Congratulations to Ms. Kenisha Gage, a fifth-grade teacher at Chaffee Elementary School, who has been selected as an HCS Changemaker!
Ms. Gage has known she wanted to be an educator since she was a young student in kindergarten. She says that her teacher, Ms. Valcourt, was so amazing that it made her enjoy coming to school to the point that she would get sad if she had to miss a day. It wasn’t long before she told her mother that she “wanted to be just like Ms. Valcourt,” and that she wanted to do the same thing for others that the first-year teacher had done for her. She mentions that Ms. Valcourt, who is Mrs. Lewis now, would include songs, poems, and other activities that made school fun and engaging for the whole class. Ms. Gage has achieved great success by using these formative years as a sort of litmus for the kind of teacher she wanted to become.
“Ms. Gage is very interactive with her students,” says Chaffee Elementary Principal April Clark, “she has a certain rhythm in her classroom that you don’t find in every classroom. That is very engaging for students. They enjoy learning with her because she makes learning fun.” Students in her room might be seen working as a whole class, in small groups, or spending time with a partner. Despite all the fun that goes on in her room, there is also a deep structure and lots of learning. Ms. Gage calls herself the “rubric queen,” and says that it is very important to make sure there are clear expectations not just for behaviors but for academic success.
At the end of the day, though, she says it really all comes down to building those ever-important relationships with the students. She says she often tells new teachers, “Build those relationships – a child is not going to learn from you if they don’t like you.” She adds that the goal isn’t just to get them to like you, but to show them that you really care about them.
When she isn’t teaching, she says that one of her favorite things is trying new foods out. She loves learning about the spices and different cultures the food comes from, and then enjoys cooking and experimenting with the new dishes. She also enjoys painting and says she learned that she was pretty good at it while living in Louisiana. She does a lot of what she fondly calls “mood paintings,” and says that it is an almost therapeutic experience for her. The rest of her time outside of teaching is spent keeping up with her very active two-year-old, Karsyn. Ms. Gage says they do a lot of drawings together, spend time engaging in outdoor activities, and Karsyn has even started asking to do Zumba in the mornings after enjoying it during daycare.
When asked what she hopes her students get from their time with her, Ms. Gage is very quick to respond that she wants them to leave knowing that she cared about and loved them. The effort she puts into encouraging them and affirming their successes helps to ensure that the first thing they learn in her classroom is that they are all capable of great things. She works to relate her lessons to real life and focuses on the long-term memories they are building together as a class.
The end result is a group of well-rounded students ready to begin the next chapter of their academic lives firm in the knowledge that somebody believes in them, and for that reason Ms. Gage has earned the appropriate title of HCS Changemaker.