Daphne Dawne Draa, Art, Grades K-8, Center for Inquiry, Indianapolis Public Schools #2
Indianapolis, Indiana
During a study on immigration last year, Daphne Draa’s art class viewed media images of Hispanics. Then they walked to the park where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy announced from the back of a flatbed truck that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. They listened to Kennedy’s speech as he called for love, wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and to residents who heard it firsthand that day, April 4, 1968.
The students left the park understanding more about the Civil Rights Movement and its connection to the struggles of today. On their own volition, they returned to the dilapidated park and rebuilt its benches.
That’s the kind of potent experience art teacher Draa strives for in her kindergarten through eighth-grade classes and in the afterschool art club she founded.
Her students studying Dadaism read the literature and manifestos of the movement that emerged during World War 1. They discussed how one person’s idea can evolve into a collective viewpoint. Students designing a mural for a nearby prison where infants would reside with their mothers, drew animals shaped as numbers and letters and wrote nursery rhymes. Only Draa was allowed on premises to paint their work.
“Immediately, they were thinking cognitive stimulation even though they wouldn’t give it that title,” Draa said. “They didn’t want to just paint rainbows and Care Bears.”
“That’s what makes our classrooms special - that higher thinking, that rigor. It’s not about just creating pretty things,” Draa said. “I feel very strongly that every person who walks out of my classroom will be better at decoding visual imagery. They may not become a fine artist, but they will be able to solve problems critically, they will be creative thinkers, and that will transfer over and help them be successful in any [college] major or profession.”
Growing up without a television in Saudi Arabia, Draa made costumes and decorations, and staged puppet shows. She helped others create, and enjoyed it. “I don’t know if I decided on teaching or teaching decided on me,” said Draa, a recipient of the Milken Family Foundation’s National Educator Award, among others.
The urban magnet school where she works has enough low-income families represented in its population of 350 to be designated Title 1. Engulfed by cement and abandoned buildings, Draa led a school-wide effort to reclaim its precious space and installed words and symbols of peace from around the world on posts along the school’s perimeter.
Her art club began as volunteer time to help three students who needed competitive portfolios to qualify for magnet high schools. Later, she decided it made no sense to wait until eighth grade to start that work and opened the club to fourth graders and up.
When a student mentioned that she could not even imagine traveling overseas, she kindled an idea. “If you’re willing to work hard for it,” Draa thought, “you can go anywhere you want.” Draa wrote grant proposals. Her students painted storefronts to sell at shows. Her husband, a college professor, coached students on the fine art of making pitches to businesspeople. They raised more than $17,000, and 13 students flew to London.
This past year 29 club students and 21 adults traveled to New Mexico, where they made pottery with residents of the Jemez Pueblo and listened to stories passed down through the ages. Students also soaked in the landscape that inspired Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams. At one point in a canyon, silence enveloped them. “Is this what it means to be ‘off the grid?’ ” a student from a blighted neighborhood back home asked. “It was pretty amazing,” Draa said.
Brad Stewart Schoener, Band, Grades 4-5, Bywood, Stonehurst Hills and Highland Park Elementary Schools, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania
The movieMr. Holland’s Opus hums along for Brad Schoener until Glenn Holland’s former clarinet student-turned-state governor, takes her seat to perform his symphony. Were it Schoener’s script, even before raising the baton Holland would have asked: “Why are you cutting the music program?”
Schoener has taught band students in a school lobby, on the steps, on grassy fields littered with debris, and in a closet that could hold trombone players as long as their slides stayed above fifth position.
In spite of it all, Schoener tripled band enrollment from 75 to more than 250 fourth- and fifth- grade students in three elementary schools. He secured $15,000 to repair and buy instruments in the schools where more than half the students qualify for free meals. He has directed as many as 350 students in an honors band representing nine schools. On his own time, he directs ajazz band of elementary school students that performs regularly and produces CDs.
As a child, Schoener took piano lessons from an uncle who drove nearly three hours to teach him. He moved to trumpet because it was loud and bright, everything “a shy, quiet kid” wasn’t. In high school, he toured Europe with a 150-piece band as first chair trumpet. When Temple University said he wasn’t good enough, Schoener convinced a staff member, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to listen to him and received his endorsement. He graduated from Temple with honors.
Knowing challenges can turn into opportunities, he rolls them out to his brass, woodwind and percussion students: Play 16 bars without missing a note. Do it again in one breath. He’ll smooth a mélange of Bach, rock-and-roll, and Ray Charles into a tune in B-flat students can handle.
“I want to try to motivate all my students to become their own ‘teacher’ and have them use me as the master teacher, solving only the problems they cannot. My medium to do that just happens to be band instruments,” he explained.
