazoned on the back. She has coordinated with her church to bring volunteer readers and snack packs into the classroom. A friend who owns a ski shop donates coats every year.
“It’s just that feeling that I’m needed and can make a difference,” she said.
In 2012, Guilford was designated a “focus school” by the state, falling in the bottom 15 percent of Title I schools on standardized tests. It was a wake-up call both for the district, which touts its high SAT scores and graduation rates, and the school, which ramped up professional development.
Blevins was a pivotal part of that effort, creating programs that helped teachers re-focus on state education objectives and helping students understand where they fell short and how they could improve. She is the school’s lead mentor, counseling newcomers in an environment that can challenge even the best educators. Within two years, the school was off the list.
Stewart said that despite Blevins’s success, she’s never satisfied: “She’s determined to have every kid meet their potential regardless of their background, or where they came from.”
— Moriah Balingit
Dahlia Constantine
Thomas Jefferson Middle School
Arlington County
In Dahlia Constantine’s classroom at Patrick Henry Elementary, 8- and 9-year-olds are puzzling out an issue that has confounded grown-up decision-makers: What to do about Arlington’s Thomas Jefferson Middle School.
The school is in dire need of expansion, but it would come at the cost of green space. It has left the community sharply divided.
Constantine, 36, had students recall articles they read about it. And she asked: Whose voice is being heard, and whose is being left out?
“The kids’ voices weren’t being heard,” said one student. “They’re the ones going to the school.”
The lesson underscores Constantine’s unusual approach to teaching and her view that her job is to empower students, even if they aren’t yet 10.
“Kids are capable of so much,” Constantine said. “I feel like if we get out of their way a little, they can do a lot.”
Teaching was not always Constantine’s dream profession. She once sketched out a 10-year plan that involved a jet-setting job at the United Nations working on human rights and learning all the Romance languages. “Something more glamorous,” she said.
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, she majored in legal studies and prepared to go to law school. But her work as a mentor for a middle school girl from a rough part of Oakland grew into a part-time position running after-school programs. She ended up heading to Columbia University’s Teacher’s College.
“I realized I could have this impact here, at this small, subtle level in a class,” she said. She came to teaching with the idea that it could right social wrongs. “This is the way I’m going to change things.”
Many aspects of her day teaching third-graders — from the classroom layout to the curriculum — are child-driven. Rows of desks have been replaced by small cafe tables, and the room is warmly lit with paper lanterns and tiny electric votive candles.
There is no hand-raising, even in group discussions, and children often get to choose their own activities.
Constantine aims to teach her students that they have a voice, and she employs technology to help. Each student has a tablet computer on which they can tap out entries for closely monitored blogs. They write about class projects and their observations about life.
“Trampolines are so much fun,” headlines one entry.
The classroom also keeps a Twitter account and picks what messages to send as a group.
Constantine has a year-long lesson on community, where she teaches a variety of subjects — from science to social studies — through tackling a local issue. This year, students are studying the debate over the middle school expansion. In years past, students have set up miniature businesses, made public service announcements about green space and even grilled a local politician about his voting record.
“It’s not about them learning to . . . pass some test,” she said. “Each of these kids is going to be out there voting and out there making decisions. . . . How do I get them to speak up and say what they feel?”
Principal Andrea Frye said one of Constantine’s strengths is building communities inside the classroom, a critical task at a school that is a blend of students from different backgrounds. In Constantine’s class, some students spend weekends at vacation homes while others were recently homeless.
Frye said Constantine champions those differences. When one student’s father was injured on the job, Constantine helped mobilize a network of parents to aid the family: a lawyer helped with worker’s compensation, other parents assisted with child care and others brought meals to the home.
“She builds the network of parents so they can trust each other,” Frye said.
— Moriah Balingit
Apollo Cordon
Academy of Health Sciences
at Prince George’s Community College
Apollo Cordon’s biology class is no stiff lecture. As he teaches his ninth-graders about genetic traits, hands go up with one probing question, then another. The exchange that follows in his Largo classroom gets so lively that some might forget this is an honors course in an advanced high school program.
“The only way we can measure if they are learning or not is if they speak,” Cordon said. “The deeper the questions they ask, to me, the deeper their understanding of the topic is.”
The back-and-forth is one hallmark of Cordon’s work at the Academy of Health Sciences, a dual-enrollment program for Prince George’s County high school students on the campus of Prince George’s Community College.
Here, on the first floor of Lanham Hall, Cordon is a “teacher’s teacher” who works long hours, helps other educators in their work and is able to get students talking about science, said Kathy Richard Andrews, the academy’s principal.
