TEACHER OF THE YEAR FINALIST: Jordan Waller believes in scholar-centered teaching
Waller is one of eight finalists for Dougherty County’s Teacher of the Year
Jordan Waller
By Terry Lewis
ALBANY — Martin Luther King Elementary School second-grade teacher Jordan Waller is a believer in creating relationships with her students, and she says her personality helps create those relationships.
“My personality is my greatest contribution in education. My personality produces relationships with my scholars, much like the relationships I produced with my teachers when I was that brown-skinned, short-hair, braces-wearing, soaring above all the boys and girls in stature, loquacious, but introverted personality scholar,” Waller, one of eight finalists for Dougherty County’s 2017-18 Teacher of the Year, said.
The relationships Waller has formed with her students over the past four years are driving forces inside and outside of her classroom.
“My second year as a teacher was one of the years I created one of the best relationships with one of my scholars,” Waller said.
The student, she said, was “much like myself,” seeking the teacher’s approval and lacking self-confidence. Waller began making weekly visits to the student’s home to check in on her.
“In doing so, her mother began opening up to me as well,” Waller said. “She shared that she was a repeat offender and was pending incarceration. When her mother returned to jail, my scholar’s grandmother obtained custody and she was transferred to a different school.
“I knew our relationship would not end there. I reached out to the grandmother, and my weekly check-ins remained. Two years later, she returned to our school. We began our check-in routines, but this time in person.”
In 2012, Waller obtained her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from Albany State University and her master’s from Georgia Southwestern State University in 2014.
The 2017-18 Teacher of the Year Dinner will be at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Hilton Garden Inn on Front Street. The system also will recognize its retiring educators at the event.
In addition to Waller, the finalists are Jacqueline Floyd, Westover High School; Jasamine Dixon, Albany Middle School; Chevonne Denson, Dougherty High School; Torre’ Mills, Monroe High School; Rebecca Strickland, Lake Park Elementary School; Shane Williams, Lincoln Magnet School, and Lydia Zuern, Sherwood Acres Elementary School.
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