LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Courtney Chastain was nominated anonymously.

Throughout college and in her early years of teaching, Mrs. Chastain was always told, "You are not here to be your students' friend, you are here to teach them." There does lie some truth in this statement, but over the years, Mrs. Chastain has learned that you DO need to be a friend to your students in a professional capacity. Building a personal yet professional relationship with students is vital to earning their trust. When this trust is established, teachers can begin to develop similar relationships with their students, creating a positive, safe, and risk-free learning environment.

With this mindset in place, she develops class norms at the beginning of the year, many of which are based on teamwork principles and how students will treat one another. Mrs. Chastain has students work in groups daily, setting norms at the beginning of the work period to ensure all students have a voice in their group and feel valued throughout the working process. She monitors these groups to ensure that all norms are being upheld and that students are not only building relationships with one another but also learning from one another and building trust. She believes that when authentic, positive relationships are formed among students, based on the example set by teacher-student relationships, success for students is inevitable.

Mrs. Chastain wants to provide her students with as many hands-on, immersive experiences as she can this year. With this in mind, she plans to enhance her students' STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) educational experiences this school year. To achieve this, she hopes to provide her students with various STEM kits, both plugged and unplugged, to connect literature to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and appeal to her students' diverse talents, thereby maintaining high interest levels.

She also plans to add art components to showcase the creative side of her students and integrate grade-level math standards into these projects. The STEM kits will also be used cross-curricularly throughout the school year to enhance her students' engineering and problem-solving skills while working through the engineering design process. These kits will be utilized in groups, which will also promote communication and collaboration skills within student groups in her classroom.

Career Accomplishments:

• In 2011, she was named Teacher of the Year at her school.
• In 2012, Courtney was a semi-finalist in Ron Clark Academy's Great American Teacher competition.
• In 2022, she earned her National Institute for STEM Education Certification and was also awarded Teacher of the Year for her current school.
• In 2023, she was named a Georgia Youth Science and Technology teacher exemplar.