“Teaching and learning is an art, and that art is developed through one’s passion for the content, and he is very passionate,” she said. “They become as interested and engaged in the material as he is.”
Upbeat and humble, Cordon, 37, was born and raised in the Philippines. He was teaching at De La Salle University in Manila in 2005 when school leaders from Prince George’s County traveled to the country to recruit and interview prospective teachers.
Cordon was soon hired and moved to the United States with his wife and young daughter. The couple now have three children and live in Bowie.
In Prince George’s, he taught biology at Largo High School for seven years before moving to the academy in 2012. He has also been an adjunct professor of biology at Prince George’s Community College since 2006.
His work at the health sciences academy means his two school worlds are on the same campus. It enables high school students to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate’s degree in the four years it typically takes students to finish high school.
Colleagues point out that 100 percent of Cordon’s students have passed the state’s biology assessment, required for graduation.
When dignitaries tour the school, Cordon’s classroom is a mandatory stop.
“I love seeing the kids learn so much more and get excited,” he said of his work at the academy, noting that more than 50 percent of its students are from economically disadvantaged families or are part of their family’s first generation to go to college.
Cordon said he does a lot of reflection about his teaching, reviewing his days and whether his instruction seemed to get through. He said he believes that ideally, teaching will touch a student’s mind, heart and will.
His colleagues admire both his expertise and his manner.
“Whatever anyone asks, he does it, and he does it well, with a smile,” said Andria Nungesser, one of the school’s academic achievement coaches. “He’s a team player. He wants to do it right all of the time. And he’s personable and he’s friendly. He’s just a great guy.”
Cordon, a field biologist, has done research in forest ecology, biodiversity and conservation. At the academy, he has organized an ecology club, a yearly STEM fair and a three-day field trip focused on ecosystem assessment.
For students such as Roland Adesina, 14, Cordon’s teaching has helped make the class one of his favorites. It’s fast-paced at times, he said, but Cordon knows when to slow it down. “He’s able to explain things in a way so everybody understands,” the teenager said.
His father, Leke Adesina, called Cordon exceptional: “Roland has talked so much about this teacher.”
— Donna St. George
Dionne Hammiel
John Burroughs Education
Campus, D.C. Public Schools
Sometimes, when Dionne Hammiel wants the attention of her rambunctious kindergarten class, she stands on the table. Other times, she lowers her voice to a whisper, making her instructions a very important secret that every child strains to hear.
The hushed message at John Burroughs Education Campus in the District was utterly routine on a recent day: “We need to go to the bathroom, drink some water, come back, and pick out our books to read.”
But the children were instantly alight, excited about the next step in their kindergarten adventure.
Hammiel, with her infectious enthusiasm and outstanding results, is known for the towering expectations she sets for the small children in her class and the deeply analytical approach she brings to her own practice and the skills each child is developing.
“She creates an environment in her class where they really want to do well,” said her principal, Aqueelha James. “Her students want to see her energy, and they really, really work very hard.”
The result? “The children who leave her are not on the first-grade level,” James said. “They are beyond that.”
Hammiel, 37, is the daughter of a schoolteacher, as well as the cousin and niece and granddaughter of a family full of schoolteachers. Her approach is also close to home: “I look at my students as my own kids,” she said.
The Guyana native moved to the District when she was 11, went to Orr Elementary and eventually graduated from Wilson High School. She majored in human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University, then started her career as a social worker at a local day-care center. She became a teacher at a Head Start center and found her niche in early childhood education. She has been teaching at John Burroughs in the Brookland neighborhood for nearly 15 years.
Kindergarten has become more academically rigorous in the past decade, and Hammiel keeps a “data wall” at home tracking her students’ performance. She sets goals for each child and celebrates their progress. She holds their parents to high standards, too, giving them clear directions for what she expects the children to do during spring break.
She said she loves teaching kindergarten because the children are “sponges.”
“The more you give them, the more they will take,” Hammiel said. “They want to please you, and every day there is the joy of seeing their success.”
She teaches lessons in creative ways to appeal to different learning styles.
When the children were having trouble with vowels, she wrote a song they could sing using their hands, with each finger representing a vowel. Now when they are writing, she sees them taking a break to look at their hands before returning to the page.
When introducing a word, she reads it in a sentence, shows a picture or acts out the meaning. And she is always looking for challenging words to share.
