From awkward to awesome

Sixth grader Tara Shaw hung her head low in hopes that no one would notice the terrible mistake she had made. She had fallen victim to “a middle-school moment.” After her cousin made reference to Tara’s “bushy” eyebrows, the insecure sixth grader shaved her brow only to meet a worse fate—humiliation among her peers. Once her story hit the middle-school halls, she felt her life would never be the same again. If only she could hide until these painful years passed....

Today, 28-year-old Tara Shaw Sparks spends her days with middle schoolers and loves it. High energy, high standards and high achievements. That’s Sparks. An eighth-grade English teacher and Lindbergh NEA member at Robert H. Sperreng Middle School in the Lindbergh School District, Sparks is the 2003–2004 Missouri Teacher of the Year. She’s the second youngest Teacher of the Year in Missouri’s history, but her list of accomplishments as a sixth-year teacher puts her at the top of her game.

• She earned national board certification in 2001–02 from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

• She’s working toward her doctorate in education administration.

• She holds a bachelor of science degree in education from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a master of arts degree in teaching from Lindenwood University.

• She has been a professional development co-chair for her school for the past three years and serves on the language arts curriculum committee.

• Since 1999 she has served on her school district’s writing assessment team, which evaluates writing standards and district writing samples.

She was one of 411 Missouri teachers who participated in the Missouri Assessment Program test-grading project in 2002, where she hand-scored 11th-grade communication arts exams.

“Her accomplishments and activities demonstrate her positive attitude, her willingness to serve, and her seemingly endless energy devoted to making a difference,” Sperreng Principal Robert Ayres writes in a letter of recommendation for the award.

In addition to her active teaching career, her doctoral program and her new role as Missouri Teacher of the Year, Sparks is a newlywed. On Labor Day weekend, she married Christopher Sparks, an industrial technology teacher at Parkway West Middle School.

Her message
As Missouri’s Teacher of the Year, Sparks will have opportunities to speak to various audiences across the state. She plans to drive home the message that students are individuals.

“With No Child Left Behind and all the legislation coming out, we tend to view students as subgroups and fail to look at them as individuals,” Sparks says. “Every child learns differently. They all learn at their own pace and have different learning styles. Until we start looking at individual students, we are not doing any favors for children.”

Sparks’ own middle-school experiences help her to build a healthy rapport with her students.

“My goal first and foremost is to meet the needs of my students and to listen to what is going on, not only with them but with their parents,” she says. “You have to take a step back and empathize with the students, try to understand how they, and their parents, feel about things. You also have to work to keep that parent-teacher communication alive.”

In her Teacher of the Year application, Sparks tells how important it is for her to help students in need.

“Just this year, I had a student, Mary, who has Tourette’s Syndrome with symptoms of verbal tics. She shouts out exactly what’s on her mind and lacks many of the social skills that help her combat her animosity toward those she considers her enemies,” Sparks explains.

Toward the end of the year, Mary was frustrated with the way other students treated her and threatened suicide. After multiple conversations with Mary’s mother, Sparks decided to educate the other students about Mary’s difficulties. The class read the book The Wave by Todd Strasser. The book stimulated discussion on the concept of crowd mentality. Then Sparks showed a video of an Oprah episode about bullying and one girl who committed suicide as the result of bullying. The lessons led to a detailed discussion about bullying at school and how it affects people. Mary had the opportunity to share her experiences and enlighten students about her disability.

“As a result of the video and discussion, Mary gained acceptance by her peers, and one popular student even apologized to her after class.”

Her role
Sparks sees herself as a resource rather than a conductor of information.

“I think the best thing we can do is have our students engaged and involved in their learning. I give students the opportunity to learn by creating good opportunities. They should be doing the bulk of the work,” Sparks explains. “I help them, guide them and direct them, but I don’t control.”

She provides learning opportunities for her English students through variety, technology and innovation. She uses higher-level thinking and discussion skills and incorporates service-learning activities to increase student achievement.

She describes herself as “a reflective person” and views reflection to be one of her most important skills.

“I think that going through the national board certification process solidified my belief that I have to be reflective, constantly analyzing what I am doing and how it is affecting student learning.”

Sparks puts her beliefs in philanthropy and volunteerism into practice through her unit on service learning, which she developed to teach students character development and research writing. Students research a community problem, write a paper and develop a multi-media presentation to introduce a service project. Each of her three classes votes and adopts a project to carry out in the community. The projects involve learning opportunities, volunteer experiences and fundraisers for charitable organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross.

In her unit on Nothing but the Truth, a novel about freedom and bias, students publish a Web site where they exhibit their knowledge of bias, health, literary terms, the Bill of Rights and the Mexican Revolution. This year she’ll expand the Web site project with an online portfolio of students’ work throughout the year.

Her future
Sparks sees herself as a career educator and is considering school district administration with an emphasis on curriculum and instruction.

“I really like the art of instruction and am interested in aligning curriculum and instructional practices to standards.”

Reflecting on how far she’s come since she started teaching in 1998, she recalls an interview with one school principal during her job search. He asked her where she saw herself in five years. “Teacher of the Year,” she replied. “I was thinking about the school’s Teacher of the Year. Never in my wildest imagination would I achieve this on a statewide level. I’m still baffled.”

Although Sparks may still be stunned by her own success, her students have no doubts that she is “the Teacher of the Year.” Jasminia, one of Sparks’ students, says it best:

“Mrs. Sparks is an awesome teacher because she helps you with anything that you have trouble with. She challenges us to be our best.”

by Debra Angstead
MNEA communications director