Wisconsin National Teacher of the Year Nominee Is From Greendale

GREENDALE, WI — The Department of Public Instruction announced Wisconsin's representative to the National Teacher of the Year program will be Erin McCarthy, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Greendale Middle School and the 2020 Wisconsin Middle School Teacher of the Year.

"Erin is highly motivated in serving our next generation. I'm happy she will be representing Wisconsin on the national stage," State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor said. "Erin encourages all of her students to be personally engaged in social studies and works to make sure all students are included in the inquiry process."

As Wisconsin’s National Teacher of the Year representative, McCarthy will receive $6,000 from the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation. She was one of four educators named to the Wisconsin Teacher of the Year program in the spring to represent the 2019-20 teaching corps.

State officials say McCarthy strives to spark every child's curiosity about history, along with their sense of agency in the present, so that they leave her class enthusiastic not only to explore the world, but to improve it.

Officials also said McCarthy sparks curiosity and motivates reluctant learners by connecting them to diverse figures, especially those whose voices have been left out of history. McCarthy has developed a curriculum for writing these voices back into the narrative. At the end of the year, students perform an exercise of rewriting a chapter from their own textbook with a goal of making the story more complete. This project has successfully engaged students who were otherwise reluctant to learn.

"I’ve shifted the focus in my classroom to valuing the experience of each student and not teaching to the 'average,'" she said in a news release Tuesday. "The work is exhausting but yields the greatest rewards."