2026 Outstanding Teacher of the Year - Oakland County

>> Hi. My name is Steven Snead and I'm the supervisor of the curriculum and assessment unit at Oakland Schools. I'm here to talk about the Oakland County outstanding educator of the year award and how you, the applicant, can make sure that the applications that you submit present your educators with the best possible chance of being competitive in our award. So, step number one, submit an application online. We have so many talented educators across Oakland County who are helping students grow, and learn, and attending to student wellbeing. We love to hear the stories about how educators are truly making a difference in the lives of our children, so we invite you to submit an application. New this year is an online application portal that we're asking applicants to use to submit their applications for this year's entries. Here's the tip. You want to make sure that you have all of your applicant's materials ready before you submit the application. There are questions that you'll need to respond to and documents you'll need to upload. You definitely want to make sure that you have all of those things ready and with you when you submit your application. You won't have an opportunity to go back and forth between application and materials, so again make sure that all of your materials are with you and you're ready to tell that great story of how that Oakland County educator has impacted student lives. The second tip we want to offer to applicants is to ensure that your application is complete. We are asking so many questions about the impact the educators make because we truly want to know the stories that you have to say relative to each applicant. Sometimes we review incomplete applications and we aren't able to really gain a complete understanding of what that teacher has done to impact student learning and wellbeing. We use a rubric to normalize our scores across multiple reviewers, so when one aspect of the application is incomplete, we can't fairly and accurately judge each application. So, make sure when you're applying that you have carefully responded to each question, you've completed all aspects of the application, and you've uploaded all necessary materials so that we can see the great impact that that educator has made on students. Now, the third tip to submitting a great application is critical. We definitely need you to supply specific examples in each question. Having specific examples helps truly unlock the potential of each applicant and we want to make sure that we see specific examples of practice in each applicant's question. Here's an example of what we mean. One of the items on the application asks nominators to provide specific examples of how the teacher has engaged students. Here's an example of a response that, while good, misses the mark in terms of truly telling the full story of how a teacher has engaged students. Mr. Oaks is a great teacher and students just love his class. He engages all students and all students genuinely enjoy learning about science. Now, here is an example from a winning application from a previous year's application. As a U.S. history teacher, Mr. Oaks motivates his students to understand the curriculum as well as to develop an interest to learn even more. Some examples include arranging for a U.S. civil war historian to come in and speak with his classes; using the online student-paced learning platform, Nearpod; and creating lessons using the iCivics program in which students can play video games and learn about the Bill of Rights. This year, he has adapted songs from the musical Hamilton for a lesson and afterward was gifted the hardcover Hamilton lyrics by a student with a note that read "Hamilton favored the elites, right? I'm no Hamilton, but you're an elite U.S. history teacher. Thanks to you, I got into Hamilton and it's one of my favorite things ever." What a great and powerful story that that application presents to us to tell us the true impact that that educator has made on student learning and wellbeing. As a reviewer, we take our duty to carefully examine each application very seriously. Each application is read multiple times by independent reviewers using a rubric that asks us to evaluate each response carefully and critically. We look forward to receiving applications from teachers in the elementary level, middle level, and high school level. Again, we are so excited to welcome applications for this year's Oakland County Outstanding Educator of the Year. We look forward to reviewing those applications and we thank you all for doing great things for student learning every day.
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