 Educators like Anna Baldwin deserve our utmost gratitude for all that they do every day to help their students learn. Every year we honor public school educators for instructional excellence, advocacy for the profession, and attention to diversity with the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence. Listen to what Anna has to say about her experience. Learn how students benefit and prepare to be inspired. The NEA Foundation Awards have been something that has supported me and pushed me along to to become a better teacher through the professional development and the other opportunities that we've had. I feel like this award is something that is going to benefit me and my students for a long time to come. The recognition that the NEA Foundation Award brings is wonderful, but I think the the most amazing part of this experience is the Global Learning Fellowship. We have the opportunity to have professional development online to reconceptualize our thinking, to share our lesson plans and our global connections with other educators all in preparation for an international study trip to Peru. That is an opportunity of a lifetime and once we return our students will be the ones who benefit. I teach in an area that by some standards is diverse but we're certainly sheltered. In Western Montana we don't have a lot of connections with outside issues and global topics. So the Global Learning Fellowship has pushed me to think outside of our community and to really try to connect students with some of those issues. For example for the first module I created a lesson plan that asked students to consider the works of Nobel Prize winner in literature Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru. We looked at the characteristics of a Nobel Prize winner. We looked at his work and then we read some of his stories and then the students came together and decided that if they had been on the Nobel Prize Committee would they have given him this award. So it has it's been something that's that's pushed me to help my students connect with the outside world in ways that I never would have before the award. I love having the opportunity to help my students become positive contributors to their community in whatever way that may be. Some of them go off to college some of them don't but when they come back and they tell me that something that I taught them in their class helped them think differently about the world that's when I love teaching. Every NEA state affiliate has until May 1st to nominate a public school educated for this prestigious national award. All awardees are invited to join the NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellowship. This 10 month professional development opportunity provides educators with the knowledge and skills to prepare their students to thrive in our flat world. Find out more information about the awards, the fellowship and the NEA Foundation at NEAFoundation.org