Prospect Sierra Teacher a Finalist in National Teaching Competition

By Madeleine Rogin

For the past several years, the Kindergarten team at Prospect Sierra School has been working on a new way of teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. to their Kindergarten students. 

Led by Kindergarten teacher, Madeleine Rogin, the Kindergarten teachers asked themselves: "How can we teach the themes of courage, justice, inclusiveness, and making change through peaceful means to our young students?" and "how can we do this in a way that is developmentally appropriate and includes all the voices in our classrooms?"

The result of this inquiry into curriculum has led to the "Peaceful Changemakers" unit of study in Kindergarten.  

Through this curriculum, students learn about many people who work toward making the world a better place through peaceful means. 

They start with the Lorax, and they call the Lorax a "changemaker" because he spoke for the trees. Students answer the following questions about the Lorax: What was the problem he faced? Who was involved or affected? Why was it hard to solve this problem? And was it solved? 

From there, they learn about Dr. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for planting trees in Kenya. As they learn about these changemakers, students take action to solve problems in their local community.

They work to restore the watershed by planting native trees at a nearby creek and go on trash walks through the local parks. They hang signs around their school educating their school community about how trash on the ground eventually makes its way into the ocean.

Students also honor changemakers from their own families and communities, and family members come into the classroom to present their changemakers. 

Some of these changemakers are tutors in schools, or work in orphanages in other countries, or educate others about the importance of reusing and recycling, or turn parking lots into neighborhood parks.

Along with this Peaceful Changemaker unit is a unit on skin color and race, in order to give young children a basic understanding of skin color differences and language they can use to be inclusive with one another.

Students mix paint to find their skin tones, write poems about their skin, and listen to many read aloud about the many different shades we all come in.

Through the years the Kindergarten teachers at Prospect Sierra have realized that their students need support in understanding race and racism so that they can recognize bias when they see it and truly appreciate the work Dr. King and many others did to fight against segregation.  

This curriculum was recently featured in a blog at startempathy.org as well as at pbs.org.

Now, because of this curriculum, Madeleine Rogin has been nominated to be a finalist in a teaching competition - the Great American Teach-off.

Madeleine is one of ten K-6 teachers around the country to be selected as a finalist. Each of the finalists has a chance to display their innovative teaching style to the nation, and the winner receives $10,000 for his/her classroom.  

People can visit the website and vote once a day every day, and each Monday two teachers are eliminated and the rest move forward. The winner will be announced in five weeks. 

If Madeleine were to win, she would use the money to deepen the Peaceful Changemakers curriculum by planting native trees in the urban areas around her school, restore the creek next door to her school, and partner with an elementary school in Ghana, West Africa to engage in peaceful change together.