Standouts make themselves known. One, an 11-year-old with four months of saxophone lessons, asked, “Do you want to hear me play some [John] Coltrane?” before launching into A Love Supreme. He was on Schoener’s mind at a Wynton Marsalis concert. Schoener scribbled a note on a napkin, got it past the trumpeter’s handlers and arranged a meeting for the student the next morning. “Marsalis was awesome, and spent an hour and a half working with my student.”
On a larger scale, Schoener assembled teachers, students, custodians and administrators for the 800-member Upper Darby Mega Band. After two rehearsals, he conducted as the curtain rose on Veterans Stadium field before a Philadelphia Phillies game. He established Patriotic Fridays, bringing to a new generation songs of old, and wrote “The Recycling Song,” which garnered recognition from the Pennsylvania General Assembly. A reading program he started awarded limo rides with the mayor and local celebrities to students who wrote sentences based on 30 minutes of extra reading.
He won a school board leadership award for shaping an “optimistic foundation” for students transitioning from elementary to middle school and was one of five teachers nationwide selected for the 2007 Mr. Holland’s Opus Award.
“Motivating through music is my mission!” said Schoener, whose ideas keep flowing in spite of battling late stage leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer, since 2004. He has undergone chemotherapy and major surgery but rarely misses work. After losing his signature ponytail that brushed his lower back to treatment, he let students who mastered a difficult scale or riff sign his bald head with a marker. It was another example of a Schoener turnaround with a lesson that appears well learned. Asked what Schoener had taught him, one of his 10-year-old students replied: “I learned how to overcome obstacles and make the most of my opportunities.”
Lori Urogdy Eiler, Social Studies, Grades 9-12, Shaw High School,East Cleveland, Ohio
Lori Urogdy Eiler puts her own twist on the old saw about taking a horse to water. She says you can make it drink. Make it thirsty. Put salt in its mouth.
Personal obligation is the thread coursing through her 31-year career at the same school where, as social studies and law teacher, mentor, and mock trial coach, she has burnished her reputation.
A 2008 graduate now at the University of Chicago, credits Urogdy Eiler with his success. “Because of her excellence I became excellent,” he said. While in her class, he worked voter polls and campaigned to raise the minimum wage. He led a statewide organization, Youth Voices for Justice, which delivered an agenda on education, health, and justice to the seat of power in Columbus and galvanized hundreds of his peers. The American Civil Liberties Union named him a Youth Scholar.
“I want my students to become star players for our democracy and their communities,” said Urogdy Eiler, a former Ohio Teacher of the Year. “Star players are created not by listening to the coach talk about the game, reading about the game, or watching the game. Star players are created by hours of practice playing the game.”
A look into her class finds a mock community where students hold jobs, cover housing expenses, and run up against problems. Courtroom simulations cast students in the roles of plaintiff, defendant, juror and judge. “All the emotion in real life comes out, but it’s easier to learn [how the system works] when the stakes are just pretend.”
Nevertheless, some students have put those skills to the test to thwart illegal evictions, retrieve security deposits, and navigate small claims courts. Even those who have left her class don’t forget it. Asked where he learned to read contracts so well, an emergency medical services union representative responded: “Street Law, Shaw High School.”
“Sending students out into the world without law-related education is like sending kids out on a basketball court without teaching them the rules of the game, and then wondering why so many are fouling out,” said Urogdy Eiler, a political science and philosophy honors graduate.
Nearly 60 percent of her tenth-grade students scored advanced or accelerated, and more than 92 percent passed the social studies section of the Ohio Graduation Test last year. Her mock trial students, who argue constitutionallybased cases written by lawyers, placed twice in the top 10 in national contests and brought home four state championships. In 2008 she came out of “retirement” to help Shaw place among the 22 teams out of 348 to make state finals. That record hinges on students being aces at thinking on their feet, arguing both sides of the case during drills, and competing as “authentic self-directed advocates” without scripts.
“In mock trial you’re teaching kids to be advocates for wherever they happen to be in life, whether it’s changing something or creating something new at work. They are doing this in a very professional manner, using rules of evidence and critical thinking.” Her ability to “make a difference” in students’ lives led the Ohio Center for Law-Related Education to establish the Lori Urogdy Eiler Award for Coaching Excellence.
Urogdy Eiler expects her star players to identify with a “wide universe of obligation,” a concept brought to earth through the examples of Max Edelman, a Holocaust survivor, and Carl Wilkens, a missionary who saved lives during the Rwandan genocide. Both spoke to Urogdy Eiler’s students and this year local “upstanders,” a term used in the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, will be honored in her classes. They are the kind of people needed in all communities, willing to “stand for what is right,” she said, “even if they stand alone.”