State Teacher of Year moves on to help ‘all kids learn’

Ann Marie Corgill believes all kids can learn and teach others to learn.

At Cherokee Bend Elementary, her fourth-grade students took part in an “Ed Camp” where they first learned about coding, movie making and other technologies. Then they taught other students — and then teachers — the skills.

 “It was not me spreading the word, but the children spreading it,” Corgill said. “I want all children to be empowered so that they can take on a challenge and teach others.”

Now Corgill, last year’s Alabama’s Teacher of the Year and a top-four finalist for National Teacher of the Year, is moving to a new position in Birmingham City Schools, where she will teach second grade at Oliver Elementary.

 “I believe all kids can do this kind of work I am doing in Mountain Brook,” she said. “I can’t tell the story of being everywhere if I haven’t been everywhere. It’s important to push myself into new challenges and to learn from different communities.”

Corgill started her teaching career in 1994 at Brookwood Forest Elementary and eventually left to teach for seven years in New York City in a neighborhood school of a diverse, affluent area. For the past three years, she was back in Mountain Brook at Cherokee Bend Elementary.

Corgill was first exposed to a variety of schools when she began to speak about her book on teaching writing, Of Primary Importance, which was published in 2008.

“For the first time, my eyes were opened to different possibilities and resources and needs in a global way,” she said. 

Her new school, Oliver Elementary, is also part of the Woodlawn Innovation Network. The network of schools, which also includes Avondale Elementary, Hayes Pre-K-8, Putnam Middle and Woodlawn High, had applied for an innovation grant that allows them to focus on project-based learning. The schools’ new curriculum, which started last year, allows students to think critically and apply that thinking to solve real-world problems. 

The network also partners with Jones Valley Teaching Farm and other local organizations and businesses for hands-on learning, providing for communitywide transformation. 

Corgill had been following the network’s work, but it wasn’t until April that she saw it firsthand. That month she visited Oliver as part of a Teacher of the Year engagement and “saw what they were about.”

The principal, Dr. Selena Florence, said that schools have to take care of the person before they take care of the academics. Corgill, too, believes in the importance of social and emotional concerns for students. By the first of May, Corgill had a job offer from Oliver, and her position became official at a board meeting at the end of the month. And so when the school year came to a close, she loaded up a U-Haul with 20 years’ worth of classroom supplies and said goodbye to Cherokee Bend.

Corgill can recount story after story of what she learned in Mountain Brook, but she is now excited to be “a learner and a teacher” somewhere new.

“We have so many things to offer them that they can be excited about,” she said. “It changes lives and it changes a community. This isn’t just about Woodlawn, it’s about transformation and growth in a city.”

In one of her National Teacher of the Year interviews, Corgill was asked if she would move back to New York City. Her answer was negative.

“We have work to do in Alabama,” she said.

Most of all, Corgill is thankful to be back in the classroom come August.

“I’m my best in the classroom teaching and learning with the kids,” she said.