Acalanes High School-2013 Winner
Ms. Moore is an English teacher at Acalanes High School. She has been teaching for 12 years.
Students, especially at a school like Acalanes High, are accustomed to looking for the “right answers.” They’ll search the Internet for them. They’ll scour their textbooks. But Natalie Moore’s English class is a place where questions frequently don’t have clear answers. She worries that in our digital world where “answers” are so accessible, we are losing our natural wonder and our human capacity for questioning. So, Natalie Moore focuses on the thought process… and the beauty of curiosity.
A few years ago, she connected with Acalanes history teacher Brian Smith and created a cooperative effort called “American Threads.” The two instructors coordinate their lessons so their classes intertwine. When Smith is teaching about America after the Civil War, Moore is having her class read “Huckleberry Finn.” When Smith is teaching about the 1920s, Moore’s class is reading “The Great Gatsby.”