Maryland’s Michelle Shearer Named National Teacher of the Year
May 2011
The College Board congratulates Michelle Shearer, an AP® Chemistry teacher at Urbana High School in Frederick, Md., for being selected the 2011 National Teacher of the Year.
Shearer was honored by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House this month.
Shearer has taught chemistry for 10 years at Urbana and, before that, for four years at the Maryland School for the Deaf, where she also taught AP Calculus. Her path to teaching began with working with deaf students; as a premed student at Princeton University, she volunteered in a class for deaf students, then decided to make it her vocation.
At the School for the Deaf, she offered the first AP Chemistry class in the school’s 135-year history. In her application for the Teacher of the Year award, she wrote that when her AP Chemistry students asked her why they should take another AP class, in calculus, she signed back: “Because you can.”
Shearer, who has dual certification in chemistry and special education, is committed to offering her science classes to children who traditionally have had fewer opportunities to explore the subject, including minority students and those with special needs.
As National Teacher of the Year, she will be relieved of classroom duties for a year. She plans to use that time to travel the country, advocate for special education, and promote public school successes.
The National Teacher of the Year Program, which began in 1952, is the oldest and most prestigious national honors program that focuses public attention on excellence in teaching. Educators representing 14 national education organizations chose the finalists from the 2011 state Teachers of the Year in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity and four U.S. extra-state jurisdictions.
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