James, the principal, said she was skeptical when she saw that Hammiel’s lesson plan early in the year included “array,” “linear” and “circular.” But later she heard the children using the words when discussing the line they had formed in the hallway.
“From the outside, you think, ‘These are kindergartners,’ ” James said. “But they rise to the occasion.”
“The moon, that’s where I set the bar,” Hammiel said. “When they leave me, they go out there and shine.”
— Michael Alison Chandler
Arvinder Johri
New Directions Alternative
Education Center,
Prince William County
Arvinder Johri attended a school run by nuns in India, where more than 60 students packed a room in long rows of desks. It was rigid: An infraction like failing to make eye contact with a teacher meant punishment.
But there was one teacher who broke the mold, engaging students and encouraging discussion. Sister Prisca, in her all-white habit, left an impression on Johri that remains decades later and thousands of miles away.
Johri now oversees a small classroom in a Manassas office building, the home of the New Directions Alternative Education Center. There is a tight cluster of desks and shelves lined with books. A quote adorns the front bulletin board: “This is your world. Shape it or someone else will.”
Her approach toward her classes — which include creative writing and Advanced Placement English literature — is to be a facilitator, allowing students’ ideas and discussion to drive their learning.
“It’s what they bring to my class that’s more important than what I can disseminate,” she said. “That one-directionality is totally an archaic, and I would say repressive, model that definitely could not work with my student demographics.”
That, at its heart, is what Johri is attempting to do with literature and writing in her classes. Many of those who end up in New Directions have been thrown out of their high schools for disciplinary infractions and run-ins with the law. Many come here when they are on the verge of flunking out and take remedial classes or get help to pass state-mandated exams. Others have work or family obligations that make traditional high school impossible.
For Principal Robert Eichorn, himself an Agnes Meyer Award winner , Johri’s honor is significant for an alternative school where he sometimes fears others view the teachers much as they might view the students, as “at-risk.”
“It’s a pretty powerful statement,” he said.
Johri, 48, said she never asks why students are in the program because she wants to give them a clean slate, an attitude many of the program’s educators adopt. She ends up recruiting students for her AP class who never viewed themselves as advanced-course material. She believes her approach — putting student voices at the forefront — shapes the way the teenagers view themselves.
“They begin to value their own learning more,” she said. “It definitely has made an impact on the way they think about their own abilities.”
Johri started her professional life in advertising in India, craving a profession that was edgy. She ignored her mother’s predictions that she would be a teacher someday.
“I would tell her, ‘Never means never. This is never going to happen,’ ” she said.
But then Johri had her daughter and realized children “fascinated” her. “I find them magical, totally magical,” she said.
She moved to the United States in 1999 and began teaching the following year, eventually earning a master’s and PhD in education from George Mason University.
At New Directions, Johri has taken on students such as Mbaimba Kamara, an immigrant from Sierra Leone who struggled to write English proficiently when he came to New Directions. Kamara had been in the United States for just five years when he joined Johri’s class.
Kamara, now 19 and a student at Northern Virginia Community College, said he wanted to improve his writing. So he plowed through homework with a dictionary close at hand and worked with Johri one-on-one on the basics of grammar and sentence construction. His writing improved, but something unexpected happened.
“I kind of fall in love a little bit with English,” he said. “I fall in love reading the books.”
Samia Chavez, 18, did not take school seriously before coming to New Directions. And she was worried she would not be ready for an AP course. But she has embraced the heavy coursework and said her writing has improved tremendously since she joined Johri’s class.
“I think a lot more about what I’m writing now and how it sounds. I don’t just throw my thoughts on a piece of paper,” Chavez said. “I think, ‘How would Dr. Johri grade this?’ ”
— Moriah Balingit
Maria Magallanes
Cora Kelly School for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
Alexandria
A generation before she was born, Maria Magallanes’s grandfather — who had dropped out of high school to support his family — worked the dusty fields in Colorado during the Great Depression. It was there that he had an epiphany.
“He saw that the only ones to have a job were teachers, so he said to himself, ‘All my children will be teachers,’ ” Magallanes said.
And they followed his advice. There are 17 teachers in Magallanes’s family, including both her parents. Magallanes followed them into the classroom, too, teaching students how to read at Alexandria’s Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology. So did her sister, who is a college professor.
“My grandmother only went to school to the eighth grade,” Magallanes said. “She always told her kids and us that education is the one thing no one can take away from you.”
Growing up in the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado, when she wasn’t biking along the dirt roads of Antonito — population 781 — Magallanes read books. It was a family pastime. Her mother’s side of the family held an annual competition for who could read the most.
