 Teachers deserve our utmost gratitude for all that they do every day to improve the future of our students. Every year we honor outstanding educators for instructional excellence and advocacy for the teaching profession with the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence. Guided by a distinguished national panel, we selected five educators from a pool of state nominees for this prestigious national award. Listen to what they have to say about their experience. Learn how students benefit from the program and prepare to be inspired. We know that there's great things going on in public education and there are great teachers out there. So I think it's the time that we need to celebrate that. And the easiest way to do that is to highlight great teachers. None of us entered this profession for a pat on the back or a thank you. And this is just a really wonderful way to say you're doing an awesome job. You know, anytime you recognize the best practices of teaching, teaching wins. Our teachers win. The classroom wins. So many times in our profession it's a thankless job. We are basing what we're doing on the research that's available right now. And student achievement will be enhanced by this. Every student should have an accomplished, caring teacher. Every single one. So not only do we take a lot of pride, which is also going to boost things like student achievement, but it also brings people looking at our community. They look at our school and they say look at what great things are going on there. What NEA Foundation asked us to do was to do what we do best. And that's to come to Washington D.C. and teach a lesson. When I got past the written application and I was able to participate in the interview and the lesson that I had to teach, I felt like I was on Teacher Apprentice where I had a chance to think of everything that I think is great in a lesson and how do I put that together in 25 minutes. Preparing was just as much fun as actually presenting it. Preparing, I presented it to a whole bunch of different audiences and it was a wonderful professional development opportunity for me. The interview process had really great questions. It made you really think deeply about what you believe in and it was a chance to share that with people in a way that teachers rarely get to do. What this process did that National Board didn't do was get me to look outside my classroom at how I behave as a professional. We're not just teachers. We're doing amazing work in our classroom and I think an application like this, a process like this helps us realize that and we can be very proud.