Guilford High School English Teacher and NCPFP Commissioner Wins Top Honors for 2022
Leah Carper, an English teacher at Northern Guilford High School, was named the 2022 Burroughs Wellcome Fund North Carolina Teacher of the Year during an awards luncheon on Friday, April 1, 2022 at the Umstead Hotel in Cary. Carper was selected from a field of nine finalists representing the state’s eight education districts and charter schools.
She said she takes her cues from her students and what they need and tailors her approach to what works best for them.
“My classroom isn’t just my classroom; it’s theirs too,” she explains. “No matter what, I’m always willing to try something new, creative, weird, or random if I think it will effectively grab and keep the attention and imagination of my students.”
“I want nothing more than for my students to feel safe when they are in my class,” she said. “I want them to feel like if they have a question or a comment, they are safe to share it. I want them to feel safe to express if they’re struggling emotionally and need an extension on an assignment. I want them to feel like our classroom is a safe place to laugh and express themselves, because when they feel safe, they can learn.”
Carper said that if she can help her students understand what it means to be a good person, she can say she was a successful teacher.
“I teach English. We cover reading and writing skills in my class,” she said. “I have taught my students grammar, vocabulary, writing, research, rhetoric, and poetry. My students score well on their standardized tests, too.
“But when my students reach out to me years after leaving my classroom, they don’t talk about how great it is that they finally learned what a transition sentence does. They talk about how the class made them feel and about how it made them think about the world around them.”
