No matter their subject, the finalists for the 2026 National Teacher of the Year make their communities central to their instruction.
The five finalists for the nation’s top teacher, all of whom have won a statewide honor, run the gamut from teaching math and reading to history and agriculture.
- Katie Collins teaches 1st grade at Bluff Park Elementary in Hoover, Ala.
- Rachel Kinsaul teaches agriculture at Morgan County High School in Madison, Ga.
- Michelle Gross teaches 7th grade mathematics and gifted studies at Spencer County Middle School in Taylorsville, Ky.
- Linda Wallenberg teaches English at Eden Prairie High School in Eden Prairie, Minn.
- Leon Smith teaches Advanced Placement U.S. History and African American studies at Haverford High School in Havertown, Pa.
Carissa Moffat Miller, the chief executive officer of Council of Chief State School Officers, which facilitates the award, said five finalists were chosen this year for their “outstanding commitment to education and impactful teaching that advances student outcomes.” The group more frequently chooses only four finalists.
The National Teacher of the Year program chooses its finalists from among 56 local teachers of the year, who come from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense schools, and U.S. territories.
CCSSO will announce the final award later this spring; the chosen teacher will spend a year acting as an education ambassador. While the Biden administration feted state and national teachers of the year in 2024, the Trump administration forwent doing so last year, and there is no word yet whether the winners will be honored at the White House this year.
Katie Collins: Roadtrip for education
“It’s hard to separate community from teaching because I’m teaching a community of learners,” said Collins, a National Board-certified teacher and mother of four.
Over 21 years, Collins also has taught English-as-a-second language across grades from preschool through adult learners, as well as middle and high school French.
Collins aligns her lessons both to standards and community needs. For example, each year, her students design hydroponics and grow hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, and basil while learning about the Alabama agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. When the school experienced budget cuts, she and her students turned the project into a community fundraiser.
“I have never had a kid say to me, ‘Ms. Collins, I just loved your worksheets.’ I hear them say, ‘I remember that time that we were able to save the hydroponics program because we planted over 3,000 plants and sold them at our community market. Because they are being contributing members of our community,” Collins said.
The suburban Hoover school district, south of Birmingham, is home to families from 39 countries speaking more than 30 languages, including Spanish, Arabic, and several Indian languages. Collins found both language and cultural barriers hindered families’ involvement in school. She co-founded the Communities Family Literacy Program, which provides language support to parent and preschool-age English learners, and helped families get transportation to participate in school-family meetings and events.
Last year, Collins and a fellow teacher launched a “road trip” podcast, “Driving Education,” in which the pair drive around the state to talk to teachers about school and community issues.
Rachel Kinsaul: Putting down roots (and blooming)
Kinsaul thinks of her agriculture class as a way to both drive the local economy and prepare her students to do meaningful work in their communities.
When one of her fellow teachers needed flowers for her wedding, Kinsaul and her students not only developed floral arrangements, but evolved the lesson into a full, ongoing student-based business. She incorporated lessons from across the school’s career education pathways—agriculture, culinary, cosmetology, music, art, audiovisual, and marketing—to teach students about the wedding industry.
Since 2019, the self-sustaining student business has supplied floral arrangements to 50 local weddings, with an annual budget of $60,000 and a profit of $1,500 to $2,000 per wedding. Four of Kinsaul’s former students have started their own floral businesses after graduating.
“My students have used their floral skills to comfort classmates, teachers, and families in times of grief, creating arrangements that speak when words fall short,” Kinsaul said. “Through this project, students see the impact their skills can have on others. They understand that their education is not confined to a classroom—it’s something that touches real people in meaningful ways.”
Kinsaul also has launched a schoolwide service day. She and her students raised more than $1.1 million to build a community barn and successfully lobbied for legislation conserving local farmland.
Michelle Gross: Building a future in math
Middle schoolers can be a skeptical bunch, but Gross is committed to showing them math’s magic and relevance to their lives.
The National Board-certified teacher brings in former students and community members—accountants, welders, international teachers—to talk about the role math has played in their careers and lives.
Gross has targeted geometry and statistics, two math topics that often get short shrift in courses across grades, with in-depth projects and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons to get students excited about statistics.
One of these projects, the Dreamhouse-o-rama, started with students researching and drawing blueprints as a way to learn area, perimeter, and scale, but has expanded to a community-wide event. Local architects, plumbers, real estate agents, and others discuss aspects of their industries with students for designs that the students ultimately turn into 3-D printed houses.
“This has become an almost an institution in our school,” Gross said. “Our community gets to see our students and the cool things that they’re doing and thinking about. Our students are getting real-world experiences because they’re not just getting feedback from me and the other 7th grade math teacher; they’re getting feedback from people in the field.
“At that point,” she said, “the students aren’t thinking necessarily about a grade doing this, but they’re seeing their future.”
Linda Wallenberg: Finding student voice and identity
For 50 years, Wallenberg has taught her students to be flexible thinkers, linguists, and athletes as a high school English and Swedish-language teacher and gymnastics coach.
Over time, Wallenberg has learned that focusing on covering and testing topics meant her students “scored well, but didn’t own the material,” she said. “I realized that by ‘covering’ the curriculum, I had been burying it. Instead, I learned to let student voices lead.”
Wallenberg turned Shakespeare’s famous line, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?"—which students often find archaic and confusing—into a multi-class discussion of the way markers like names, family, and gender can define students’ expectations and change the way others see them. Students explore the meanings of their own names as an avenue to larger, sometimes difficult discussions of identity, prejudice, and cultural pressures.
“Teaching students to see their own lives and heritage as integral to the curriculum” is critical to getting students excited about learning, Wallenberg said.
Wallenberg has won national awards for her teaching and gymnastics, but she said her greatest achievement has been her former students who have become teachers, too.
Leon Smith: Deepening historical perspectives
As a student in Pennsylvania, Smith never had a Black teacher. When he became an educator, he found himself equally alone among colleagues for 20 years. Today, he works to ensure his students explore diverse perspectives and experiences key historical events.
That includes, for example, discussing the experience of Indigenous and Black enslaved people while learning about the history of the slave trade, or studying how school desegregation reduced teacher diversity in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling.
“It’s important that students have the ability to think critically ... to really understand the impact of the audience, the perspective of the person that is giving the speech, what’s happening in history at that time,” Smith said. “We really focus a lot on analysis, trying to make sure that we understand that things don’t happen in a vacuum.”
Smith works to get his students learning in and from the community. Students meet with local legislators and community scholars on advocacy and the role of government when studying civics. While learning about the Transcendentalist movement, they wander and journal like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson did near Walden Pond.
Smith also works to prepare new generations of students to value diversity in education and teaching.
