As unprecedented numbers of U.S. students struggle to read, the nation’s best teachers highlight the importance of integrating literacy.
The finalists for the 2025 National Teacher of the Year award include three English/language arts teachers and a school librarian-cum-history teacher who infuses a literacy focus across the curriculum.
The finalists are:
- Ashlie Crosson, an English teacher at Mifflin County High School in Pennsylvania. She teaches Advanced Placement language and composition, journalism, English 10, and Survival Stories—a course she created.
- Janet Renee Damon, a history teacher in the Denver public schools. She also has served as a literacy interventionist, library trainer, and a K-12 school librarian.
- Mikaela Saelua, a teacher of senior English, journalism/yearbook, AP English Language and Composition at Leone High School in the Western District of American Samoa.
- Jazzmyne Townsend, a K-5 English/ language arts instructional coach and a grade 2-3 special education inclusion teacher at Stanton Elementary School in the District of Columbia.
All of them highlight the importance of creativity and engagement for developing lifelong readers.
The National Teacher of the Year program, facilitated by the Council of Chief State School Officers, chooses its finalists from among 56 winners of local teacher of the year, who come from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense schools, and U.S. territories. The winner will be announced this spring, and will spend a year advocating for the profession.
Ashlie Crosson: Reading as a window on the world
Reading and writing should open doors for students who have never traveled beyond their hometown to understand cultures around the world, says Crosson, a first-generation college student and a 2018 Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow.
Over time, Crosson has seen the effects of declining reading skills, as new students come in less confident in their comprehension. She addresses the issue head-on in class, by having students couple reading and discussing the Ray Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 and a recent Atlantic article on a decline in reading skills. “It turned into a huge unit on why literature and reading matter,” she said.
Crosson urged teachers to branch out in texts they use to teach reading. “Not everybody wants to sit in 180 days of American literature; Transcendentalism isn’t everybody’s cup of tea,” she said, referring to the 19th century literary movement. “ELA standards are skills-based, not so much content-based, so there’s literally a whole world of stories that you can use to meet those standards and to help students grow their skills,” she said.
It turned into a huge unit about why literature and reading matter.
She developed a course called Survival Stories, focused on firsthand accounts of adolescents coping with crises from war to natural disasters. This spring, her students analyzed Dry, a young adult novel by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, set during a water crisis in California, while tracking the effects of ongoing wildfires in the state.
While class conversations often touch on contentious news events and social issues, Crosson said exposing students to a wide array of firsthand writings allows teachers to “de-escalate that rhetoric and help my students see the connected humanity between themselves and literally anybody else they’re going to ever interact with.”
“My students are going to live and exist in a globalized society,” she said, “and I don’t want them to go out of high school and, and into their adult life feeling like they’re unprepared or at a disadvantage compared to their peers who have more tangible experiences of those things.”
Janet Renee Damon: Don’t ‘weaponize’ reading assessments
To improve student literacy, schools and communities need to give students better access to books, according to Damon, who started her education career as a school librarian before teaching history. She voiced concern over the rise of “book deserts” or communities without a school library or easy access to public libraries.
“The more you read, the more the students come to see the entire structure of writing—the vocabulary, the understanding of transition and nuance and inference and imagery—embodied,” she said. “And so the more that we have reduced the amount of access that young people have to books that make them passionate about reading, the more we have sabotaged their writing.”
Damon specializes in helping students ages 15 to 20 who are off track to graduate high school on time, and she advised teachers to help struggling students see their reading and writing as a process, not a binary pass/fail.
“We have to be cautious not to use [reading] assessments as a ways to humiliate kids and to make them feel like failures, because then it limits their desire to try again and again,” Damon said. “We know that writing is an iterative process. You need to write more every time; you need to edit your writing.
In the ways that we approach the reading and writing with our students, we need to be careful not to weaponize it.
“It’s such a journey. In the ways that we approach the reading and writing with our students, we need to be careful not to weaponize it,” she said.
Increasingly, teachers also need to address outside challenges or mental health concerns that impede students’ academic focus.
“Kids need adults more than ever right now, but when we have not invested in a relationship, [students] are holding all of these complex issues that they need our wisdom for, but they don’t feel safe enough to ask,” Damon said. “We as teachers need to lean in, and listen, and let students know that we care about them as human beings, and also as learners.”
Mikaela Saelua: Leveraging home language and culture for reading
Native languages are an important tool, not a hindrance, to helping students master English, according to Saelua, head of the ELA department at Leone High School in the U.S. territory of American Samoa.
Each year, Saelua asks her students—all of whom are native Samoan-speaking English learners—to translate a Samoan song into English.
“Samoan, especially in music, is beautifully poetic and packed with figurative language, but translating it into English without losing its soul is a challenge,” she said in an essay for CCSSO.
By using Samoan in an academic setting, we’re also showing students that their language and culture are valued here.
Students often start out translating the song word for word, then realize it doesn’t properly convey the meaning of the song. Students work in groups to check each other’s meaning and help brainstorm figurative ways to translate the emotions of the song. At the end of the project, students perform their translated songs in music videos.
“By using Samoan in an academic setting, we’re also showing students that their language and culture are valued here,” she said. “They aren’t just learning English by replacing Samoan; they’re learning how to express what’s meaningful to them in English too.”
Saelua, who leads the school’s professional-learning community and self-study groups, said teachers need ongoing training and mentorship to teach using evolving technology and across different media.
Jazzmyne Townsend: Teach me
After working with one student for four months, Townsend found a little note from the girl that has become the motto for her approach to teaching.
“The note says, ‘Ms. Townsend, I love the way that you teach me.’ It struck me because she didn’t just say, ‘I love the way that you teach.’ She said, ‘I love the way that you teach me.’
“That lesson taught me it’s so important to make learning personal for the students, to make it really based on their interests, their needs, the things that they find fun and engaging. If I can do that ... I can give you challenging and rigorous content, and you are willing to persevere. You are willing to, willing to work with me to get better,” she said.
The academic and emotional effects of pandemic disruptions continue to echo among students in Townsend’s multigrade special education class. Teachers, she said, need to work with their colleagues, support staff, and parents to address barriers to student learning.
She didn't just say, 'I love the way that you teach.' She said, 'I love the way that you teach me.'
Teachers need to have regular opportunities to review student data and plan lessons with teachers in other grade levels, Townsend said. For example, she recently worked with other teachers in Stanton Elementary to identify what “productive struggle” in reading would look like from grade to grade to make sure students develop as readers.
For example, “If I’m in kindergarten, I know my students need to develop their oral language so that by the time they get to 5th grade, they can explicitly recall from the text. So I focus more on developing their oral language: more read-alouds, finger plays, songs and poems and rhymes. So here are the tangible things that I can do as a kindergarten teacher to support this standard ... .”
