Caitlin Evans earns Perrysburg Schools Shining Star Award

Congratulations to Caitlin Evans, who has been named Perrysburg Schools’ Shining Star Award Recipient. She teaches English Language Arts at Perrysburg High School. The award is presented only twice annually to an employee who is nominated by his/her colleagues as a Shining Star of our district. A panel representing a cross-section of the district chooses the award recipient from a pool of nominees.

Colleague Deb Drew submitted the following nomination for Caitlin Evans:

Since 2009, when Caitlin first joined PHS, she has always gone above and beyond to do what she can to make learning the best and most effective it can be for our students. In the year or two after she was hired, she attended a Rigorous Curriculum Workshop with Nicole Kosewick, and the two of them have become experts with ELA curriculum. Caitlin was instrumental in leading our department through choosing Power Standards, as we navigated through our unpacking and implementing the Common Core standards at PHS. This work has been transformational for us as a department, and has ensured that the instruction our students are receiving is aligned and uniform across the grades.

Caitlin also has worked to totally revamp the senior English 411 course at PHS. She and I attended a workshop several summers ago where we learned about the power of Choice in the English classroom. We came back invigorated by this new idea. We spoke with Mike Short about how effective this technique could be with our students, and Mike approved her to teach 411 as a reading-writing workshop this school year. She designed the curriculum, and launched forth into something totally new for PHS. The other 411 teachers continued teaching British Literature while Caitlin made new strides with students in her classroom. She empowered students by not only allowing them to exercise their choice in what they wrote about, but also in what they read. She has found that many students who called themselves "non-readers" earlier this year have read upward of 10 novels so far. This is amazing when in other senior classrooms it's been a struggle to have students read one or two school-required novels. Giving students choice is allowing them to become better readers, which will lead to better success in college. Not only are her students becoming better readers, but they are also learning how to better analyze the craft of writing. Caitlin has spent countless numbers of hours developing mini-lessons that explore various genres, and techniques so that her students are not only stronger writers, but stronger thinkers and analyzers overall. Next year every senior English 411 class will be taught as a reading writing workshop. Without Caitlin's forward thinking and willingness to take on this new approach to the course, we would not be as far ahead for our students as we are. Our students will benefit so much from learning via a workshop approach.

Finally, just this month Caitlin has spearheaded the work needed at PHS for the Berbee-Walsh writing contest we have run for the first time. Before second semester, someone came to PHS with the idea of sponsoring a writing contest for PHS students. Caitlin took it under her wing and did everything needed for this contest. She developed a set of rules, a set of guidelines for judges and set up a course in turnitin.com so that we could be sure the pieces submitted by students were original work. Caitlin's classroom was the place where students submitted hard copies of their entries, and she graciously answered student questions about the contest. We received 100 student submissions, which means that approximately 1 out of every 14 students at PHS participated in the contest. Caitlin also arranged for judges for the contest, and ran off hard copies of the pieces for each judge. This took many hours of work, but Caitlin believes so strongly in the promise of young writers that she did it all.

Caitlin Evans has given a tremendous amount of herself and her time to ensure that students at PHS achieve their greatest potential. These are just three of the ways she has worked tirelessly for the betterment of our students!