 Educators like Crystal Williams Gordon 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 Crystal has to say about her experience, learn how students benefit, and prepare to be inspired. I think it's important for the NEA Foundation to award the Global Learning Fellowship because it allows us to not only, you know, it's wonderful to say, yay you won and there's nothing, you know, and we feel wonderful, that's great. But to get all of these free opportunities, these opportunities to learn about other cultures, to become global learners ourselves so that we can impart that to our students is awesome. The Fellowship affords my students an opportunity to get information that I would not ordinarily have. Good teachers are lifelong learners and we're teaching our students to be lifelong learners and so with that what I'm learning I can impart to them, you know, we have to teach global learners. We have to make them global learners. We have to teach them for the global age and so with that we have to make sure that we're teaching critical thinking and we're teaching life skills and we're teaching technology. Good teachers do what they do not because they want the recognition but because, you know, they have a calling, they want to help our children, they want to help society, our students need good teachers. The recognition really helps bring attention to public education and the good teachers that we have. I think it does give a shot in the arm to teachers that are doing what they are going to do every day. The fact that someone recognizes that makes them feel good, makes me feel wonderful. So this process itself was a very reflective process. This one really had me look at my practice, look at my attention to diversity, look at how I advocate for the profession and help other people along the way with professional development and I think anybody that applies, you know, whether they go anywhere from this point, I think that they really will benefit, their career will benefit from it, their students will benefit from that reflection. There are 39 educators that are being recognized with this award and we have 50 states. I think that every state should have someone worthy enough to be nominated and the state affiliate leaders, they need to make it their responsibility to find those people and nominate them. Every NEA state affiliate has until May 1st to nominate a public school educator 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.