“They were always reading and talking about books and authors,” said Magallanes, whose favorite book is “How Green Was My Valley,” by Richard Llewellyn. “When my grandfather lost his sight he listened to books on tape. I’ve always been surrounded by that.”
At Antonito High School, she was surrounded by family. Her mother taught her algebra class; her father, wood shop; her uncle, social studies.
After graduating with a degree in elementary education from Adams State University in 1998, Magallanes’s first job after college was teaching the children of migrant farmers how to read, which she did for a summer. Magallanes’s father worked in lettuce fields as a boy and earned enough money to buy himself clothes for school.
“Kids struggling with reading didn’t have confidence in themselves,” Magallanes said. “I thought, ‘I have to do something more. Literacy builds confidence.’ ”
At the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, she earned a master’s degree in 2005 in education, specializing in reading instruction.
“I like to think of it as comparing ourselves to doctors in a sense,” Magallanes said. She gives reading tests to students and analyzes the data to determine “what are their strengths and weaknesses and then find strategies to help that student grow as a reader, like a doctor who then prescribes something to help them.”
Magallanes taught in elementary schools in Santa Fe and Colorado Springs before joining the Alexandria City public schools system in 2009. She taught second grade at Cora Kelly before becoming a reading specialist in 2013.
At Cora Kelly, Magallanes helps run a book donation fund for children in need. According to Alexandria schools statistics, 89 percent of Cora Kelly students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. To help encourage more reading at home among her students, Magallanes organized family literacy nights to teach parents ways to read books with their children.
Many of the Cora Kelly students, Magallanes said, come from immigrant families whose parents are not literate in their native language, much less English. Instead, Magallanes tells the parents to use wordless books and to talk about the pictures on the page with their children to foster their imagination and improve their vocabulary.
The goal, Magallanes said, is to pass on “that joy in reading.”
— T. Rees Shapiro
Kimberly Scott
Franklin Middle School,
Fairfax County
Kimberly Scott thinks in poetry.
A pastor’s daughter who grew up on the banks of the Missouri River, Scott immersed herself as a child in the lyrical works of Madeleine L’Engle, Lois Lowry and Beverly Cleary. Now, as a teacher in Fairfax County schools for the past decade, Scott, 47, brings her lifelong passion for the written word into her classroom.
Words of verse come to her as she teaches eighth-grade English at Franklin Middle School in Chantilly. Encouraging her students’ efforts on a recent test, Scott read aloud Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which includes the lines:
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
And it was poetry that came to Scott at one of her darkest moments a few years ago, as she sat opposite a neurologist at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
“The doctor looked across the table and said, ‘Your husband has Alzheimer’s,’ ” Scott said. Her husband, at the time not yet 40, was a hard-charging Air Force officer who read Civil War history and could detect jet engine malfunctions by ear. Scott said she realized in that moment the crumbling future that lay before her and the man she had met at her father’s church and married at 20.
Scott said she looked back at the neurologist and recited from memory a verse by Emily Dickinson that would sustain her through the years until she buried her husband one April day in 2013 at Arlington National Cemetery.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
Scott said that throughout her challenges at home after her husband’s diagnosis, her students and colleagues at Franklin grounded her family.
“Teaching became a support I could lean on every day,” she said. “As our world felt as though it was imploding, they held us together.”
Scott persisted and focused on her work, becoming a nationally board certified teacher and chair of the Franklin English department.
She has lent her expertise at the county, state and national stage on educational standards, testing and professional development.
At Franklin she is known for punctuating her classes with spontaneity. To grab her students’ attention, she’ll jump on her desk to make important class announcements. On Standards of Learning testing days, she organizes the English teachers into a gantlet to greet the students as they enter the halls. The teachers wave pompoms, rattle cowbells and cheer on the students as if they’re star athletes as the “Rocky” theme plays over the public address system.
“They need to know we believe in them,” Scott said. “The power of someone believing in you can affect the outcome you want.”
Ian Perkins, 14, said it’s clear to his eighth-grade classmates that Scott’s top priority is her students.
“She has more confidence in us than we have in ourselves,” Ian said. “She inspires us to be as great as you can be.”
Assistant principal Amy Parmentier, in an essay she wrote about Scott, called the teacher “a master storyteller and humorist,” who helps her students “understand the larger themes of life that are woven throughout the stories, poems, and essays” that she teaches .
“Poetry is often difficult content,” Franklin principal Sharon Eisenberg said . “They shy away from it. But when she’s finished with the kids, they have a greater love for its meaning.”