 Monica Washington was an NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellow in the class of 2015. She lives in Linden, Texas and has been in public education more than 21 years, 19 of those in the classroom. Her love of learning and teaching started early on at home, in public school and in the neighborhood. So, my mom was, I think, my first teacher and she made me love reading and love writing and love self-expression and that was just a really important part of my young life and then I think I loved all of my elementary teachers, especially my fourth grade teacher. And she just made everybody feel like they were the favorite and I remember loving that feeling and putting that love of what she gave us with my desire to tell everybody what I knew, then I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I taught the students in the neighborhood. You did? Yes. I'm sure that was very annoying. As a teacher and now as an instructional coach for Better Lesson, Monica is passionate about helping people become better people by developing relationships, listening, advocating and sometimes, as she explains, just filling in the gaps. I have always wanted to have an impact in a way that when a student left my classroom, they didn't feel like they just left English class, but they felt like they just left their family. I just walked out of, that's my house. Even though I may not be your homeroom teacher, I'm always home base and I've always tried to be home base. So, students are in there in the morning, even though I may be tired, somebody is waiting by the door because they feel like it's home base. I always say we're a learning family and those are the students that I fight for and I've never wanted to be in a situation where everything was perfect, every student had everything they needed and that's great if that's the case, but I feel like I'm more successful and more of a help when I can be in places where there are gaps to feel, so I've always tried to be the person to help fill those gaps for students and for colleagues. You've talked to me about empowerment, so tell me a little bit about that. My love of the students also is so deeply rooted in my desire to make them feel powerful and that they can do whatever they want to do. I know that students who come to me don't always have a cheerleader at home or someone telling them that you can do anything that you want to do with these steps and this is how you do it. I know that not all of them have someone who is positive that they can look up to for what is the right attitude for me to have and I have tried to be that for them and listen to them. I think listening is the first step of empowering someone because you have to know what their passions are, so I try to get to know my students on a personal level and then figure out what it is that makes them tick and then what they plan to do with that thing that makes them tick and if they haven't thought about it then or if they don't have the plan, I try to help them put that plan into action. You move from the classroom and teaching children and kids to teaching teachers how to be better teachers. Tell me a little bit about what you discovered through this process and what you're doing now. Moving from the classroom to Better Lesson has been awesome because the things that I feel that I do well, I can tell others about, for example, I talked to a teacher in Montana who is a first-year teacher and he has a good relationship with his students but he wants to get more focus from them, he wants them to have more buy-in and more ownership of the work and it was my favorite meeting this week. We just laid it all out on the table, figured out what he needed to do. He's excited to go back into the classroom next week and really implement that plan and so that's really humbling to know that the things that I've learned, the things that I've tried to do, the things that I've been successful with that I can sort of sprinkle it across the map in some way. So it's been fun, it's been a stretch for me because I am used to working with students but what I've found so far is that students and teachers require the same thing. Someone to listen, someone to not judge, someone willing to be there beyond when they are required to be.