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Neighbors | Jessica Harker.Austintown Middle School teacher Angela Yohman recently won the 2019 Outstanding Language Arts Educator award from the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts.
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Neighbors | Jessica Harker.The Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts named Austintown Middle School teacher Angela Yohman as the 2019 Outstanding English Language Arts Educator for the middle school level.
By JESSICA HARKER
Austintown Middle School teacher Angela Yohman recently won the 2019 Outstanding Language Arts Educator.
Yohman was given the award by the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts.
Seventh-grade English teacher Jolene Ross nominated Yohman for the award. Yohman said she then submitted a portfolio of her work, and that portfolio was chosen from all nominated in the state of Ohio for the award.
“I try to make it individualized as much as I humanly can, knowing each student, their likes and dislikes, and who they are as a person,” Yohman said.
Yohman will attend the OCTELA conference on March 1-2, where she will be given the award. She said she has attended the conference in the past, even running a break out session on the school’s Web Leader mentorship program.
In her eighth-grade classroom, Yohman said she tries to reach the state standards while also allowing students to explore their own interests.
“I like developing a relationship with them so they can feel comfortable receiving feedback or asking questions,” Yohman said. “I want to make them feel as if they are the only one that matters.”
This year Yohman said that she started a new technique where students are allowed to write a poem, a book review and an informational essay. The students get to choose the topic of the poem and essay, and well as the book they are going to review.
“Everything is very much geared towards who they are,” Yohman said. “If they are interested in the subject, they are going to try to do better.” Along with teaching, Yohman is one of three teachers who assists in the schools Web Leader mentorship program. Yohman said that Web Leader is a program where eighth-grade students mentor incoming sixth-graders.
The eighth-graders give up three days of their summer vacation to train in mentorship strategies. On the last day of the program, the eighth-graders meet with the sixth-graders, giving them a tour of the building, playing games and even helping them with their locker combinations.
“It’s just a nice way of getting the sixth-graders in touch with the eighth-graders,” Yohman said.
Throughout the year, the older students will continue to check in with the sixth-graders to see how they are doing.
Yohman said that this is the third year the program has been going on, making this group of eighth-graders the first to go through the program when they started AMS.
“I don’t know if its just coincidence, but it’s just a great group this year and I think that it’s because they went through it and experienced it as a sixth-graders,” Yohman said.
It is these programs, along with a multitude of other work, that has led to Yohman winning the 2019 award.
She said that if it was not for the support from the school and people she works with , she would not have won.
“I know this sounds cliche but I work with amazing people and we push each other and we challenge each other,” Yohman said. “I would not be the person that I am or the teacher that I am without their ideas and their support.”