 Educators like Allison Riddle 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 Allison has to say about her experience, learn how students benefit, and prepare to be inspired. My experience so far with the NEA Foundation Awards for Excellence program has been a rich journey. It began with an incredible experience of reflection filling out this wonderful awards application. It's an experience that I would want every educator to be able to do. This kind of a program is invaluable to educators. We're so inside of our own classrooms, we focus so much and we have important standards that we have to teach. We have to work on student mastery. And while that's very important, we could actually be doing a much better job if we were incorporating and integrating other cultures and other countries' traditions into our own classrooms. Because of what I'm learning about teaching global competencies, I have been able to integrate other cultures, the traditions in other countries inside my own classroom. For example, just teaching the song Yankee Doodle Dandy, I usually just show the students what the words mean. But this year I realized we're talking about a hat in Italy. And now all my students have been researching hats across the world and finding how those hats have come to the United States, what the stories are behind them, and how that culture from that particular country that they're researching has embedded itself into our culture now. This kind of a program only keeps the best teachers in the classroom. They'll stay in the classroom if they think there are opportunities for them to learn and to grow and to communicate and connect with other educators across the country and across the world. 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.